Silamoth

In what world is rent lower than mortgage? Part of the reason my fiancé and I bought a house is because it was cheaper than renting. Not just long-term, but our monthly payment is actually noticeably lower.

Of course, we did need to pay a down payment. But if you amortize that over a 30 year mortgage period, we’re still better off buying than renting.

Funny enough, I see it the exact opposite. LLM slop code degrades software quality. While one person may appear to move quickly, the software quality suffers dramatically. It takes them (or other team members) more time to fix the issues than it would have to just do it right the first time.

I mean, even with the advent of “AI” agents, is software today any better than it was 3 years ago?

I think teams embracing too much LLM coding are going to see a continued decrease in quality and a massive drop in team productivity. Godot, on the other hand, is avoiding this. While it might not be as trendy, I think it’ll be a competitive advantage in the long term.

Not the person you were responding to, but genuine question: How are you interacting with computers without practically ever using a mouse? And how do you expect to use CAD software without a mouse?

Do they? And if so, by choice?

I don’t like “AI”, and I don’t use it. I read lots of stories where people are forced to use it at work but don’t use it otherwise. Do you know of people who don’t think “AI” will have a positive impact on society but still choose to use it?

That’s a pretty naive model of how laws get passed in the US. A lot of laws would be different if your model held true.

Regardless of American vs. British spellings, those are not the same sound. Some British people may pronounce them the same. Americans definitely pronounce them differently, though. For instance, the word “water” has a hard “r” sound at the end; Americans don’t pronounce it “watuh” like some British people do.

This should be entirely non-controversial. Listening is much more passive. You can zone out more easily without re-reading. You don’t have to work your brain to figure out pacing or anything like that.

I think the only people who claim audiobooks are the same as actual reading are people who have never bothered to do much actual reading.

I had a similar experience in my undergrad software engineering course. One group literally took a JS facial recognition library and wrapped a halfway decent UI around it. That’s it, that was their entire project. But the grad student teaching the class and a lot of the other students were very impressed.

Hackathons are about making and finishing something. That’s the whole premise: Instead of spending months working on a personal project that goes nowhere, give yourself a time constraint so you’re forced to finish something. Now you have something concrete to put on your portfolio (even if it’s still a proof-of-concept) - plus you’ve probably learned a lot.

Setting up config files for a tool is not making something. That’s like if I spent hours setting up my IDE, build processes, a CI/CD pipeline, and even unit tests. That might be cool and enhance my productivity down the line. But I still haven’t made anything.

I’m all for hardware hackathons. But I think there’s still a place for software hackathons: Just don’t use LLMs. Generating an entire application with LLMs kinda defeats the point of a hackathon to begin with. It’s supposed to be about showing you can make something in a short time frame. It’s supposed to be about exploring and learning new areas with no long-term commitment. It’s supposed to let you develop your skills and build your portfolio; the time constraint forces you to actually finish something.

I can’t imagine going to a hackathon just to not write any code and outsource it all to an LLM. I wonder if any hackathons ban LLMs?

If a couple gives birth to a baby with a debilitating condition and dies after 6 weeks, that’s an additional baby death. If instead of having that baby, a couple gives birth to a healthy baby, it will likely survive into adulthood, meaning there’s one less baby death.

It sounds like you just take issue with abortion. That’s more of a you problem than a problem with quantifying baby deaths.

Did you read TFA? It explicitly mentions Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. The best quality education, based on the data, is private tutoring with mastery learning. That is unaffordable for most. Nothing about the data indicates that “ideology and politics” are having a negative effect on education.

MGTOW nonsense most certainly is not the common mode of operation for young men. Where are you getting this idea?

It’s a sad state of affairs when so many think math is about “rote memorizing formulas and rules like a robot”. That’s how math is taught through freshman or sophomore material for a somewhat ‘general’ audience. But real math is nothing like that - it requires far more creativity. You need to discover formulas and rules. You invent new rules and see what the consequences are. This all requires a great deal of creativity. Nothing “rote” about it.

If you don’t believe me, crack open a text on something like graph theory (that’s pretty accessible, and if you’re a programmer, you’re familiar with graphs) and read through some proofs. Or better yet, try to prove some theorems yourself. No amount of rote memorization of formulas or rules will replace the creativity needed to write these proofs. Doubly so for discovering the facts in the first place.

Much of the US is in a drought. While we can generate plenty of electricity, doing so with outdated fossils fuels and ‘natural gases’ introduces a lot of pollution that harms people and the environment. We need to be careful about making these decisions.

But that’s really the problem - “we” don’t get any say in these decisions. A bunch of corrupt politicians and rich oligarchs make these decisions that screw over the rest of us.

And yes, for the record, I’m not uniquely against “AI” data centers. I’m opposed to a lot of other environmentally harmful and wasteful developments. They don’t get hyped up like “AI” does, though.

