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SubstantialFrivolity

I'm not even supposed to be here today

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joined 2022 September 04 22:41:30 UTC
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User ID: 225

SubstantialFrivolity

I'm not even supposed to be here today

5 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 22:41:30 UTC

					

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User ID: 225

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The only time I have a problem with it is when someone does that in a parking garage. It takes some finagling to back in, and while you do that there tends to be a whole line of cars waiting behind you. I think that's pretty rude and people should just pull in normally in those situations. Otherwise, whatever.

Oh yes it is, when a lot of those people will be doing 65 or less. Nobody has any business going 15 mph over the speed limit.

  1. Yes
  2. Yes, although at a stop sign it's acceptable to not fully stop only if visibility is good and there's nobody else. It's still illegal though and don't complain if you get a ticket from a well hidden police officer.
  3. Largely followed but doesn't have to be to the letter. 5 mph over is fine, 10 is iffy, 15+ you shouldn't be on the road.
  4. Yes the left lane is for passing only, no it's not ok if someone cuts you off and rides your bumper. I have no idea why you tied these two together because they are very different.
  5. Absolutely not. Better to miss an exit or get forced into the wrong exit than to do shit liable to cause accidents. Again if someone does this they shouldn't be allowed to drive.
  6. No

Nobody says you have to make a flowery effortpost. There are plenty of topics that get posted where someone has two or three sentences saying what they think about the topic. That's all you need.

Bit of both. The car she had when we got married died because she was never changing the oil, and that caused the engine to seize. Was quite a shock to me that she was never changing the oil, but I guess I should've asked at some point rather than assume. The car we got to replace that was totaled by the insurance company after a hailstorm, after only two years of us having the thing.

I have had two whole cars. A 1997 Dodge Intrepid, which I owned from 2003-2011, and a 2001 Ford Mustang, which I got in 2011 and have to this day. To be honest I would like to have a new car (or even a decent used car), but my wife's cars keep dying and so we keep having to put our car money into her vehicle.

I think you might be confused as to the purpose of a discussion board.

As you can see from my flair I'm Christian.

Off topic but... why would one take that away from you flair? I suspect that very few people here can read Greek, so most probably have no idea what it means. I definitely don't, anyways.

She's probably right but damn if that isn't the most autistic thing ever. It is not new that people will treat anything short of maximal condemnation of child porn as being pro-child abuse. I don't think that it should be that way, because it's better for said abused children if we can rationally discuss ways to better disincentivize what's happening to them. But for better or for worse that's how people are, they can handle zero rational discussion on this topic and I would say she should've known that.

Sorry, I genuinely can't understand what your point is. I'm guessing because I don't work in finance so I'm missing a reference. Can you please clarify?

I have to say I find it hard to understand why you care so much. Even if she does smell bad (which neither of us can know one way or the other, as we will never see her in person), what's it to you (as you will never experience the bad smell)? If her hygiene practices don't inflict any actual cost upon you, I don't see why it matters one way or the other to you.

Walmart Labs, for data science and engineering, is as prestigious and as lucrative as a FAANG job currently.

Lucrative perhaps, but I dispute the claim about prestige. I've never even heard of Walmart Labs, whereas everyone in the industry knows of the FAANG companies and the high status that comes from working for one.

IMO the best way to keep Discord pleasant is to not join public servers. It works best for small groups of people who know each other, like an MMO guild or similar groups of friends. I've joined large public servers before and they are kind of miserable.

If you are decently competent programmer working in an industry where things like accuracy, precision, and security are core concerns, LLMs start to look anti-productive as in the time you spent messing around with prompts, checking the LLM's work, and correcting it's errors, you could've easily done the work yourself.

I think this fairly nicely summarizes how I feel. Not that I do work in one of those industries to be fair, but it's part of my personal work ethic I guess you might say. I want computers (and programs) to be correct first and foremost. Speed or ease of development don't mean much to me if the result can't be relied upon. Not only that, I want my tools to be correct first and foremost. I wouldn't accept a hammer where the head randomly fell off the handle 10% of the time or even 1% of the time. So I similarly have very little patience for an LLM which is inherently going to make mistakes in non-deterministic ways.

I have not tried that, but it also seems like kind of a failure of the tool if I have to, you know? The whole point of a tool that can understand natural language is that you can just talk to it normally. If one has to figure out how to word the incantations just right to get a useful result... I'm not sure how that's better than just figuring out the code myself at that point.

Thanks. And for my part I'm sorry that I blew you off unjustly; I really thought I had explained myself in detail but I was wrong.

And yeah, the tech might improve. I imagine you can see why I'm skeptical of the strong predictions that it'll do so (given that I don't agree it's as good as people say it is today), but I try to keep an open mind. It is possible, so we'll see.

Oh for heaven's sake, dude. When did I ever say I consider myself better than anyone else, that I would deserve such a litany of sarcasm directed at me? I don't think that and certainly haven't said it. I am just an ordinary programmer - I doubt very much that I'm better at programming than anyone here except the non-programmers, and I'm sure I'm worse than more than a few. Not only did I say "hey I'm not trying to litigate this right now" and that got ignored, now I get people dogpiling me saying I'm a troll or think I'm better than everyone else or whatever.

