ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
ChickenOverlord
24d ago
I've found LLMs the most useful in identifying bugs I caused by embarrassing typos (or cooy paste errors where I didn't change the value of something after pasting). Just 10 minutes wgo it solved a bug by pointing out that I had transposed two letters in a variable name. Though in fairness if I was using a real language instead of a toy language like Python the IDE could have caught it for me.
ChickenOverlord
24d ago
As one of our local cantankerous luddites, I'm still unconvinced that we'll ever achieve the first outcome in your grid, at least not with LLM-based technology. And the fact that OpenAI, Anthropic, et al are still hiring software engineers at extremely high salaries is proof enough that they don't think LLMs are there yet either (and I don't see how it could ever get there).
I'm still highly doubtful of option 2, this time using the output of major software companies (including the LLM-makers themselves) as evidence. "Claude CLI is basically a game engine running at 60 FPS built in React" is still one of the funniest sagas to me, since it betrays a complete lack of understanding of how TUIs work in the first place. How long it takes Anthropic to fix fairly minor bugs (like the flickering in Claude Code) despite having effectively unlimited access to the best models and tools is just embarrassing.
And the fixes themselves are just embarrassing too sometimes: there's an annoying feature in the Claude CLI where if you click anywhere in the CLI window when it is asking for permission to perform some action, it will automatically select the currently highlighted option, which as you can imagine can have disastrous consequences. Their fix? A setting that can be set via environment variable to disable this behavior, but it also disables selecting text from the CLI, expanding tool output, etc. You'd think with all the resources at Anthropic's disposal this would be an incredibly easy fix, but I'm sure it's something so complicated it could be the topic of an entire PhD dissertation. That was a reference to the spat between Casey Muratori and the Microsoft Terminal dev team from simpler times before LLMs, in case you didn't catch it.
Speaking of Microsoft, they were already building their software stack out of cards and H1Bs, but the addition of LLM-powered development there has only increased the rate at which instability has been added to Windows, Azure, and other platforms they control. Thank goodness at least .NET seems to still be one of their shining gems atop the shitpile. But it got bad enough that MSFT had to publicly apologize for the drop in software quality, allegedly prompted by pressure from their hardware partners like Asus and Lenovo (who themselves are worried about Windows instability leading their customers to jump ship to the Mac Book Neo).
Another one from Anthropic - the Bun rewrite into Rust. I won't comment on the entirety of that saga, but one thing in particular stood out to me: Mythos clearly doesn't understand the purpose of safety comments on unsafe blocks in Rust. They're supposed to explain how you (the dev) have taken steps to ensure that unsafe behavior cannot occur no matter how the caller calls into the unsafe code. Instead, Mythos seems to love using these as a place to explain to potential callers (itself in this case because I doubt the Bun team is ever going to read that shit given their attitude towards writing code) what precautions they need to take to avoid triggering unsafe behavior in the unsafe block.
I'd love to go back to the good old days of your third option, but I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle, at least not entirely. There are a few things even I, cantankerous luddite that I am, find LLMs useful for. Finding bugs and vulnerabilities in code is one of them, even though I think Mythos and Fable were way overblown in their capabilities as marketing for Anthropic. I also find them useful for analysis tasks. For example I was working on a codebase I'd never touched before, couldn't find where a certain page was being served from, and the LLM helpfully let me know thet the project was mixing together ASP.NET Core MVC with ASP.NET Core Razor Pages and saved me 15 minutes of fumbling around trying to find the page in the MVC part of the project.
ChickenOverlord
26d ago
I prefer hellfire as a solution. Hellfire missiles, in particular.
Would it kill you to not try to spin your way out of a false claim? They aren't suing her out of spite because she didn't abort.
No I agree with you, it was a false claim on my part.
EDIT: Specifically, the news article I linked presented it that way and I accepted the idea uncritically, which was an error on my part, and I'm sorry about that.
ChickenOverlord
26d ago
Regardless, do I understand correctly that are you saying that this is really a "slippery slope" rather than an "unfortunate consequence" specifically because the hypothetical progressives beforehand said "this won't happen"?
I'm saying that, when social conservatives said "This thing will probably (or will absolutely) happen" progressives often countered with "No it won't, that's the slippery slope fallacy!" I'm simply saying it's not a fallacy in this case. Someone acknowledging that it will happen and it's worth the tradeoffs or it will happen and actually it's a good thing are recognizing that the slope is in fact slippery, that the principle they are using to argue X also applies to Y, etc. etc.
ChickenOverlord
26d ago
Are you willing at all to make a distinction between "slippery slopes" and "unfortunate consequences"?
Absolutely. For example, I'm pretty much a second amendment absolutist, but I'm more than willing to admit that certain negative things like mass shootings are inherently downstream of the mere existence of firearms, let alone the right to keep and bear them. I consider this a worthwhile tradeoff for the benefits the right of an individual to keep and bear arms provides. The difference between that and the arguments over abortion, gay marriage, etc. is that there was a massive contingent of the left who were effectively saying "Nuh uh! That totally won't happen" as opposed to "Yeah that will happen but it's worth it" or even "Yeah that will happen but it's actually a good thing too". I'm sure there are 2nd amendment nuts who claim that gun violence and mass shootings are worse in Europe or something silly like that, but they seem like a tiny minority compared to overwhelmingly monolithic voices 20 years ago insisting that stuff like gays adopting babies to rape them would totally never happen (one I personally heard tons of times back then).
