Lutger

A computer not, but a LLM model does learn. The original text in no way exists 'in the model', and the model does not copy-paste it and resell the original text. Not the same, but reasonably similar to a human.

We may need some new legislation. An LLM is not a person, but its also not just a storage solution.

Ideas are not protected by copyright, nor are facts. You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply.

The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not.

Thank you for this, I've noticed this often in politics and didn't know it has a name. Some politicians do this so often, that any accusation to me reads a confession instead.

A more rigorous definition of software quality can be found in ISO 25010.

The quality of a system is the degree to which the system satisfies the stated and implied needs of its various stakeholders, and thus provides value. Those stakeholders' needs (functionality, performance, security, maintainability, etc.) are precisely what is represented in the quality model...

Here is a decent summary: https://iso25000.com/en/iso-25000-standards/iso-25010

Not exactly software quality, but adjacent, is the capability catalog of dora: https://dora.dev/capabilities/

Dora is about 'software delivery and operations performance' and has a vast body of empirical research underpinning it.

The money isn't really for the researchers personally, but for doing the research. They are merely offered a job at a time where their jobs are on the line in the USA. And not even that, they still have to apply and compete with top researchers from other parts of the world. Really hard to call that a bribe, even in a morally neutral way. At most you could say the Netherlands - and other European countries - are taking advantages of the situation where the USA is abandoning their top researchers.

But for years it has been the other way around. Top talent from the Netherlands has been moving to the US in order to get funding (and a bigger salary).

figuring out exactly how to work it into our particular business

This is the most crucial bit. Neither ramming it down developers throats nor rejecting it wholesale is particularly productive. You need the conservative people onboard as well, to discover critical edges and failure modes. Including their criticism in the adoption process instead of bluntly banning it is the smarter move. Of course, there will be a few people who just don't play, they will fold eventually or be let go.

And not few of those 'productivity improvements' for farmers have had disastrous consequences, even though what I think you are referring to has been implemented with far greater discernment and empirical basis than the current AI revolution.

People are stubborn, but sometimes for good reason. Let the stubborn people hold on to their practices, if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway.

I have a different mental model because I live in a high trust society. Well, at least higher than the US. In my model, the government is basically a virtual contract between all people to take care of each other. One side of the bargain is tax and following the law, the other is what you should get out of it: protection against criminals (police) and hostile countries (defense), universal healthcare, education, roads and stuff, consumer rights, the rule of law, etc.

I think that is a pretty good deal and I see no inherent reason for why 'the gov is out there to steal from us' (makes no sense), because it basically IS us. Corps on the other hand, they are explicitly there to get your money.

So in my model the only reason the government is bad is because it is influenced by corporations (and because people vote for rightwing parties), and the only reason corporations are good is because the government makes them so. This is a bit black and white to make it very explicit, but basically that is the idea.

And there are some flaws here of course and a lot of nuances, but I don't think this is wrong or biased at all. In fact, I think everybody else is wrong or biased and am ready to argue why, but that should come at no surprise.

That's the worst thing. You need to take a job to have money. You need to buy food to eat, pay housing, clothing, insurance, etc. Yet you don't get to determine these prices. The 'free market' story is just a way to make it look like being poor is your own choice, because you agreed to these transactions. You are just being gaslit into blaming yourself for your conditions, while the rich extract every last penny out of society without even working for it.

You don't need no guarantee nor even trust if you have openweights, that's the beauty of it.

The real question is: what guarantee do we have from Trump that he won't pull away the software (and hardware) our society is built on?

Previously we could pretend to rely on the international order as shaped by the US itself, and as an extension on the guarantees of the US president. But with Trump, even Xi sounds like a standup guy.

So as Europe, we must scramble to disentangle the core of our societies from AWS, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. etc.

No doubt there are some feelings involved in geopolitics. However, if your mental model of global trade and politics doesn't go beyond comparing Europe to a toddler having tantrum, then you just might miss some important nuances.

Imposter syndrome maybe?

In a way, nothing is complex at the point where you have untangled it, by definition. Software development is, after all, the art of untangling complexity. The real challenge is (re-)imagining something in the simplest way that fits the goal you are given. When you have arrived there, everything seems obvious and simple. But not everybody could have done it.

Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money.

And what happens when your money is gone? What happens when the government has no money anymore because the super rich took it all? Your life turns to shit real fast when you can't afford housing, healthcare and food.

I get when you are in an authoritarian country, or one on the path to becoming so like the US, that the government looks to be the most dangerous actor. But in the west that is still free, its the corps that I worry about the most.

When people say they prefer 'the syntax', I think they usually mean a bit more than just that: at least a fair bit of this is semantics. Python provides a lot of features out of the box, and if you work superficially along the happy path, it is very easy to understand how these work and read code using them.

Take list comprehensions for example. It is mostly syntax: you can do virtually all list comprehensions with just a map and filter function. But the way that it is integrated and presents the code, makes is vastly easier to follow for most developers, which tilts the balancer in favor of doing away with loops and mutable state. Is it syntax that made them do so? Yes, maybe. But its the actual semantics that provide the value.

We all tend to assume AI will only ever be good at the execute part, but what if AI will also be good at decide-deliver? What if some day, we could put AI in charge of not only running a company, but coming up with a business idea, getting funded, driving sales, pivoting until product-market fit and then scaling?

Who would profit from such a company?

Humans make mistakes too, does it mean humans are unusable? We accept as empirical fast that most production quality code has 2 - 10 bugs per 1k LoC. According to your premise, virtually all existing software is therefor unusable.

What if an LLM overall starts to make less mistakes than a medium developer, costs less than its salary and is 100 x faster? For sure, the companies that will leverage these with just a few senior devs doing prompting, testing and requirements analysis, will outcompete other organizations.

