feanaro

Surveillance is decidedly and completely unlike locks.

This is the million dollar we'll see answered in our lifetime. Software engineering exists to automate work, are we arrogant to think we are not destined to the same fate? Is this truly a job befitting of a human over an agent?

There is a fine distinction here that I believe is often glossed over, so the two things it's delineating get muddled together. One of those two things is coding—the rote, mechanical encoding of meaning into computer instructions. It can be argued the LLM is fit to take this out of hands hands almost entirely, and it's almost indisputable the LLM is better at this in at least a certain sizeable subset of coding tasks.

But the other thing is the choosing, determination, specification of the intended meaning itself. This I think is squarely the job of the human, because letting this fall through to the AI means it is no longer the human that is making the decisions. This then becomes not merely automating work but ceding control. This, ultimately, is a bad thing.

So if we accept the premise that the specification of the intended meaning is the job of the human, the question is how you do that. Today many of us do it somewhat half-assedly, by writing lots of natural language text at the LLM and hoping it sticks. It is our hope that the text, given that there is a lot of it, will drive the stochastic machine in a sufficiently correct direction. This works to a degree—meaning we've ceded some control but not the majority of it—not least because we still read (most) of the code but cannot work in the limit, if code reading ceases.

A more proper way to specify the intended meaning is to specify (or "model") your system formally in a system that is mechanically verifiable. Then the final artefact produced by the LLM can be validated by verifying that it aligns with the specification. However this type of high-assurance specification looks a lot like a certain type of programming. In my opinion, writing this kind of specification is the future of human software engineering.

I do not accept the approach of simply rolling the dice and hoping the machine knows better than us, though I'm sure that church is also going to have its acolytes.

What is also lower is your understanding of the change. So yes, if you are now essentially only doing the final mile of paper pushing for the LLM, then the mental burden is lower but so is the assurance of what has just transpired.

Whether this mode of working is going to be long-term viable is going to depend on how important it is for you to be aware of what has happened for the system in question, how viable the economics are for the LLM usage at this level of assurance and how much ownership you exert over the LLM used or another similarly powered one (because otherwise the LLM can be taken away from you, leaving you at the mercy of a third party with goals that do not align with your own).

How do you type an em-dash? Is it OS specific?

On Linux X11 at least, you can enable the Compose key and then press `<Compose>---` which results in — and `<Compose>--.` which gives you –

The almond thing is false, but I'd argue that "misleading" might be defensible if you were to accompany it with "the majority of almonds are grown in California, but not all of them".

The "majority" in this case meaning about 51%, according to Wikipedia[1]? How could 51% ever be considered to be close to "all", such that "misleading" would be a valid answer?

Am I missing something?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond#Production

I mean, "the pieces were already there" is true of everything? Einstein was synthesizing existing math and existing data is your point right?

If it's true of everything, then surely having an LLM work iteratively on the pieces, along with being provided additional physical data, will lead to the discovery of everything?

If the answer is "no", then surely something is still missing.

And the "anyone who read all the right papers" thing - nobody actually reads all the papers. That's the bottleneck. LLMs don't have it. They will continue to not have it. Humans will continue to not be able to read faster than LLMs.

I agree with this. This is a definitive advantage of LLMs.

No, by saying this, I am not downplaying Einstein's sizeable achievements nor trying to imply everyone was wrong about him. His was an impressive breadth of knowledge and mathematical prowess and there's no denying this.

However, what I'm saying is not mere nitpicking either. It is precisely because of my belief in Einstein's extraordinary abilities that I find it unconvincing that an LLM being able to recombine the extant written physics-related building blocks of 1900, with its practically infinite reading speed, necessarily demonstrates comparable capabilities to Einstein.

The essence of the question is this: would Einstein, having been granted eternal youth and a neverending source of data on physical phenomena, be able to innovate forever? Would an LLM?

My position is that even if an LLM is able to synthesise special relativity given 1900 knowledge, this doesn't necessarily mean that a positive answer to the first question implies a positive answer to the second.

This alone still wouldn't be a clear demonstration that AGI is around the corner. It's quite possible a LLM could've done Einstein's job, if Einstein's job was truly just synthesising already available information into a coherent new whole. (I couldn't say, I don't know enough of the physics landscape of the day to claim either way.)

