HermeneuticsOfVibes
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User ID: 3708
HermeneuticsOfVibes
13d ago
Makes sense, I think it all comes down to the corpus of public information available. If similar work can be scraped from one of the half billion repos on github its probably great, otherwise it likely isn't. Most of my work is either web stuff, infra as code, or business logic governed by public policy (rather than internal rules) so it's pretty ideal.
I imagine it would be significantly worse if I were still in global finance, but we often had the same issue as the LLMs. Lack of information and often having to switch tasks while we wait a week for a request for some bespoke implementation details to go up the chain, over to IBM, and back.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
13d ago
They are undoubtably useful, especially in a domain like writing tests. If you are writing tests post-facto, you have a very well defined problem with a constrained domain, and a massive corpus to consult in terms of style, strategy, etc, etc. We live in a world where hundreds of millions (and I'm probably lowballing) of tests have been written, including tests for some of the hardest math and logic problems known to man. Every leet code website and programming competition out there uses a suite of test cases to verify correctness of submissions.
Honestly writing software tests is almost the optimal use case for an LLM.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
19d ago
I completely understand your experience regarding the Russians. In any given domestic situation, the same character is given four different names, and none of these are what his coworkers call him.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
24d ago
Honestly I think the price of ec2 in terms of server time is somewhat reasonable. Not reasonable-reasonable, but like within 4x the cost of actual hardware and electricity, and honestly it's close-to-cost if you sign a year long contract for provisioning.
The way they try to fuck you on bandwidth though is just beyond the pale.
Based on a bit of research I'll probably just slop this out with Hetzner cloud. Their stuff lives in Germany, they charge $.0012/gb going both ways, and ultimately all I need is a dumb pipe that I can kill with little commitment.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
24d ago
Been meaning to build my own VPN again for a while, had one many moons ago but it died with the ancient blade server a got for free a decade ago.
Trying to think through how to architect it, since I want something off-prem, preferably in a different country. I could just do it how I'd do at work and have something in like an hour, but then Amazon would rob me to the tune of $.09 per gigabyte. Digital Ocean would instead want $.01 per gigabyte, plus a flat $5 or whatever, but it still feels like I'm paying through the nose for bandwidth, and the markup is still crazy.
How does Amazon get away with charging like 1200x the commodity price of bandwidth of a data center provider like hurricane electric?
HermeneuticsOfVibes
25d ago
I use the tools quite a bit, especially in the use case of architecting cloud infrastructure, where as you might imagine, every solution you are building has already been done by 100,000 other people before you.
In general there's something to be said for point three, but not how the speaker intended it. If an LLM is incredibly helpful and can eliminate 50+% of your work, most of your work is repetitive junk that can be automated. Just like traditional software in the 90's and 00's automated away a tremendous amount of human labor that amounted to manual data entry, LLMs are very good at automating tasks that are the next level above that.
What do I mean by the next level above manual data entry? Tasks that are performed by many, many people, in only slightly different ways, across many different organizations. Let's say you work in HR and have to compile a weekly email for exec leadership that serves as an analysis of discretionary expenditures, based on some grouping, where the data comes from some attached spreadsheet. This is an incredibly common task people are performing, with many extremely common sub patterns (i.e. huge spend by R&D this week on flights and accommodations, they are attending a conference and chose to file it as discretionary instead of getting training and travel pre-approved). Because there are only so many unique scenarios, LLM's are a good use case for automating this kind of work, even if it is a dynamic analysis task.
The reason engineers and scientists find less general utility from using LLMs is likely just because they aren't walking well trodden ground. Were I in one of these roles that benefit so highly, I personally wouldn't be bragging about how much of my workload is able to be automated.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
27d ago
/pol/ isn't a self hosted 4chan offshoot, it's just 4chan. And the correct comparator to reddit isn't even 4chan, it's twitter, where people are happy to issue calls for the death of whoever you'd like, unabated.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
27d ago
Memory is such a weird, non intuitive thing. Something can live inside your memory for eternity, for no reason whatsoever, but if everything did that, we would not even be able to function. Why is it that I will forever know the name of, and be able to pronounce, the state fish of Hawai'i, but I can't recall my mother's middle name?
(I'll save you the google search, it's the humuhumunukunukuapuaa)
HermeneuticsOfVibes
27d ago
I'm curious as to what specific media you are referencing. From my own small, myopic perch, 80's media seems to be all over the place in terms of future predictions, with the major constants being:
- They like to make media about the future in the first place, and
- They foresaw an increased ingression of corporate presence in a person's daily life
The latter was almost certainly because they themselves were living through a period of rapid corporate expansion into the personal domain that probably seemed like an endless march. That said though, I'm not super well versed in 80's media, and what little I have seen or read has moral lessons and warnings all over the spectrum.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
27d ago
I strongly disagree with laying blame on the Catholics, and I'd actually lay the fault at the feet of culture of the Chesapeake pointing fingers elsewhere. While you could view the Virginia and Maryland colonies as high trust through the eyes of the planter class (in their intereactions with members of the same class), it was absolutely a low trust, chaotic mess in every other regard, and much of modern American low trust culture has its roots here.
From the everpresent threat of rape looming over every woman by men of a higher class than her, to the significantly higher crime (and especially property crime) rate compared to the other colonies, to the absolute reverence for individual freedom (including the freedom to enslave), to the near worship of fortune and luck as a prognostication of God's general favor, to the gentry asserting themselves as arbiters of what messages the clergy can deliver, to the most popular lesiure activies of all classes and ages being the slaying of some sort of animal (in porportion to their rank in society), to prohibitions on education of both the slave and servant classes, to the ubiquity of class condescension, to the general preference for violence and permanent disfigurement as means of punishment for transgressions, the entire society was structured to create about as little trust as a highly decentralized society could ever managed.
Anyone of a higher class interacting with one of a lower had to rightly worry that they were dealing with a violent savage with a short fuse that could snap at any moment. Anyone of a lower class intereacting with one of a higher had to rightly fear that they'd be subject to any and all forms of abuse with no possible form of redress.
Another driving consideration is that of all the original colonies, the bay colony, and later the south as a whole, saw the largest geographic redistribution to the greater west of any of the original colonies, and largely brought their culture with them. In most cases of 19th century inland immigrant migration, the immigrants were moving to places already well tread by Anglican diaspora, and were subject to their existing practices. As elsewhere, the first settlers have a massive, disproportunate impact on the culture well beyond their size (as @quiet_NaN also correctly points out about the Quakers, who might have the greatest impact:population ratio of any American migrant wave).
I remind my kids of this frequently, and my wife occasionally. Very important to maintain an internal locus of control, especially in such a highly externalizing society.
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