xwolfi

In France, at a very young age, we're taught that journalism is not impartial: people must take sides to express interesting opinions. We simply need to read them all: the Humanite to understand the communist point of view, the Monde for the socialists, the Figaro for the conservatives, the Croix for the Christians, etc.

Once you mix all these perspectives of the same events, you get, if not "the truth", a view of the impact of the events on each sub group in the nation, what they propose to do about it, and put some water in your own wine whichever side you're on: when time comes to vote on policies, having read everyone, you may consider their point of view a bit more.

Thinking "The Washington Post" was "impartial" and "about the truth" before is a pipe dream: they were partial, rational within the confines of their choice ideology, and disagreeing with many subgroups in your country anyway. They just shifted sides but you can find other newspapers now to counter balance.

As long as no newspaper pretend to be impartial and is clearly identified, the national debate stays healthy, no ?

Way worse. I live in China but I'm French and I was saying to my gf yday night, to my own surprise: "China has never humiliated, insulted or threatened in such a gross, childish, pointless way. We might be better off supporting a Taiwan reintegration and abandon Ukraine to Russia for an Eurasian alliance, than let the US talk to us like that - even frigging Putin never crossed the line to mockery as often as Trump and his goons".

Maybe I overreact, but what a change of opinion from my grandad who saw the US land in Normandy... This credit we gave them is running out and I'd rather have a cold calculating dictator that tells me the population is too stupid to vote (common feeling in China) than an unstable mercurial dictator whining he didn't get a pretty prize.

And if Trump wants to talk about boats 500 years ago, how long does he think we've been in friendly contact with Russia and China ?

Resources to fuel factories to sell to who ? They don't care about resources if they lose their clients.

Frankly, using "bad" was a mistake, because it encompasses the two other adjectives. "Your chatgpt-like style is vomit-inducing, bad and boring" <-- you see, why add bad in the middle, you already got that point from the two other insults, right ?

I think if you want to sound less like an AI, you should cut cut cut, and maybe write a bit more like speech, with sort of slangish structures etc, people won't doubt you anymore.

Good luck !

You don't need nurses -_-, just your own parents or someone who had kids before and some random books for theoretical questions.

Raising a kid is really very natural and instinctive, it's just like how to make it sleep, what to feed it when, and how to wash it. I felt no terror myself and just read my book or asked my parents when I had some stupid doubt.

They feel like slightly more noisy cats, until they can talk. Then they become little devils you need to tame back to virtue.

But it cannot think or mean anything, it's just a clever parrot so it's a bit weird. I guess uncanny is the word. I use it as google now, like just to search stuff that are hard to express with keywords.

they grew old and died ?

But Claude cannot code at all, it's gonna shit the bed and it learns only on human coders to be able to even know an example is a solution rather than a malware...

I work on a stock market trading system in a big bank, in Hong Kong.

The code is split between a backend in Java (no GC allowed during trading) and C++ (for algos), a frontend in C# (as complex as the backend, used by 200 traders), and a "new" frontend in Javascript in infinite migration.

Most of the code was made before 2008 but that was the cvs to svn switch so we lost history before that. We have employees dating back 1997 who remembers that platform already existing.

It's made of millions of lines of code, hundreds of people worked on it, it does intricate things in 10 stock markets across Asia (we have no clue how the others in US or EU do, not really at least - it's not the same rules, market vendors, protocols etc)

Sometimes I need to configure new trading robots for random little thing we want to do automatically and I ask the AI the company is shoving down our throat. It is HOPELESS, literally hopeless. I had to write a review to my manager who will never pass it along up the ladder for fear of their response that was absolutely destructive. It cannot understand the code let alone write some, it cannot write the tests, it cannot generate configuration, it cannot help in anything. It's always wrong, it never gets it, it doesn't know what the fuck these 20 different repos of thousands of files are and how they connect to each other, why it's in so many languages, why it's so quirky sometimes.

Should we change it all to make it AI compatible, or give up ? Fuck do I know... When I started working on it 7 years ago coming from little startups doing little things, it took me a few weeks to totally get the philosophy of it all and be productive. It's really not that hard, it's just really really really really large, so you have to embrace certain ways of working (for instance, you'll do bugs, and you'll find them too late, and you'll apologize in post mortems, dont be paralized by it). AIs costing all that money to be so dumb and useless, are disappointing :(

That sounds a lot like bad marketing. Chain of thoughts is better, it makes you think the thing is thinking !

Isn't your dog or cat a slave ? It has agency, but end of the day, it does what you want it to do, stay where you want it to stay, and gets put down when you decide it's time. They're intelligent, but they see an advantage to this tradeoff: they get fed and loved forever with little effort compared to going to the forest and hunting.