This is fake news.
My apologies, "We asked her to do it, and since she didn't we are suing her for a bunch of the problems we're claiming we have to deal with because she didn't do it" might be more accurate.
I find knowingly putting the baby's life and health in jeopardy objectionable, indeed evil, and your lack of reaction to that (as well as apathetic "not contractually required" dodge) indicative that you have no moral scruples beyond disgust/purity kneejerk reactions.
Home births with a midwife in the US (and I assume Canada) are often (though not always) safer than hospital births, at least in terms of maternal and child outcomes (selection effects and other things obviously play a role here). Hospital births aren't inherently more dangerous than a home birth with a midwife.
ChickenOverlord
26d ago
Good heterosexual couples have politely exterminated entire classes of human beings with birth defects; when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's?
I hate the Europoor eugenicists who have mostly eradicated kids with Down's on a similar level to how much I hate the people in this story, so what's your point?
I find both parties corrupt here.
"They may be suing her for failing to murder the baby, but she chose to do a home birth instead of a hospital birth (which was not contractually required) despite the adoptive parents wanting one so they're both corrupt". I don't find anything corrupt or objectionable in the surrogate mother's behavior (other than agreeing to the surrogacy in the first place).
ChickenOverlord
26d ago
The argument wasn't "it might get weirder" it was (and is) "it will get weirder" and it will get weirder in very specific, predictable ways (plus some new man-made horrors beyond our comprehension and ability to predict). And it was hardly the only argument against gay marriage, legal abortion, etc.
If you care about this stuff, you need to go to war or give up on the West, and especially the East, where they love abortion and suicide even more than we do. Accept that you live in a society where the average person has been totally given over to evil and futile hedonism, and react accordingly.
That's an option, but without a critical mass of people on your side it's not a realistic possibility. One of the other options (and these are not all mutually exclusive) is to create your own pocket of sanity and stability in the world for you and yours, while preparing for when other, more decisive solutions to the issue become more feasible.
ChickenOverlord
26d ago
It's not evidence of a slippery slope if someone, somewhere, did one thing that maximally enrages you, out of hundreds of millions of opportunities for people to do such a thing.
It absolutely is because it never could have happened in the first place without the prerequisite social and legal changes at the top of the slope.
This is like the entire point of the slippery slope as an argument.
It seems very likely that something like this would have happened many times in the past, say, some high-status man impregnating a domestic worker or slave and then using his superior status to force her into abortion or to kill the child after birth.
And in the past such behavior was punishable by law. Are you being intentionally obtuse here?
ChickenOverlord
26d ago
OK
ChickenOverlord
26d ago
Thanks for the corrections, I missed the heart defect part.
Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?
A story from Canada today that, by its very nature, maximizes heat. I will try to keep my own emotions about this story in check. Sitting at the intersection of gay rights, abortion rights, surrogacy rights, and ultimately the violence upon which all government force is founded, I bring you: Couple sues surrogate who refused to abort their baby over a minor birth defect
Long story short, the baby had a minor heart defect (the article doesn't specify what) and a cleft palate, and the adoptive men wish their now two year old child had been murdered and are suing the birth mother for failing to do so (there are also claims that she failed to keep them informed in a timely manner about these issues). Last I'll say of my own emotions on this is that this strikes me as outright demonic behavior and if I say anything more about my feelings I'm going to drift into fedposting so I'll stop here.
The main point I can take away from this is that all of the Christian right that warned about various slippery slopes have been validated over, and over, and over again. The slippery slope is technically a fallacy, yes. But Christians repeatedly pointed out "There is no limiting principle here, and the arguments you nake to support degenerate behavior X are just as applicable to degenerate behaviors Y and Z and there is nothing except public sentiment (and not even that if a judge somewhere says otherwise) preventing the awful things we're talking about from becoming reality."
For those who lived through the culture wars over abortion, gay rights, and similar issues, have your feelings on the matter changed in anyway whatsoever over the last decade or two, and in which direction? And why, if you're able to articulate. For me at least, to quote the meme an old friend shared in our edgy groupchat the other day, "Upon further consideration I have decided to become more extreme in my religious beliefs".
ChickenOverlord
29d ago
ChickenOverlord
29d ago
Yud is one of the leading voices in the "AI safety" crowd and "Bomb the datacenters" is one of his literal proposals for dealing with rogue ASI. Now you can argue that Yud isn't representative of that crowd but he's absolutely one of the biggest figures for it in the public eye.
ChickenOverlord
30d ago
LLMs even in GPT4 era are surprisingly good at chess despite no specific training in chess, for example.