The 'vote' is real. But it is 'darwinian'. It's not that animals develop a certain adaptation on purpose in order to survive. Instead, out of many random changes an adaptation emerges by selection: those that are the most advantageous get the chance to pass on their genes.

If everybody stops using meta apps and starts using signal, bluesky, mastodon, etc., meta would instantly transform their business (if they still can make a profit).

The problem is, subtly harvesting data from and even shoveling ads into paid subscriptions actually doesn't make consumers immediately and massively cancel their subs. So you can make a profit from subscriptions alone, or make an even larger profit by also collecting and monetizing your customers data. Guess who will win?

And we still let tobacco companies spread their products, which are practically speaking as harmful as they ever were, maybe even more so considering their environmental impact as well.

Brilliant conversation.

"Would you let kids gamble?" - "It sounds very fun and obvious." "To be clear, we think it's a horrible idea!"

Surely you mean the laws of shareholder capitalism. There are many things you can do with money, and only some of them are legally backed by rules that ensure absolute shareholder power.

Really depends on the domain. I've been in jobs where the domain was much harder than my job as a software engineer, but I've also been in jobs where I quickly got to understand the domain better than the domain experts, or at least parts of it. I believe this is not because I'm smart (I'm not), but because software engineering requires precise requirements, which requires unrelenting questioning and attention to details.

The ability to acquire domain knowledge quickly however, isn't exactly the same as the ability to develop complex software.

The source of truth in fascism is not popular support or inquiry, thus they always need to channel some privileged connection to reality, or claim to voice the true will of the people and authentically represents the pure will of the nation.

Its a farce, of course, but one that can sometimes muster enough support to keep the signs in the shop with just a bit of intimidation and violence to back it up.

Neither is 'real'. The power of might depends on belief just as much as the power of rules. You need a whole lot of compliance, even when forced by fear and terror, to just keep up a police state. The belief consists of where people think other people assign authority to, at large. But that can be just as brittle as a meme stock if the time is right.

Social reality is always constructed. No single construction is more real than any other.

This, 100%.

Imagine working an a project for the first time, having a Dockerfile that works or compose file, that just downloads and spins up all dependencies and builds the project succesfully. Usually that just works and you get up and running within 30 minutes or so.

On the other hand, how it used to be: having to install the right versions of, for example redis, postgres, nginx, and whatever unholy mess of build tools is required for this particular hairball, hoping it works on you particular (version) of linux. Have fun with that.

Working on multiple projects, over a longer period of time, with different people, is so much easier when setup is just 'docker compose up -d' versus spending hours or days debugging the idiosyncrasies of a particular cocktail that you need to get going.

Maybe you are right about kubernetes, I don't have enough experience to have an opinion. I disagree about containers though, especially the wider docker toolchain.

It is not that difficult to understand a Dockerfile and use containers. Containers, from a developer pov, solve the problem of reliably reproducing development, test and production environments and workloads, and distributing those changes to a wider environment. It is not perfect, its not 100% foolproof, and its not without its quirks or learning curve.

However, there is a reason docker has become as popular as it is today (not only containers, but also dockerfiles and docker compose), and that is because it has a good tradeoff between various concerns that make it a highly productive solution.

The problem as stated in the original comment isn't that child porn as drawings is forbidden, or even that the interpretation of such is ambiguous. Or to be precise, it is not the only problem. The argument made is that these laws do not exist for their apparent intent (safety of children), but only as an excuse to exercise otherwise unlawful oppression and suppression of freedoms.

I don't find this assertion very plausible honestly, especially if this would be an argument against the existence of these very laws, because its not really an argument against government backdoors and such.

You could make the same argument (of ambiguity) with almost any crime, because there are always cases where a crime is hard to prove completely without any risk of failure, especially in the realm of sexual assault.

I'm not taking a position here, honestly I'm unsure about it, but the reasoning is sloppy and the allegations of abuse seemingly pulled out of thin air. There is also no case for why the poster is being investigated other than the pornography. It would be more plausible if there was some kind of civil disobedience involved. As stated, I'm inclined to put this in the category conspiracy theory.

which is just prep talk for "if we need it, we could do it"

Maybe this is taking it too far, but anyway: corporations don't have any agency. They are not persons. The organization and constellation of interests of corporations may be such that:

1. immoral people (such as psychopaths) will be disproportionately at the helm of large corporations

2. regular people will make immoral decisions, because to do otherwise would be against their own interests or because the consequences / moral impact are hidden from their awareness

There is no way to act in life that isn't in some sense moral or political, because it also impacts others and you are always responsible for your what you do (or don't do). And corporations are just a bunch of people doing stuff together. To maintain otherwise is in itself a (im)moral act, intentionally or not, see point 2 above.

It is and it isn't. Relative wealth within society has consequences regardless of absolute wealth. But globally power is absolutely shaped by wealth distribution as well, as wealth distribution is influenced by power relations too.

Why not give them credit for that? There is no moral rule that to be virtuous, it has to be self-sacrificial. If you narrow a commendable course of action to some sort of ascetic vision of martyrdom and self-punishment, then yes everybody and everything is evil.

So they may pivot to closed source when the circumstances will benefit it, or they may actually not do that. They have no shareholders that force them to squeeze the bottom line. The perceived benefits may just be slight and their culture will push them to stay the course on the long term, where other companies will do the reverse. Maybe if their survival is at stake, but wouldn't anyone faced with existential danger do anything to stay alive, including the worst imaginable?

Within certain commercial boundaries that keeps the business profitable, companies can and do make all sorts of decisions based on values and visions that are more than just economical, especially companies not beholden to shareholders that only care about short-term profits. Even the economical decisions aren't purely rational and often done from some kind of cultural bias.