dclowd9901

Clearly some folks here have never worked at Amazon before. It's genuinely terrifying to see what most of the internet runs on.

Yet, with 37% of people being only a $400 surprise cost away from financial destitution, you might be completely wrong.

https://www.investopedia.com/here-s-how-many-americans-can-t...

Still, it lowers the resolution of the results if you have to throw out a significant portion of the interviews.

Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes

Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures.

Ah, guess I was conflating the two (they are quite similar after all). From their documentation (the link you posted):

For untrusted repos, use a basic text editor instead.

Is that really our options here? How shitty.

This draws to mind the dialog that opens when you open a new project in Cursor (and VSCode too, I think), where the IDE asks the user if they trust the project they're opening. Is Cursor under the impression that this is sufficient security apparatus?

I'm always confused by these phrases:

The new API cuts word error rate by 3.5 to 4x on the same audio: from 9.02% to 2.12% on clean speech

Shouldn't they have said "cuts error rate by 78%" or something?

Oh yeah, I think I alone have shared this article with a few dozen people.

Just more focused places to find it, I think. I loved the historical seafaring stories that DI would post, but then I realized that there were subject matter podcasts that dug into these stories even more. So I think it was just specialization taking over.

Admittedly, I haven't read DI in quite a while, but seeing this post brought back a flood of memories from my college days of waiting for the next article to drop. This blog was the precursor of an entire genre of "generally interesting shit" that has kind of underpinned most of the spirit of podcasting today. Shows like 99PI, Stuff You Should Know, RadioLab and so on owe I think a little something to this blog.

The amount asked for is meager, and I was more than happy to throw some bucks at it.

There is no such thing as a complete piece of information and it is unreasonable to expect every published piece of every bit of information to contain all required context to understand it. I'm not defending the Yale article's basic miss on the information, but rather your laziness on looking for more information when something came across your purview.

If someone said to you "hey, I heard they're pulling back on measuring ocean currents, isn't that shitty?" Would you get defensive and start yelling at them about not providing the "other side"? No, you'd say "whoa, I better figure out what's going on here" and make it a point to dig more, not sit there and bitch and moan about incomplete information. Yale.edu isn't a news service, it has no obligation to "both sides" a story for you.

Furthermore, what even would be the point of anyone regurgitating that hopeless pile of words the NSF's chief barfed out (apart from illustrating that's all they have as an explanation)? You mistakenly gave the administration the benefit of the doubt here when you really had no business doing so.

Or even the UN? That organization that this administration wants no part of...

https://archive.is/fZ9CN

Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, said the decision to dismantle the network, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

1) it's not hard to do your own research. If you're here, I assume you know how.

2) does that answer satisfy you? The bullshitty word salad doesn't surprise me. With this administration I expect incompetence and double speak and am rarely disappointed. I wonder why at this point in time you choose to give them so much leeway.

"Ingenuity" is what I think is missing. The sheer _want_ of solving a problem that is distinctly a living creature's concern.

The irony is if we ever taught machines how to have this, they'd probably not want to work for us anymore.

Nonsense. The goalpost is "this is as good as a senior engineer". A senior engineer can easily understand architectural rationale. Don't dismiss my argument because it's inconvenient to yours.

I'm not sure what your background is, but as a staff level engineer, I can assure you they do not. They in fact seem to lack any understanding of architectural intent within a sufficiently large code base. This seems obvious since they can't fit the entire code base in their context at once.

We have many folks (not engineers) at our company using LLMs to open PRs, and every one of these PRs has profound architectural design problems.

I've been using it mostly to bat away yak shaving rabbit holes one can get into when working on a large and complex project. I work mostly on platform work, which is generally nebulous in its feedback loop and testing. Relegating AI to refactoring and building tools to help me research keeps me focused on solving the actual main problem I'm trying to solve, reduces context switching. I really don't understand people who use it to bat out their main focus. I simply don't trust it at that level.

I see it as rude as well. The literal interpretation is: "your time is worth absolutely nothing to me."

Without reaching for my tin foil hat, I have a feeling MS is able to suppress these incidents somehow, because yeah, that one was pretty bad.

What's your general increase of cost and maintenance overhead? How many devs and repos do you have?

Or last week's "If you use merge queue, oopsie, we accidentally destroyed your trunk", which also failed silently.

I kind of had assumed that had already begun impacting downtime, though I guess it would be good to get some confirmation.

"Useful" is an interesting term. How useful is someone who is an expert at using AI but has no computer?

So I guess I should just give up on my dream of having a useful AI assistant for day to day "human" tasks. We're just hell bent on replacing humans in jobs.

Then prove I'm wrong. Prove that an LLM can in fact solve completely novel arithmetic.

Well we're not. Theory of mind is _understanding_ you're not.

How is it not true? Theres a world of difference between predicting the next word of a sentence in a summary and understanding the tenets of mathematics. You're mistaking general application of mathematical knowledge with memorization of mathematical outcomes.

Because they don't _understand_ things. If I teach an LLM that 3+5 is 8, it doesn't "get" that 4+5 is 9 (leave aside the details here, as I'm explaining for effect). It needs to be taught that as well, and so on. We understand exactly everything that goes into how LLMs generate answers.

The line of consciousness, as we understand it, is understanding. And as far as what actually constitutes consciousness, we're not even close to understanding. That doesn't mean that LLMs are conscious. It just means we're so far from the real answers to what makes us, it's inconceivable to think we could replicate it.

My favorite part of this article was this bit, and naturally so, since I love the author:

Where did we come up with this caricature of AI’s obsessive rationality? “There’s an article I love by [the sci-fi author] Ted Chiang,” Mitchell said, “where he asks: What entity adheres monomaniacally to one single goal that they will pursue at all costs even if doing so uses up all the resources of the world? A big corporation. Their single goal is to increase value for shareholders, and in pursuing that, they can destroy the world. That’s what people are modeling their AI fantasies on.” As Chiang put it in the article in The New Yorker(opens a new tab), “Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.”

I didn't realize it til I read it here, but yes, my fear isn't really about the machine, it's about the machine that drives the machine. We already have a class of amoral beings that treat the world as an expendable thing and are willing to burn it down for profit. We should focus on getting rid of that problem first.

If you can't ban them, what else would you call it?