You say that like environmentalists support those things. We don’t. We regularly criticize golf courses as a waste of water and land. We regularly call out the water waste and ecosystem impact of manicured, uniform lawns.

I promise most people don’t care enough about you to spread rumors that paint you in a nasty light. If someone is doing that, you need to hang out with a new crowd and make some new friends. But most people have too much going on to care about you not being “normal”, if they even recognize your existence.

Nothing about this screamed AI slop to me. What makes you think it’s AI slop?

The problem, I’m a picky eater. I never order something that simple. I always need it with “No X” or “Only Y”. Cashiers often struggle with that, even if they understand me well (which they don’t always). It’s easier for me to see everything an item comes with and make sure I’m entering my order correctly.

Glad someone else feels the same way! Knowing that I enter my order in correctly is the biggest win there for me as a picky eater. The cashier is just entering it into a computer anyways, so it makes sense for me to enter it in myself. I honestly wonder why more restaurants don’t do this. It’s not that hard to wrap a halfway decent UI around the system you already have.

Hmm. I’ve never really had those issues. It’s also much faster and easier than ordering with a human. I guess it does try to upsell you, but humans often do, too. And to me, it’s worth it to just click “No” in exchange for the added convenience (mostly in getting my order right).

I have had them run out of receipts, but it’s never mattered for me. If I’m dining in, the plastic number you carry to your table makes sure I get my food. And if I’m taking it to-go, they always find me anyways.

Out of curiosity, what issue did you have with the McDonald’s self-order kiosk? I actually think McDonald’s has the best kiosk I’ve ever encountered. The little animation that plays when you add an item to your cart is a little annoying (but I think they’ve sped that up). But otherwise, it’s everything I’d want. It shows you all the items, tells you every ingredient, and lets you add or remove ingredients. I have a better experience ordering through the kiosk than I do talking to a cashier.

This is exactly it. A human capable of reasoning might not know how to write code. But they can learn and be taught. Eventually, you can give them a vague problem, and they’ll know what clarifying questions to ask and how to write the code. LLMs cannot do that.

If you have to do the reasoning and tell the LLM the results of your reasoning before it can generate the code you want, surely that tells you the LLM isn’t reasoning. Agentic workflows hide some of it, but anyone who’s interacted even a little with an LLM can tell they’re not reasoning, no matter how OpenAI and Anthropic label their models.

If that’s really the case, then I’d say 2015 you needed to do more reading and thinking about AGI and the nature of intelligence and consciousness. The Chinese Room thought experiment is a good starting point for thinking deeper about what AGI is.

But really, I have trouble grasping how anyone can really think database searching is intelligence. For starters, I’d say the capacity to learn on the fly with relatively poor input data is a necessary condition for intelligence, and you can’t get that with database search.

I asked this elsewhere, but do you have an example of this knowledge? Have prediction markets ever revealed genuine knowledge? If so, has anyone ever acted on the newly revealed knowledge in a meaningful way?

What insights are being gained? Every time this topic comes up, I see someone vaguely mentioning insights from prediction markets. But no one ever has concrete examples - real or even hypothetical.

Can you give an example of insights derived from prediction markets? Who benefited from the insights, and how did they act on the insights?

1. At a certain point, the idea of growth must be criticized. Unless, of course, you think infinite growth is possible.

2. Claiming the modern capitalism’s “cult of line go up” has anything to do with humans leaving caves is a stretch at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. Humans left caves out of a desire to create better lives. Stable shelter, better quality and variety food, tools to make life easier, clothing to protect us, etc. Plus probably some human desire for exploration. None of that is driving capitalists who insist “line must go up”.

We have more than enough to go around. We cannot grow infinitely. Greed is holding us back from caring for our entire human population.

Huh? You got any sources on that? I’ve never heard anyone say a non-Delaware LLC is a bad idea. And most sources seem to say incorporating in your home state is usually the right call.

It’s not “random”, it’s whatever you’ve configured it to on your machine. Your choice of (e.g.) 3 spaces per tab shouldn’t be forced onto me if I prefer (e.g.) 4 spaces per tab. As long as you’re on your machine, you’ll see exactly the amount of code indentation you prefer - not something “random”. On someone else’s machine, well, that’s up to their preference, and it’s hard to complain about how someone else has their machine setup.

TL;DR: This is a feature, not a bug

I don’t think it’s accurate to say Roblox replaced Gary’s Mod. They both released in 2006, and they’ve always targeted different audiences. Roblox has always targeted younger kids while Gary’s Mod has targeted older kids, teenagers, and adults. Roblox has had a weird resurgence in the past few years, but it didn’t replace Gary’s Mod. Heck, I’d reckon it was always more popular than Gary’s Mod among younger kids (I know I had friends who were obsessed with Roblox circa ~2009, but I didn’t hear about Gary’s Mod until I was a teenager).