HN user

icepat

704 karma

Canadian, living in Iceland.

Posts2
Comments271
View on HN

Regardless of if you agree with the US Constitution's perspective on self-evident rights, your point here does not negate what they said, simply indicates that the Russian government is not constrained in the same way the US government is.

Yes, however it still means that the browser is phoning home to somewhere. To be able to make use of that API key, it has to send some data out. Is that data routed over TOR? Does it even matter given that an API key can be used to deanonymize you?

I'm not sure I follow what you mean, but in general yes. I do find "just read the docs" to be a way to excuse not helping team members. Often docs are not great, and tribal knowledge is needed. If you're in a situation where you're either working on your own and have no access to that, or in a situation where you're limited by the team member's willingness to share, then AI is an OK alternative within limits.

Then there's also the issue that examples in documentation are often very contrived, and sometimes more confusing. So there's value in "work up this to do such and such an operation" sometimes. Then you can interrogate the functionality better.

Yeah, I tend to agree. The main reason that I use AI for this sort of stuff is it also gives me something complete that I can then ask questions about, and refine myself. Rather than the fragmented documentation style "this specific line does this" without putting it in the context of the whole picture of a completed sample.

I'm not sure if it's a facet of my ADHD, or mild dyslexia, but I find reading documentation very hard. It's actually a wonder I've managed to learn as much as I have, given how hard it is for me to parse large amounts of text on a screen.

Having the ability to interact with a conversational type documentation system, then bullshit check it against the docs after is a game changer for me.

Right, which is why you go back and validate code. I'm not sure why the automatic assumption that implementing AI in a workflow means you blindly accept the outputs. You run the tool, you validate the output, and you correct the output. This has been the process with every new engineering tool. I'm not sure why people assume first that AI is different, and second that people who use it are all operating like the lowest common denominator AI slop-shop.

I agree. I use LLMs heavily for gruntwork development tasks (porting shell scripts to Ansible is an example of something I just applied them to). For these purposes, it works well. LLMs excel in situations where you need repetitive, simple adjustments on a large scale. IE: swap every postgres insert query, with the corresponding mysql insert query.

A lot of the "LLMs are worthless" talk I see tends to follow this pattern:

1. Someone gets an idea, like feeding papers into an LLM, and asks it to do something beyond its scope and proper use-case.

2. The LLM, predictably, fails.

3. Users declare not that they misused the tool, but that the tool itself is fundamentally corrupted.

It in my mind is no different to the steam roller being invented, and people remaking how well it flattens asphalt. Then a vocal group trying to use this flattening device to iron clothing in bulk, and declaring steamrollers useless when it fails at this task.

I don't think it's a flaw as much as the system is operating outside the intended design capacity. Imagine how sideways HN would go if nothing at all changed in the way the site operates, and it scaled up to 100x the userbase.

Reddit absolutely had issues in the early days (ie: violentacrez), but the issue was mostly a dogmatic concept of free speech, rather than the moderation, and manipulation now. When your subreddit's user-base in in the hundreds, or thousands, rather than millions, it's much easier to pin down bots, and bad actors.

Reddit, in my opinion, is the absolute worst platform for this. It's incredibly easy to manipulate the appearance of consensus opinion. Also, the degree of power the individual moderators have on shaping conversations means instead of an algorithm choosing what you see, someone who spends up to 8 hours a day on Reddit chooses what you see. Lots of these moderators are not the sort of people who should have any place shaping conversations.

This sounds to me like an argument against platform centralization, as the internet itself isn't a platform, but a protocol. So this is a problem of platforms, and their improper design. Not a problem of the internet itself.

Pen and paper in my opinion is absurd. You will never write code by hand. Ever. Writing things by hand teaches you how to do something in a way you will never use, so the memories being developed are going to be attached to a context that is alien to the reality of what your end goal is.

I tend to agree. But will extend beyond computer science students and say especially people who are self-learning. When I was getting started, I actively tried to minimize the number of packages, and abstraction tools I used. Consequentially, I was able to properly and deeply understand how things worked. Only once I was able to really explain, and use a tool, would I accept an automated solution for it.

On the flip side, I've now found that getting AI to kick the tires on something I'm not super well versed in, helps me figure out how it works. But that's only because I understand how other things work.

If you're going to use AI in your learning, I think the best way you can do that is ask it to give you an example, or an incomplete implementation. Then you can learn in bits while still getting things done.

Plutarch is well known for just making things up. He was the Greek version of the dude in the pub with wild tales about the time he went fishing and caught a shark during a wild storm. When in reality the story actually boiled down to "he caught a fish once".

What's more remarkable, is that the user created an account just to post this. Behavior like this on the internet always confuses me.

RE: Empathy. I've known a few people who's digital footprints look like this in real life. It's usually not empathy that's the issue (well, _primary_ issue). There's usually a cluster of things that have gone sideways that leads someone to becoming the sort of person who does this sort of thing.

Yes, this is exactly why I think my comment was fair. Meta itself is where it is because it was first and got initial traction. Now it has an effective level of vendor lock-in. It's the equivalent of saying someone who won at slots on their first round is an expert gambler because they got a multi-million dollar payout, even if they've then subsequently lost every other turn on the machine.