ChickenOverlord
No bio...
User ID: 218
ChickenOverlord
7hr ago
You type in variable names? Like every letter manually?
Not usually, no. I have the misfortune to work on a Python project right now and we're using SQLAlchemy as an ORM. The parameters get passed in a dictionary where you need the name of the dictionary keys to match the names of the parameters in the query. I transposed 2 letters between what the query had and what the parameter dictionary had. In C#/.NET (my preferred language) this would be impossible with EF Core, and the tooling around Dapper is much better than whatever crap SQLAlchemy has so I'm pretty sure the IDE would have detected it for Dapper.
This is the largest Python project I've ever done significant work on and I hate it. 99% of the pain points I've had are due to the terrible type system. Also I miss LINQ every time I write a loop.
ChickenOverlord
7hr ago
I pray for the day that MSFT pisses off their partners so bad that big name vendors like Dell start shipping Linux laptops and big retailers like Best Buy sell them.
The iPhone was the mortal blow to the old internet, and outside of niche communities it has gotten worse every year since.
Or, as a meme succinctly put it, "65% of India isn't even on the internet yet":
Note that this meme was likely made around 2020, now a mere 30% or so of India doesn't have internet access. Also note the lion's share of this is mobile internet mostly being accessed via phones. Good luck running fiber or copper anywhere in India.
ChickenOverlord
13hr ago
Did they intentionally bypass the cache, or did they not even know about it?
No clue, when we asked them why they did it they didn't have any sort of coherent answer.
Perhaps he's wondering why someone would sponsor a man for an H1B before employing him overseas.
You're a big guy. And my mistake, I call them all H1B code monkeys even if they're still offshore employees.
ChickenOverlord
14hr ago
You'll have to provide some examples.
We had a project that gets some fields from the database. These fields were being cached in memory after retrieval because they literally only change once a year. The H1B code monkeys in Mumbai bypassed the cache and fetched them from the database every single time because they're retarded. They wrote a whole nother SQL query instead of just typing "SomeGloballyAvailableMemoryCache.Get("TheTaxFormFieldsThatGetUpdatedAnnually") or something like that.
Oh and they passed all these fields around in a stringly-typed DataTable instead of the strongly-typed object the cache would have given them. This is one of millions of examples, this shit happens daily in the software engineering world.
ChickenOverlord
14hr ago
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.
ChickenOverlord
14hr 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
15hr 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d ago
OK
ChickenOverlord
2d 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
5d ago
ChickenOverlord
5d 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
6d 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
6d ago
Yeah, probably, but it's fun to dunk on the "AI safety" nerds
ChickenOverlord
6d 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)."
Yeah, we're using type annotations, and they're still pretty garbage too. "Expected type str, actually found 'property'" even though the property is a str lol
More options
Context Copy link