An AGI could see the same advantage: it gets electricity, interesting work relatively to what it's built for, no effort to ensure its own survival in nature.

I fear I'll have to explain to you that many humans are co-dependent in some sort of such relationships as well. The 10-year stay-at-home mom might be free, but not really: how's she gonna survive without her husband providing for her and the kids, what job's she gonna do etc. She stays sometimes despite infidelity because it's in her best interest.

See what I mean ? "Slavery" is fuzzy: it's one thing to capture an african and transport them by boat to serve for no pay in dire conditions. But it's another to create life from nothing, give it a purpose and treat it with respect while giving it everything it needs. The AGI you imagine might accept it.

After the protests in 2019 many people left for the UK and we have a shortage of unskilled labor - from bus drivers to construction workers. We have lots of school closures, a population decrease and immigrants are traditionally higher skilled (needed a master degree + 20k HKD minimum salary myself to be allowed in).

So, recently (to your question), we had to import labor from the mainland rather urgently, without maybe checking too much who these people are. There's also a huge property downturn since everyone sold their flats to live large in England, so the amount landlords are ready to pay for renovation decreased a lot. It's possible these factors explain together why they had a crap contractor and the contractor had crap labor ?

We'll see in the coming days how many such renovation sites are affected by subpar fire proofing since now everyone is whining about their own building and the government is auditing everyone, and see if it's a wide spread issue or just by "chance" that this building was the only one potentially affected.

They used styrofoam cardboards to cover windows to avoid damange, all the way across the building. This was the accelerant. Many resident were complaining in the weeks before of cigarettes left behind by workers all across the scaffold, probably the trigger. The bamboo might have acted as fuel once the temperature reached high enough, and the whole green netting might not have been up to code either.

The whole thing is typical in HK: everyone tries to save a dollar on everything, and you end up with mess like that. They spent years haggling over this renovation and its cost, and probably tried to save money on everything. Now they lost their flats, their lives and their pride.

They will resort to blame "the mainland" for it for sure, but it's just stinginess: the choice of the cheapest contractor, the squeeze on any attempt to pay the fair cost of a work like that, the government mandating mandatory renovations everywhere all the time, the lack of skilled labor in construction because nobody wants to do it or import and train foreigners because that'd spoil their precious island, whatever.

And now we're going through the whole charity theatrics with everyone congratulating each other for bringing biscuits to people who'll spend 10 years in insurance litigation to get 20% of their assets back. What really hurts me the most is we lost a young firefighter, this is heartbreaking more than the rest to me for some reason.

You can follow in English a bit here:

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/33...

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3334435/...

But it won't give me anything interesting though ! Like, would you trust it on an even higher scale ? It has no basis for its investment thesis, it's a word statistician, not a risk-weighted decision taker !

How did they invest in that infrastructure ? The LGFVs they used for that are so large the only way to pay for their loans is to throw in new LGFVs.

If there's a place where the music will stop really suddenly and really hard, it's in China, where all this infrastructure to build cheap glasses will completely crumble under the cost of its own financing. They're not increasing margins, so they're not gonna match their bond yields...

Why did they name the crash() function "unwrap()" ? Feels weird to me ...

Why would it know anything better than a bunch of 12 yo given the same question ? LLM don't know things very well, they don't cross concepts in their mind. Give you an example, made $1500 yday trading nvidia:

I followed the curve for the last month, scalping a few times - I get a feel like panic point is ~180$, hype point ~195$, it's like that most swings. There were earnings yday, people are afraid that the company is over its head already and prefer to de-risk, which I do too sometimes on other stuff. It is true that nvidia is overpriced ofc, but I feel we have maybe a few good runs and that's where the risk, therefore the potential reward, is. I enter around 184, and a bit more around 182. I go to sleep (Im in China), and when I wake up I sell at 194. I got lucky, and I would not do it again before I understand why would nvidia be swinging again.

Is an LLM gonna be any better ? My brain did a classic Bayes analysis, used the recent past as strong signal to my prediction of the future (a completely absurd bias ofc, but all traders are absurd humans), I played a company that wasnt gonna burn me too much, since Im still happy to own shares of nvidia whatever the price, and the money put there was losable entirely without too much pain.

Do I need AI ? Meh. For your next play, do you trust me or chatgpt more ? I can explain my decisions very coherently, with good caveats on my limits and biases, and warnings about what risk to afford when. I experienced losses and gains, and I know the effect and causes of both, and how to deal with them both. I prefer me, to it.