But fine, since you and @SnapDragon are insistent on pressing me on the topic (and since I apparently didn't say to him what my experience was, my bad on that, but I know I have posted this in a previous thread before), I will reiterate the things that I personally have seen LLMs fall flat on their face with. This is of course in addition to the various embarrassments that are public, like Microsoft's ill-conceived attempt to let Copilot loose on PRs.

  • Tried to get ChatGPT to help me generate a fluentd config file that would process logs in a way I needed to do for work. It gave me a config file that not only didn't do the thing, it didn't conform to the schema and caused the software to crash
  • Tried to get it to help me order CloudFormation resource delete-and-recreate in a different way than the default order. It first gave me options that didn't even exist, then it gave me options that did exist but didn't do what I asked for. I had a similar issue with the AWS-trained model they provide, which also suggested options that don't do what I asked for (and are documented as such).
  • A coworker used ChatGPT (a custom one trained on our API docs) to generate a script to run against our API. Again it hallucinated methods that simply do not exist.

These were all within the last year, though I couldn't tell you exactly when or what model or anything. And I've been honest that sometimes it has done good work for me, namely in generating short snippets of code in a language (or using an API) that I know well enough to recognize as correct when I see it, but not well enough to produce without laborious reading of docs. I've never claimed that LLMs work 0% of the time (if people have taken that away, I've done a poor job communicating), but the failure rate is much too high for them to be considered viable tools in my book. Most frustratingly, the things that I actually need help on, the ones where I don't know really anything about the topic and a workable AI assistant would actually save me a ton of time, are precisely the cases where it fails hard (as in my examples where stuff doesn't even work at all).

So those are again my experiences with LLMs that have caused me to conclude that they are hype without substance. Disagree if you like, I don't mind if you find it useful and like I have tried to say I'm not actually trying to convince people of my views on this topic any more. Like I tried to say earlier, the only reason I posted in this thread was to push back on the idea that one simply must be ignorant if they don't think LLMs are good at coding (and other things). That idea is neither true, necessary, or kind (as the rules allude to) and I felt that it deserved some sort of rebuttal. Though heaven knows I wish I had just left it alone and had peace and quiet rather than multiple people jumping down my throat.

Right, and I gave it then. Which is why I am not going to bother doing it this time. Like I said, nothing has changed.

I've tried to have this debate with you in the past and I'm not doing it again, as nothing has changed. I'm not even trying to debate it with self_made_human really - I certainly wouldn't believe me over Carmack if I was in his shoes. My point here is that one should not attribute "this person disagrees with my take" to "they don't know what they're talking about".

There are fifteen! Or fourteen if you don't count the prequel book, but let's be honest... if you read the other fourteen you're probably going to read that too lol.

The average person who writes code. Not an UMC programmer who works for FAANG.

Yes, that is indeed what I meant as well.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating; and for code, if it compiles and has the desired functionality.

I agree. And it doesn't. Code generated by LLMs routinely hallucinates APIs that simply don't exist, has grievous security flaws, or doesn't achieve the desired objective. Which is not to say humans never make such mistakes (well, they never make up non-existent APIs in my experience but the other two happen), but they can learn and improve. LLMs can't do that, at least not yet, so they are doing worse than humans.

Why should I privilege your claims over [famous programmers]?

I'm not saying you should! I'm not telling you that mine is the only valid opinion; I did after all say that reasonable people can disagree on this. My issue is solely that your comment comes off as dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as too inexperienced to have an informed opinion. When you say "They can't code? Have you seen the average code monkey?", it implies "because if you had, you wouldn't say that LLMs are worse". That is what I object to, not your choice to listen to other programmers who have different opinions than mine.

Why do you consistently assume that people who don't share your views of LLM capabilities just haven't seen what they can do/what humans can do? For example:

They can't code? Have you seen the average code monkey?

Yes I have (and of course, I've used LLMs as well). That's why I say LLMs suck at code. I'm not some ignorant caricature like you seem to think, who is judging things without having proper frame of reference for them. I actually know what I'm talking about. I don't gainsay you when you say that an LLM is good at medical diagnoses, because that's not my field of expertise. But programming is, and they simply are not good at programming in my opinion. Obviously reasonable people can disagree on that evaluation, but it really irks me that you are writing like anyone who disagrees with your take is too inexperienced to give a proper evaluation.

I bounced off the very beginning several times myself. But once I got past the first few chapters, I really wound up enjoying the books. I even love the books that people complain about. I know why they complain, but by that time I was so in love with the characters and the world that I was just happy to spend time with them. Plus, a lot of people have observed that the books which are considered a slog are a lot more bearable if you weren't having to wait years for each one to come out like when they were first published.

I can't promise you will enjoy them like I did, but I encourage you to give them a shot. I would say that they don't really hit their stride until the fourth book (the first book in particular is weird because it was written to serve as a standalone story in case Jordan didn't get the chance to continue the series), but if you aren't enjoying them at all by at least the second book then they probably aren't for you.

How is this not equally applicable to literally every other politician that has been term-limited out of office?

It is.

Singling out Trump for political cowardice on the matter amounts to special pleading...

I'm not doing that. Trump was under discussion, not anybody else. Nor did I call him a coward.