ohyes

On the one hand we have Claude doing my work for me, on the other hand it is laced with unoriginality, on the gripping hand everyone will get all references.

All witty stuff disappearing and turning into LLM mush is kind of the maximal expression of capitalism for capitalism’s sake. We don’t care if things are novel or interesting, we’re producing “content” to fulfill an imaginary content demand that we can feed to make money.

The best way to feed it is to create stuff that’s just barely enough degrees of quality from a viagra spam email that it can pass for original thought.

—- —- —- Em dashes for emotiveness.

Okay. In my experience asking an LLM requires you to know the right set of questions and the right process for working through the problem that you’re having. You have to know the correct terminology to use to describe your problem.

These are not trivial things even though they are things that senior developers tend to trivialize.

If you’re describing the wrong problem, you’ll get a right answer that doesn’t fix it.

If you’re describing the right problem wrongly, you’ll get another wrong answer that talks past being right.

If you’re describing a difficult problem that maybe isn’t even solved in existing stuff, you can get help figuring out the necessary steps if you have an idea where to start.

If you don’t know where to start you can start by asking where to start.

Anyway, point is, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you know (or think you know) and what you don’t know. I don’t have a magic wand, I have years of experience grinding down problems until they submit.

as soon as you start calling a group of stock tickers the “magnificent 7” they’re destined to underperform, as that’s a feelings based assessment and many investors will continue to buy the feelings long past the value being fair.

“Do they make money? I don’t know but I know they’re magnificent!”

“When the stocks don’t go up they don’t match the market which generally goes up”

I mean, technically… I’ve lived in that world. You just go back 25 years. We had the Dewey decimal system (card catalog) and the library, hard copy encyclopedias. You could also ask someone else.

Then we had computerized encyclopedias and search engines that searched the library.

I mean, you had to work for the knowledge. Sometimes you didn’t know something and no one else knew either, so you had to wait until you got a chance to find out, but you would think about it and sometimes you would be right when you found a reference source.

I’ll also note, Wikipedia is a secondary source. It is not a reliable source of truth. It is more like the ‘ask someone else’ alternative than anything else, it’s just ‘someone else’ is a person on the internet who writes Wikipedia articles.

Excellent point my colleague has the exact opposite incentive.

Sure, if we’re going to go that broad. People are already leaning heavily towards learning nothing instead of using Wikipedia.

I guess to me it has to be comparable to be an alternative.

Like, I don’t consider doomscrolling x an alternative to reading Wikipedia but I might consider it an alternative to CNN, even though they’re all technically and very broadly activities that I could use to inform myself.

In that same way I don’t consider the multitude of ways I could use my free will necessarily alternatives to each other even though they technically are. It kinda sucks but going that broad feels to me like it breaks the concept of alternative and makes it kind of meaningless.

The free alternative to Wikipedia is the library, not “don’t learn anything new ever”.

I find Claude is surprisingly similar to a confident but incorrect coworker, with the benefit that Claude will reevaluate when I correct it.

The solution is inexpensive drugs for addicts, minimum standard of living, programs for getting off drugs. But there’s an incentive to make drugs expensive and people desperate, and to punish people for their “failures” rather than forgiving and helping.

It is cheaper to avoid the situation by structuring society in a way that people aren’t willing to steal copper for quick money.

LLM is a powerful tool but it still doesn’t have the context that a person would have. A million tokens is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall context that the person guiding the LLM needs to keep it on track and being productive.

If you’re not a good engineer and you don’t have the domain knowledge, your token costs will be very high for whatever gets shipped, because you won’t be able to provide the context necessary to prompt machine efficiently.

Claude will still very often hallucinate bugs, explanations, domain requirements, that have no basis in reality. It will offer fixes and improvements that are pretty standard but not optimal. This is correctable if you catch it, but you need to review every line of code and comment, because in addition to being obviously wrong, it is often very subtle in the wrongness. For every bit of “slop” there is almost microslop, the places where it just kind of confidently guesses… and doesn’t tell you… but sometimes is correct anyway.

The “problem” is there’s less low hanging fruit. You have to know a lot to add value beyond being a middleman gating the slop. You have to really pay attention to the details to find some of the errors that it’s making.

I remember when there was a kid who kept installing this and the Chex doom on the school pcs in 7th grade. GTA was pretty controversial as a game even though it is incredibly tame by today’s standards. I’m pretty sure they never caught him.

