customguy

Once upon a time in Southern Germany, there was the one and only C-Team...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GRBn7Vn2U0&t=775s

Obviously it loses a lot if you don't speak German, but they were very funny and silly and interacted with their fans a lot, to say the least.

I meant to ask what the point of the question is basically. What would change, what would it matter for, if the answer was yes or no?

Besides it being so general a question to really be useless as anything but an insinuation IMO, which is why I'm trying to tease that insinuation out. E.g. are people who use Apple left-handed? Are they gay? The answer is "yes, some of them, of course, but also many aren't... why are you asking?"

There is no thing as "just a question, nothing in mind really". That does not exist. The mind that can ask a question cannot arrive at it in a vacuum.

Is there something that translates math formula into code? There are many (comparatively) "simple" algorithms I simply cannot make heads or tails when they are described via math prose or math formula, but when it's code I basically instantly know how to rewrite it into any other language I know, at least, and sometimes that's a starting point for poking at it to understand it a bit better, if not the same way would if you understood all the underlying math.

For poor old me, too many wikipedia articles on algorithms useful mostly or only for programming are described in formulas rather than simply code with detailed comments. Scrap the whole page and just gimme the code :( Not even to copy and paste, because that's a language I can understand, and enjoy learning.

I didn't say they're "unusable". When I did use them it went great because I didn't ask for random advice on subjects. I could even get ChatGPT to oneshot code for me.

Doesn't make it any less ghoulish the way it's all trained on things humans made for humans. So yeah, I'm glad I don't need this stuff. You may need it for your job, I don't. Neener neener! I don't need it for my countless side projects I could not make reality in 10 life times, either. Because I know if I finished them all, I'd just come up with more stuff, there is no end, so simply going at my own pace and smelling the flowers, loving every insect, is just as well. I like it better, that's why I do it.

So why wouldn't I shit on something I have no use for, because of all the qualities it has that deserve to be shit upon? I'm free. "But others are not" -- then get free, but get out of my hair about not being free.

if I search my file system for "foo" a trillion gazillion times, it will not return "bar" once.

Do you understand what this means? I say "this bike cannot fly to the moon, I prefer my moon rocket". And you say what if they can be improved? Fine, improve them. Don't question me because I go by what is real now, rather than what you'd think is possible or around the corner. It's not a game with a few bugs, where mostly bugfree games also exist. There is no way from here to there I see, and if you disagree, walk it.

I lose no time by doing something else in the meantime. Find the promised land and I'll be there with my feet on the table in 0.1 seconds, pretending I founded it -- don't worry about that. But until then I won't stumble around some corporate slop desert with you because I think there is no there there, and basically doing anything else is preferable.

LLMs are currently in a category where people can have visceral reaction and claim "I'd never buy something from a company that does that" but I can tell you right now that won't last.

Because people are struggling to make ends meet as wealth gets more and more concentrated. It reminds me of that really disgusting joke: why do sheep farmers like to fuck their sheep just at the edge of a cliff? Because they push back.

So yeah, people often make choices they'd rather not make. Doesn't mean anything, just like that sheep doesn't love the farmer and is grinding up against him, it doesn't want to fall of a cliff and die.

And these companies take a few cherry picked snapshots, never show the video, never show the aftermath, and brag about acceptance. Fuck all of that, so much.

People don't want all of humanity to be stolen from by companies who then turn around and sue you if you violate their copyright. That settles all of it, already. All this stuff about quality and economics is irrelevant. We hate people who steal from the little man to enrich the wealthy, always did, always will. Where there is a "we" that isn't just isolated people playing pretend, you will find this as the bedrock, maybe a layer above hating child abuse. And making the "accept child abuse or robber barons" option 10%, 20%, 50000% cheaper doesn't change that in the slightest.

I'll go you one further: the very few ones who do, or don't care, don't matter, because when it comes to ethics and society they already checked out, and can stay checked out. They got old, they lost what they were supposed to hold on to if they ever had it, and that's tragic, but mostly their problem which they want to extend onto the people who don't have it.

