TheAntipopulist

TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

I'd like to think I'm reasonably good at coding considering it's my job. However, it's somewhat hard to measure how effective a programmer or SWE is (Leetcode style questions are broadly known to be awful at this, yet it's what most interviewers ask for and judge candidates by).

Code is pretty easy to evaluate at a baseline. The biggest questions are "does it compile", and "does it give you the result you want" can be evaluated in like 10 seconds for most prompts, and that's like 90% of programming done right there. There's not a lot of room for BS'ing. There are of course other questions that take longer to answer, like "will this be prone to breaking due to weird edge cases", "is this reasonably performant", and "is this well documented". However, those have always been tougher questions to answer, even for things that are 100% done by professional devs.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

and they simply are not good at programming

At @self_made_human's request, I'm answering this. I strongly believe LLMs to be a powerful force-multiplier for SWEs and programmers. I'm relatively new in my latest position, and most of the devs there were pessimistic about AI until I started showing them what I was doing with it, and how to use it properly. Some notes:

LLMs will be best where you know the least. If you're working on a 100k codebase that you've been dealing with for 10+ years in a language you've known for 20+ years, then the alpha on LLMs might be genuinely small. But if you have to deal with a new framework or language that's at least somewhat popular, then LLMs will speed you up massively. At the very least it will be able to rapidly generate discrete chunks of code to build a toolbelt like a Super StackOverflow.
Using LLMs are a skill, and if you don't prompt it correctly then it can veer towards garbage. You'll want to learn things like setting up a system prompt and initial messages, chaining queries from higher level design decisions down to smaller tasks, and especially managing context are all important. One of the devs at my workplace tried to raw-dog the LLM by dumping in a massive codebase with no further instruction while asking for like 10 different things simultaneously, and claimed AI was worthless when the result didn't compile after one attempt. Stuff like that is just a skill issue.
Use recent models, not stuff like 4o-mini. A lot of the devs at my current workplace tried experimenting with LLMs when they first blew up in early 2023, but those models were quite rudimentary compared to what we have today. Yet a lot of tools like Roo Cline or whatever have defaulted to old, crappy models to keep costs down, but that just results in bad code. You should be using one of 1) Claude Opus, 2) ChatGPT o3, or 3) Google Gemini 2.5 pro.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

What do you do to get AI help with a large code base rather than a toy problem?

Two things mainly:

Have a good prompt that has the nuances of the crappy, antiquated setup my work is using for their legacy systems. I have to refine this when it runs into the same sorts of errors over and over (e.g. thinking we're using a more updated version of SQL when we're actually using one that was deprecated in 2005).
Play context manager, and break up problems into smaller chunks. The larger the problem that you're getting AI to do, the greater the chance that it will break down at some point. Each LLM has a certain max output length, and if you got even close to that then it can stop doing chain-of-though to budget its output tokens, which makes its intelligence tank. The recent Apple paper on the Tower of Hanoi demonstrated that pretty clearly.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

Twitter and Reddit both allow you to sort chronologically. I've just naturally stopped using most of the ones that don't have an option like that, such as Facebook and TikTok (I never got into TikTok in the first place, I bounced off hard). I also don't think "the algorithm" is necessarily always bad -- Youtube's recommended videos have exposed me to some truly excellent creators like Montemayor over the years. Sometimes I'll watch lower quality stuff like whatifalthist and my recommended will be populated by garbage for a bit, but that resolves itself after a week or so, and I could probably speed it up by marking those videos as things I don't want.

Ublock Origin blocks basically all ads, and is quite effective. I haven't noticed shills posing as users to be that much of a problem outside of stuff like porn.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

I agree that the bubble will almost certainly burst at some point, and lots of people will get burned. I strongly disagree that it's all just hype though, or that LLMs are a "scam". They're already highly useful as a Super Google, and that'll never go away now. They're generating billions in revenue already -- it's not nearly enough to sustain their current burn rates, but there's lots of genuine value there. I'm a professional software engineer, and AI is extremely helpful for my job; anyone who says it isn't is probably just using it wrong (skill issue).

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

You can just... not engage with most of that? There are places like Substack and this site that don't sort by popularity. You can also curate your feed to make the algorithmic sites useful. I use Twitter/X to keep up with bloggers I know, and Reddit is useful for AI updates and video game discussions. Youtube can be almost anything you want it to be as long as you subscribe to the things you like and don't subscribe to things you don't like. Just get off /r/all and Tiktok.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

there's nothing to be done about it.

This wasn't true for the first several hundred years of the country's existence. Heck, it wasn't even true in the 90s.