It's still unclear whether this process could be merely continued, seeded only with new physical data, in order to keep progressing beyond that point, "forever", or at least for as long as we imagine humans will continue to go on making scientific progress.

No, that's a completely different concept, because we have faultless machines which perfectly and deterministically translate high-level code into byte-level machine code. This is another case of (nearly) perfect abstraction.

On the other hand, the whole deal of the LLM is that it does so stochastically and unpredictably.

This is essentially a group theoretical result about permutation groups. Would be nice to see a treatment from this angle.

And yet the categorical concepts in Hask are undoubtedly practically useful, more so than an arbitrary sample of concepts, and compose extraordinarily well. Does that have nothing to do with those concepts deriving from (even more general concepts of) category theory?

I don't think anything good ever came from Ylva Johansson. Mentions of her name on something should make one automatically treat that thing with suspicion.

How do you discover the principles in the first place? You can discover them once and then apply them in all applicable places precisely because you generalised them.

You have a point that the result may very well be more easily explained in concrete terms to practitioners of a given field in which you applied it, though.

What do you mean by the Wireguard option for mitmproxy?

EDIT: Oh, look at this https://mitmproxy.org/posts/wireguard-mode/. TIL.

A server is someone else's device. Your phone is your own device. So no, doing the scan on your own device and making your device your potential adversary is not better than doing it on the server. You can always choose not to use the server.

So there is an upper limit, which is the real price?

What are you even on about, mate? A hacker's multi tool with infinite potential for exploration is an idea "too malicious" to consider?

lnav is amazing and I use it often. I do have a list of gripes where I think it could be improved, so I'm just going to dump them here in case you're interested:

- regex101 support for quickly defining custom formats is just awesome. Versioning support is slightly broken however, probably because regex101 changed something, so there's no easy way to update the format once you've initially imported it.

- I feel like there's missing opportunity for integration between various features.

  - There are lots of different filtering capabilities, but there is no unified treatment of them. For example, `:hide-lines-before` and `:filter-out` are at their core the same type of operation: filtering. I should be able to pull up a list of all filters that are currently active and easily add new ones and toggle or delete existing ones.

  - I would expect to be able to create a new view of the data using SQL `SELECT`. A select statement is fundamentally about filtering out some rows (log lines), which feels like a filter, and selecting some particular columns (log fields) and hiding others. The latter point seems like it could be something that should be handled when https://github.com/tstack/lnav/issues/1274 is resolved.

What does it mean that Peano Arithmetic isn't categorical?

Yes, it's called rr. https://rr-project.org/

It's not a "lost" key if it's found hardcoded in an easily available place (e.g. an application). It's a negligently placed key leading to a vulnerable place that is going to get into the hands of a malicious person.

Your machine regularly uses that key to access what's behind the door on your behalf; there is no reason you shouldn't be able to access it yourself.

If you don't find the key and realise it's actually a lost one, leading to a potentially dangerous place, someone else will and they won't be benevolent.

"Viewing" private data for purposes of verification of the issue. How about you just don't ship passwords in the application like some negligent troglodyte?

More likely the model has a system prompt authoritatively saying what "now" is, and it can reason about other times specified in other resources in the training set because those resources specified their own time reference.

So even though a training resource said "It is DATE today. An IMPORTANT THING happened.", it knows that IMPORTANT THING happened in the past, because it knows CURRENT DATE from the system prompt, and it also knows that DATE < CURRENT DATE.

Kagi should hire the Marginalia author.

I think they are expressing a view that we ought to offer less protection / more scrutiny to larger commercial entities, which concentrate disproportionate amounts of wealth and power, compared to smaller entities. I tend to agree.

Even if I'm not using bisect (I rarely do), having the 'git log' be polluted by merges makes it harder for me to fit everything into my head.

How and why? Done properly, a merge commit of a PR breach is semantically equivalent to a squashed PR commit, from the perspective of the "trunk"/main/master branch. It is the commit introducing all of the changes of the PR branch into the trunk branch.

If you're about to reason about squashed PR commits, you should be able to reason about merge commits. The only difference is that with merge commits you still have the individual commit granularity available, should you be interested in it.

How does merging have the same problem? By definition, merging only requires you to resolve the conflicts once, at the point of the merge commit.

YES. I've been saying that for years. The fact that it doesn't work this way is really pretty braindead.

When will you ever be able to appreciate and look at 9T of photos?