To me nothing a human makes has the capacity to be as terrible on an existential level as genAI slop.

something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them

Of course they think it's great, or they wouldn't be doing it. That goes for everyone, with anything, ever. And some customers probably think it's great, too. But if you want me as a customer, to whom all those other opinions are completely irrelevant, you'd be better off just putting a turd glazed with boogers. Doesn't matter what it advertises, I'll know a human made this, and look at the product description.

What's the argument here? People don't like spit in their food, how many people can tell their food got spat in? Does that mean they're somehow wrong or to be belittled for not liking spit in their food?

If a game on release is unplayable-tier buggy, then improves over time to the point where bugs are barely noticeable, is acknowledging that going to count as "goalpost moving" to you?

if someone says "this hame is buggy" talking about how it might improve is moving goal posts, especially here where that "fix" is purely speculative and has not happened even once.

Great! Nor will an agent any more likely, cause it just sends out a tool call and surfaces its output.

nope, that's so handwavy it doesn't wareant more response than that.

trivially verifiable facts

like that game gets patches? this is too dumb for your mockery to get a rise out of me.

Nobody said anything about “going for slop.”

I did. I used that phrase.

"not slop cuz pretty useful" = slop argument

Didn't read the article because the conclusion is obvoius enough to me as is, never heard of Erik Schluntz before, and drawing an analogy between two things means very little anyway. "this bike is about as heavy as that table" doesn't require the rebuttal that bikes aren't tables, for example.

so far I mostly saw it spewed forth on HN

Nevermind "comments", has anyone with a name and reputation claimed they are?

The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience.[...] It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. [...] Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.

- Simone Weil

nervous-curiosity about the unknown (future of jobs, their kids' job market future, is this going to make us all dumber, etc)

That's 3 things to be nervous about, none anyone is "curious" about. So they're nervous about the prospects, but also acknowledge they "benefit from them", which is 100% vague versus actual concerns. If that's the best you can come up with after this stuff about the media trying to find boogeymen, that's kind of an own goal.

And you don't even mention something I see mentioned in the wild all the time, often at the forefront: how these companies just took and take everything people made, without asking, while if you take from them they sue you. That is so glaring I would even say if all people you know don't care about that, it would be a problem with your friends, not legitimize what these companies did and do.

So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.

So now not being the first becomes the smarter move. Kinda fits that it's all built on ingesting vast volumes of stuff people made because they couldn't just prompt, but doesn't spell good things in the long run IMO. It makes me think me of complaints about dating in big cities, people tend to hold out for meeting someone even better rather than committing and making the best of it.

"hallucinating less" is just shifting the goal posts into vagueness. Things can be rocky still = nothing fundamentally changed. Meanwhile, if I search my file system for "foo" a trillion gazillion times, it will not return "bar" once.

Why do you think that will happen, and why do you think going for slop in the meantime could possibly bring us closer to that?

The question wasn't "is there anybody who supports this", but how that isn't ethnonationalist.

With what? You cannot even say WHAT is supposed to be "classic suicidal empathy". You made no point, you just demonstrated distress over the word "empathy" that seems to be so big you cannot even express what your issue is.

ChatGPT just hit me with "I smiled at this:" ...

> If we don't have empathy with victims of that

Classic suicidal empathy.

What is? You didn't even quote a full sentence, you're basically just freaking out over the word empathy.

And interestingly, what you failed to even try to parse says the opposite. I do NOT have empathy with those who don't have empathy with others. I'm not "crying", you kinda are.

It just says the same thing regardless of what I enter:

1 million annual:

If you got to keep your fair share of the profit Amazon.com reported, $77.7B, your salary would be $1.049.283. You helped Amazon.com make enough to pay you $49.283 more.

3 million annual:

If you got to keep your fair share of the profit Amazon.com reported, $77.7B, your salary would be $3.049.283. You helped Amazon.com make enough to pay you $49.283 more.

1 dollar per year:

If you got to keep your fair share of the profit Amazon.com reported, $77.7B, your salary would be $49.284. You helped Amazon.com make enough to pay you $49.283 more.

You forgot 'signalling' which is what people in the West - not just the USA - are tired of.

No, that's implicit. If I'm tired of rock music, that mostly comes into play when I'm exposed to it in some way.