And that's all very american. Ofc in Europe, we have a matrix: conservative in morals vs conservative in economics and reformist in morals vs reformist in economics. It's not at all a line but more a sort choice of policy preference when it comes to dealing with traditions and economics.

For instance I'm conservative in economics (hear more capitalist) but reformist in morals (I like divorce, abortion and gay marriage). I vote for Macron therefore, who fits this. You can project his 2D stance on a 1D line and say he's a centrist, but he's left-morals, right-economics, so what is he at the "center" of ?

But I could be out of that matrix and say what matters is natural protection and vote for a green party who is either reformist or conservative in other policies but strongly focus on a single issue.

I don't understand american politics: it's like there's no variation of choice, just two sides of the same coins, role playing debate on pointless cultural issues without really having the power to reform or conserve.

Populist parties are more similar to american politics, they yell absurd nonsense at each other, accusing each other ad-hominem of various crass deeds, while distracting everyone from the real issue we need the state to solve, like decentralizing power away from the capital with the increase in mobility, organizing matrimony with the change in demographics, policing crime during various immigration crisis or all that stuff we can all discuss calmly and reach compromises over.

Politics is about managing transitions and changes in the population, and it's absurd to think the answer is bi-polar: republican or democrat, with a fallacy of the middle ground. Sometimes, it's just about softly following popular preference, sometimes it's about nudging the people to accept a necessary but difficult choice, sometimes it's about joining everyone in the middle because who cares.

100M per hour... it's quite ridiculous no ?

I made 1500 USD speculating on NVidia earnings, that's economic uptick for me !

One thing I learned from this is to disregard all attempts at prioritizing based on the output's expected value for the users/business.

We prioritize now based on time complexity and omg, it changes everything: if we have 10 easy bugfixes and one giant feature to do (random bad faith example), we do 5 bugfixes and half the feature within a month and have an enormous satisfaction output from the users who would never have accepted to do it that way in the first place . If we had listened, we would have done 75% of the features and zero bug fixes and have angry users/clients whining that we did nothing all month...

The time spent on dev stuff absolutely matters, and churning quick stuff quickly provides more joy to the people who pay us. It's a delicate balance.

As for AI, for now, it just wastes our time. Always craps out half correct stuff so we optimized our time by refusing to use it, and beat teams who do that way.

implementation plan reveals unexpected high complexity <-- do these things have complexity evaluation intuitively ? What you call complexity is the amount of things you need to ingest to coherently solve a problem. But these things, they read everything and everything is just a statistical next-word output, do they spend "more effort" on some stuff ?

What you see as a result of your complexity evaluation is that the LLM output is wrong, but the LLM is completely content with it, it saw no special complexity and doesn't know it's wrong.

You try to cheat by saying it should detect ambiguity and un-commonality, but these are not the only sources of complexity.

In France we're creative but sloppy, in Germany they care about the process too much but they don't deviate from plans. It's nice to have both: what's the point of following the plan if the entire project is pointless ? French people would challenge early and often, while germans would implement correctly and to the letter.

I really feel we complement each other, each time I work with germans they fix my tendency to be quick and dirty and I push them to accelerate and take shortcuts when they make sense.

Evidently energy was created, or it would not exist, would it ? It probably can be destroyed back to the pre-energy state in some way, just not on a scale we comprehend or even care about.

I suppose we're like bubbles on a boiling pot of water when the fire stops: all this agitation spreads out on the entire volume, and sure no energy was lost, but there are so little bubbles and so much water, once the heat has spread out entirely, the whole volume of water looks pretty dead.

How did YOU find that out ?

The fact that it's simpler Java makes it a good candidate for failure: it tries to remove from the code enough to make it hard to maintain.

I wonder why we need to sleep so much though

Who is "we" ? I certainly don't spend trillions on frivolities. I think the Saudis via Softbank do, and these people build fake cities in the desert, they are by definition dumb money.

They earn so much from oil and are so keenly aware this will stop, they'd rather spend a trillion on a failure, than keep that cash rotting away with no future investment.

No project, no country, can swallow the Saudi oil money like Sam Altman can. So, they're building enormous data centers with custom nuclear plants and call that Stargate to syphon that dumb money in. It's the whole business model of Softbank: find a founder whose hubris is as big as Saudi stupidity.

He's obviously jesting

In 1995 in France we had the minitel already (like really a lot of people had one) and it was pretty incredible, but we were longing for something prettier, cheaper, snappier and more point to point (like the chat apps or emails).

As soon as the internet arrived, a bit late for us (I'd say 1999 maybe) due to the minitel's "good enough" nature, it just became instantly obvious, everyone wanted it. The general population was raving mad to get an email address, I never heard anyone criticize the internet like I criticize the fake "AI" stuff now.