staunton

People have been going nuts all throughout recorded history, that's really nothing new.

The only scary thing is that they have ever more power to change the world and influence others without being forced to grapple with that responsibility...

you would think they would put your name in the system prompt

They probably do, along with "pretend to not have any personal information about the user".

Don't forget the "nature partner journals", which people also call (and cite as) "Nature XY"...

labor is what they most have to offer, so that is what they will trade

What will they eat? Whose land might they be allowed to grow their food on?

Also a lot of errors would be called "typos", not errors. Such as some edge cases missing in the theorem statement which technically makes the theorem false. As long as there's a similar theorem in the same spirit that can be proven, that's what the original was all along.

Have you ever read the (full) text of any bill that has been passed during the last couple of decades? How about reading all of them?

So are you proposing people vote on them without reading them? Or that we write very short bills aimed at a non-lawyer audience, effectively leaving most decisions up to the interpretation by courts? Or something else?

What does it mean "to make filling out your taxes"??

should also be caught in code reviews

Assuming they even have code reviews - in your experience, in a situation where the person writing the code didn't check if it already exists, the reviewer will check that and then tell them to delete their already finished implementation and use that existing thing?

models deployed in critical applications such as finance, law, and healthcare.

We went really quickly from "obviously noone will ever use these models for important things" to "we will at the first opportunity, so please at least try to limit the damage by making the models better"...

Most musicians (i.e. non-famous ones) get most of their income from teaching students. I don't think such a model makes sense for developers

(though who knows, maybe at some time in the future there will be significant numbers of people programming as a hobby and wanting to be coached by a human...)

Addiction is a matter of degree. There's a bunch of polls where a large majority of people strongly agree that "they spend too much time on social media". Are they addicts? Are they "coosing to use it"? Are they saying it's too much because that's a trendy thing to say?

We've been through this before in the 70s-90s.

What do you mean?

if people thought social media was bad, they wouldn’t use it.

Do you think Heroin is good?

Would you say Log4j is an internal or an external dependency?

interfaces

You mean obsolete and subtly wrong comments buried among preprocessor directives in some far-upstream header files?

I'd guess that's mostly because C has been around long enough to be chosen for it and people who are into that kind of thing don't urgently need more than one contest, regardless of language...

Agreed. Does any of that contradict something I wrote?

Objections:

- it's possible to transfer knowledge, as demonstrated by the fact that human civilization exists. It's not always easy, doesn't always succeed, and reading is a part of that, but it's possible and happening. I'm confused about your intended meaning in claiming otherwise.

- It's very difficult to distinguish between (especially one's own) understanding and a false impression thereof. To an overwhelming degree, the main realistic way is applying the knowledge, which is easiest when far removed from the activity of reading.

- One's upbringing, environment, social circle, etc., strongly influence one's propensity for reading, both for work and for pleasure. People change, especially as long as they're young, but even adults do in a major way according to conditions.

Well, if you're using GRPC anyway, and have the protocol buffers already... It's hard to resist the temptation after a few hours of installing broken package versions.

Incidentally, I suspect this is the spiritual origin of microservoces...

Set them up, each in its own container, and use GRPC to communicate between them...

(Not even kidding, I've seen people do this)

This sounds very educated but I don't really see what it has to do with the comment you're responding to (or with AI).

I think it's important not to be too sure abot what of the future one is "seeing". It's easy to be confidently wrong and one may find countless examples and quotes where people made this mistake.

Even if you don't think you can change something, you shouldn't be sure about that. If you care about the outcome, you try things also against the odds and also try to organize such efforts with others.

(I'm puzzled by poeple who don't see it that way but at the same time don't find VC and start-ups insanely weird...).

An LLM can even ignore lack of precision and just guess what you wanted, usually correctly, unless what you want is very unusual.

What standard would that be?

you can always detect the AI by text and timing patterns

I see no reason why an AI couldn't be trained on human data to fake all of that.

If noone has bothered so far, that's because pretty much all commercial applications of this would be illegal or at least leading to major reputational damage when exposed.

For this to be plausible, you have to explain why the people controlling the AI would share their wealth.

They would either do it voluntarily (and be outcompeted by those who don't?) or be coerced (by who? Someone who doesn't have AI but is more powerful than they are?).

That's just like asking to replace priests by AI...

However, it's a lot more socially acceptable to say "I missed the email" than "I sat there for 30min while you were talking but didn't actually listen"...

An interesting aspect of this: Where I work, an email subject line including "important" or "urgent" is a 99% indication for junk...

Leaving a region means they would give up market share, investments and a lot of staff. This is huge. It's not just about quarterly profit, even if it might sometimes feel like it is.

Presumably, before they take such a drastic measure, they would first spend massive amounts on lobbying, which would most likely succeed.