People have a strong financial incentive to not understand this. It’s subprime mortgages.

20 juniors become some % of 20 seniors. and some % of that principals. Even if it lives up to the claims you’re still destroying the pipeline for creating experienced people. It is incredibly short sighted.

Yep, paid modding is Bethesda cooking and eating the golden goose. As soon as it happens it kills what makes their games special.

Some claim we are centaurs, we say Neigh!

The thing I really love about magic is that so much of it boils down to “I practiced for years and developed a seemingly superhuman ability to manipulate this object”.

I really relate to this because despite being at least ostensibly “gifted” my entire academic career, almost all of my professional success has been because I have been willing to climb steep learning curves at the expense of hours of my life and extreme frustration.

In short, I can relate because I too practice a type of “up close” magic which few people can even appreciate.

People downplay how important consistency is when trying to make changes to their lifestyle. Walking is good but whatever the exercise, a sustainable plan is best.

Same reason behind having a list when you go to the grocery store and sticking to it rather then buying whatever looks good then and there.

Had someone put up a project plan for something that was not disclosed as LLM assisted output.

While technically correct it came to the wrong conclusions about the best path forward and inevitably hamstrung the project.

I only discovered this later when attempting to fix the mess and having my own chat with an LLM and getting mysteriously similar responses.

The problem was that the assumptions made when asking the LLM were incorrect.

LLMs do not think independently and do not have the ability to challenge your assumptions or think laterally. (yet, possibly ever, one that does may be a different thing).

Unfortunately, this still makes them as good as or better than a very large portion of the population.

I get pissed off not because of the new technology or the use of the LLM, but the lack of understanding of the technology and the laziness with which many choose to deliver the results of these services.

I am more often mad at the person for not doing their job than I am at the use of a model, the model merely makes it easier to hide the lack of competence.

Dont forget the “murder for hire” user story

Yes, using anything less than the finest of French grapes from the Champagne region is just a sparking qbit.

I feel like a cut is a very specific type of weight loss where the person gets down to an unusually low body fat %. It’s to the point where each bit of fat loss is a significant portion of your body’s fat reserves. It seems different from when there is an abundance of easily accessible fat to burn.

Losing weight without losing muscle mass is very hard.

Yes it is.

It requires extreme diets like a protein sparring modified fast where 80%+ of your calories are from lean protein while running a 50% caloric deficit.

I’m not any sort of expert but that sounds frankly, dangerous. I don’t see how you do something like that without damaging your liver.

It’s very possible to lose weight and gain muscle, but you have to be at just the right body composition (not lean and not obese) and then there’s a question of “over what period of time”?

Any duration under a month is probably pointless to measure unless you have some special equipment. Any duration over a month and it’s kind of obvious that it is possible. Eat a balanced diet without junk, work out regularly, and keep the calories to only what is necessary.

Sometimes if everyone else is the problem you are the problem.

You’ll know when he ends every meeting with “dummies, get back to work”

There’s a strong argument that checklists are the opposite of what you want. In your example if I give you a list of ports to close, you might close those ports and leave all others open, and you would be “compliant” but still in danger.

You really need better defaults (“all ports start closed”) and a culture of strong justification for any changes from the known safe defaults.

This is of course at odds with convenience so it probably won’t happen.

I mean, this is a bipedal gallop, standing upright. What if someone were to train for running on both their hands and feet, the way a horse, dog, or cheetah does? I’ve seen a video of a young woman doing this, and it looked very uncomfortable/unnatural and it was frankly terrifying to imagine a human running at you in this way.

Mechanically it seems like the advantage would be using more muscles and being able to take advantage of your core and upper body when pushing off in addition to the legs. landing seems like it would be a challenge as fingers aren’t really made for that.

Good, finally we can scrape these to feed into an engine to make soulless versions of Picasso

Mine is always terrible and the others are terrible as well.

Let’s make a committee to discuss! we need all the key players involved, so let’s invite all of dev and QA, ~60 people for an hour long discussion?

This is interesting because a lot of the decisions to “sabotage” are about convincing people to attempt to cover their own asses.

I think in that light, number 1 is to foster an atmosphere of fear where anyone attempting to make things better will be confronted if things don’t go perfectly.