But even bleeding edge LLMs will still try to make blatantly illegal moves (unless you have their output run through some sort of harness to prevent it). Not saying their chess playing isn't impressive, it just makes me wonder if "intelligence" is the right way to describe what they are doing/what they possess.
ChickenOverlord
30d ago
Yeah, probably, but it's fun to dunk on the "AI safety" nerds
ChickenOverlord
30d ago
If you dislike this one then you'll absolutely hate what he does in the sequel. One of the main ideas in the sequel is roughly "Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits. Sometimes you just need to beat him to death (literally, physically, with your bare hands)."
“It is well that I have heard you,” said Oyarsa. “For though your mind is feebler, your will is less bent than I thought. It is not for yourself that you would do all this.”
“No,” said Weston proudly in Malacandrian. “Me die. Man live.”
“Yet you know that these creatures would have to be made quite unlike you before they lived on other worlds.”
“Yes, yes. All new. No one know yet. Strange! Big!”
“Then it is not the shape of body that you love?”
“No. Me no care how they shaped.”
“One would think, then, that it is for the mind you care. But that cannot be, or you would love hnau wherever you met it.”
“No care for hnau. Care for man.”
“But if it is neither man’s mind, which is as the mind of all other hnau—is not Maleldil maker of them all?—nor his body, which will change—if you care for neither of these, what do you mean by man?”
This had to be translated to Weston. When he understood it, he replied:
“Me care for men—care for our race—what man begets—” he had to ask Ransom the worlds for race and beget.
“Strange!” said Oyarsa. “You do not love any one of your race—you would have let me kill Ransom. You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, that what you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left.”
“Tell him,” said Weston when he had been made to understand this, “that I don’t pretend to be a metaphysician. I have not come here to chop logic. If he cannot understand—as apparently you can’t either—anything so fundamental as a man’s loyalty to humanity, I can’t make him understand it.”
But Ransom was unable to translate this and the voice of Oyarsa continued.
“I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws that all hnau know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like, and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this one he has bent till it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little, blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey it, though if we ask you why it is a law you give no other reason for it than for all the other and greater laws which it drives you to disobey. Do you know why he has done this?”
“Me think no such person—me wise, new man—no believe all that old talk.”
“I will tell you. He has left you this one because a bent hnau can do more evil than a broken one. He has only bent you; but this Thin One who sits on the ground he has broken, for he has left him nothing but greed. He is now only a talking animal and in my world he could do no more evil than an animal. If he were mine I would unmake his body for the hnau in it is already dead. But if you were mine I would try to cure you. Tell me, Thick One, why did you come here?”
“Me tell you. Make man live all the time.”
“But are your wise men so ignorant as not to know that Malacandra is older than your own world and nearer its death? Most of it is dead already. My people live only in the handramits; the heat and the water have been more and will be less. Soon now, very soon, I will end my world and give back my people to Maleldil.”
“Me know all that plenty. This only first try. Soon they go on another world.”
“But do you not know that all worlds will die?”
“Men go jump off each before it deads—on and on, see?”
“And when all are dead?”
- C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
Starlink is useful because it allows internet from anywhere in the world. It needs a certain minimum amount of computing power onboard to be able to accomplish this. A 5G cell tower, by constrast, only provides internet in a limited radius around the tower.
Building a datacenter in space offers no significant economic, legal, or technological advantages over a datacenter on the Earth.
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
After 10 years, you're probably not breaking even.
Datacenter hardware lifecycles are usually 3 to 5 years so they can just give me another million and a replacement third of a rack every 3 years.
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
Nope, at least not easily. But they can outsource their data transmission (which takes orders of magnitude less energy and computing power than actually processing it) to Earth.
I really don't think this was the gotcha you thought it was.
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
Even just the imagery needs are enormous. Planet Labs for example processes something like 30 Terabytes of imagery a day. I don't know how they do it, but it's not hard to imagine the constraints. Even the most basic Planet Labs Dove 1 and Dove 2 CubeSats from the early 2010s didn't report every image they took back to ground antenna networks. The stress on bandwidth would be enormous.
With Starlink or a similar system I imagine it would be easy to beam a lot more of it down.
A datacenter is just a warehouse of computers. There's nothing special about it.
Yes, which is why putting them in space has very limited advantages that rarely outweigh the benefits of a terrestrial datacenter.
This is basically how Starlink already works. When you connect to Starlink it switches which satellite you're connected to every few minutes.
Starlink works by just handing off a connection/stream to a different satellite. It doesn't need to pass off 30 terabytes of image data that are already partially processed, it's a fundamentally different problem.
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
I give a lot more credence to SpaceX, who have a decades-long history of actually delivering on serious technical challenges previously considered outlandish under conventional wisdom.
I absolutely believe SpaceX can make a space datacenter work. I'm questioning the practicality and economics of the entire idea, not whether the engineering needed for it is possible.
Nah, it's not just that. There's also a problem with what Casey Muratori has termed "pessimization", where careless devs don't do even the most basic things to make the computer not have to do the same work twice. It's especially embarrassing when the shittier way of doing it is harder to write than the non-pessimized way and retarded web dev monkeys do it anyways.
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