Stating that a whole country has problems with virtue is rather stigmatising

Speaking of, someone expressing their virtue -- and caring for the well being of sentient beings simply is, it's a capacity, and it annoys the people who lack it, because it raises the question why they lack it -- isn't automatically them "signalling" anything. That's just an attempt to stigmatise it.

recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48922972

If we don't have empathy with victims of that, who cares what we are "tired of"? We can torture animals, but don't stigmatise us, and don't talk about how you try to avoid feeding the systems that lead to animals being tortured. You can talk about how much you like your other new hobbies, but not this one. You cannot even wear a pin. Because we're so tired and you're so oppressive, with your virtue and your signals. Have empathy with my fear of empathy, basically.

I'm not even vegetarian but I'm more tired of that than them, because it's both evil and stupid, and projects that on vegans.

something you'd complain about if it were about any country in what some have taken to call the "global South".

Many things play into this. One is the hesitation to punch down versus a superpower that spent many, many millions to signal, to broadcast, their virtue into the whole world for decades.

Really not caring about something also means not making a positive and false claim about it. What I said was relevant to that claim. That claim in turn was, according to your heuristics, not relevant (for daily coding).

How could it be? For example, each memory stick doesn't know beforehand what other memory sticks it will be used with, so the "physical" addressing of the memory on each stick has to be independent of the others, i.e. a local address, that gets mapped to a virtual one.

A bit of a tangent, but it's fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community. I would like to see a collection of such anecdotes, but I can see why it doesn't get compiled, because it would essentially just be [description of community] and then [Facebook], with no specifically interesting thing to report other than "it petered out". Same for Amazon, come to think of it. You can describe what used to be, and that it's now longer there, but there isn't really any compelling tale in it.

Even better is when you can only assign a priority once, ever. So if one thing was marked "urgent", nothing else can ever be "urgent" again. It can be "Urgent" or "double urgent" or "urgent for real this time", but not "urgent". Forces creativity and maybe even, depending on the size and business (as in "being busy") of the organization, the creation of whole new words after all existing permutations have been used, from which we all benefit.

the features that they themselves would use

IMO that's worse.

If you're making a plane, crashing 1 in 1000 times is terrible, if you're making some administrative thing which if it crashes costs 5 minutes work then it's likely fine

Yes, and if it doesn't crash it's better than fine. Objectively.

I have handmade crafted products and I have assembly line products. Not only are the latter cheaper and more consistent, they're often better.

Completely ignoring the care and work that (ideally) goes into making and running the machines at assembly lines, and the cleaning that takes place every day, or sometimes several times a day, all the strict regulations. You cannot compare 99% of software engineering with food production in modern countries. Similar for furniture, it can hurt or even kill, and it would do at a much higher rate if it was made like most software is.

There's gross factory food, and super nice street food, there's healthy factory food and super gross street food. That has nothing to do with anything. All else being the same, you want the person who prepares your food or runs the factory to pay attention and not be sloppy, or you end up with food poisoning, glass shards, and other fun stuff. You just take allll of that for granted, instead of imagining how awesome computing could be if the people involved in it took it similarly seriously instead of just applauding their own laziness.

All you're saying is that for you only the destination ever mattered. But it's very apparent that is not true for a lot of people.

And "solving needs" is kinda vague. We drank from lead cups for a long time, because perfect knowledge of material and biology was secondary to just having a cup. And no single sip from any lead cup killed or maybe even much harmed any person, but it all added and adds up.

Of course the comparison with lead is kinda over the top, but it's just to illustrate the principle. If your software crashes the computer 1 out of 1000 runs, and it otherwise crucial and unique, people will still use it, and the longer and the more people use it, the more human lifetime it "destroys". If it would take you 1 year to find the source of the crash, it may not be worth it, if it would take you 30 minutes, it might be. You just won't get recompensated for it, you'd have to get satisfaction from it via something like craftsmanship.

Your users don't know either way, so it's your job to know. Saying it's not, everybody just has to be content with the transaction, is a bit like saying a doctor doesn't have to do medicine according to what they know is likely best, but according to what their patient thinks they need.

it is simply one meaning of the word, and you talking about something else instead a waste of time.