Nihilism like this is just a demotivational DDOS.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

Saying "denial" is something that has gotten me warned by the mods in the past, and I was only using it in a vague general sense. You're using it as a personal attack. The moderators on this site are heavily tilted towards conservatives so I doubt anything will happen to you on that front. Still, personal attacks make me just not want to respond to people who make them.

widely known facts

I'm not sure which specific "widely known facts" you think I'm disputing, but the overall "Joe took bribes" story is disputed not only by Dems, it was completely abandoned by Republican House members since there was just nothing there despite all their fishing and their dozens of subpoenas. Filling in that hole, that there's just no evidence, with unfalsifiable claims that Joe was crafty enough to evade all detection, then claiming "it's obvious" while making personal attacks that people who disagree are naive and "in denial" is one way to go about it I suppose. Did you know Dem partisans made similar attacks when the Russia investigation failed to show much in regards to Trump's collusion? Flip the valence of what you said, how it's ludicrous to expect any sort of evidence, that Trump would never be so stupid to sign a big contract saying "I, President Trump, agree to sell out the USA to Russia", and it would sound very much like something a never-Trumper would say.

In any case I doubt we'll change each other's minds, so I'm going to drop this conversation.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

Despite the uptick in political violence that the US has seen recently, political assassinations really haven't been a thing that much.

Also, people have a relatively short memory. Dems will never totally forgive Musk, but a sufficient number would probably be willing enough to tolerate his existence.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

What a wonderful development. Get the popcorn.

Hopefully Musk learns what the majority of the rest of the grey tribe learned long ago: that Trump, while being useful for trashing wokeness, is broadly a thuggish buffoon. In a perfect world Musk would become an abundance Democrat, or give up on politics altogether and go back to making rockets.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

My biggest disappointment has been in how MAGA more broadly has just rolled over and accepted this foolishness. Punishing politicians after they're elected is hard, but MAGA did this to at least some extent when Trump + Elon said we need tons of Indian immigration back at the start of the year. But besides that, they've just held a competition to see who can do the most goofy mental gymnastics to claim Trump is actually doing 7D Chess. Tariff flip flops, egregious corruption, exploding the deficit, incompetence, buffoonery, etc.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

Just how dumb do you think

you can in as deep denial

live in denial as long as you want

First off, cut it out with this crap, please. Denigrating people who disagree with you as "being in denial" adds nothing productive to the conversation.

In terms of Joe, the best evidence that he didn't take bribes was that Republicans (a hostile party) subpoenaed his bank accounts and repeatedly found nothing of the sort. Joe gave excessive leeway to his son Hunter -- partially from Beau's death, partially from not wanting Hunter to spiral again -- but never discussed anything but simple chitchat with Hunter's "friends". That’s consistent with a father who keeps family and state separated on paper while ignoring the obvious optics problem. Yes, companies will pay decent sums even for this. A few million dollars here and there might be quite a lot in politics, but its chump change for many businesses that would pay even higher sums for (legal) lobbying that also doesn't guarantee outcomes, and which don't even come with access to the President. Some might be willing to pay millions just for the novelty of their firm having dinners where the President makes an appearance.

In terms of the Trump stuff, I broadly agree that the most histrionic Dem attacks weren't true. But that wasn't my point. My point was that there was indeed an issue with Trump's underlings being shady scoundrels. This could easily make a reasonable person think the guy at the top was doing the same sorts of stuff -- but eventually this wasn't proven to be true. Still, there's some degree of a problem with Trump hiring corrupt people just like there's a problem with Joe putting on the blinders when it came to his son.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

IIRC every president gets a routine audit from the IRS, but I'm not sure how far it goes in terms of looking for the specific types of wrongdoing R's alleged.

Instead, the House Oversight Committee (under Republicans) subpoenaed his bank accounts and found no wrongdoing.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

There's degrees to this. IIRC no President has decreased the US debt in nominal terms in a century, but as long as the debt:GDP ratio is stable then that's OK to some degree at least. But this bill would be a quite massive increase in those terms, when the economy is doing generally well (minus whatever comes of the self-inflicted tariff nonsense).

The immigration appropriations are decent. They're a far cry from the kind of sweeping reform I want, but they're better than nothing, I guess. I'm also a fan of the expanded Defense budget. My main issue is the regressive tax cuts, which are really going to be fiscally damaging.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

Hunter wanted to make it seem like Joe was in on it so Hunter could plausibly "sell access", but no money ever made it to Joe. Hunter was obviously corrupt, but there wasn't a link to Joe. Joe even agreeing to make small talk with Hunter's associates was bad no matter how Hunter lied and said they were just his "friends", but far worse was the pardon he gave his son. That's a clear example of corruption. Basically all Presidents have abused the pardon power and it would be better if it was simply abolished outright.

For the Trump-Russia investigation, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Roger Stone were all engaged in a bunch of shady stuff. What they were doing was by no means a "pile of pure shit". The issue for Dems is what those individuals did didn't really reach up to Trump.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

This isn't an unreasonable take, but it goes against what Musk is doing now. Trump's Big Beautiful Bill has had a rocky road that has required Trump to help it along, something Trump generally doesn't like doing for legislation. Musk is giving ammo and support to opponents of the bill, and if it fails then Trump will have a lot of egg on his face.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

Good questions, I think it's unclear at the moment. The main cleavage point here is whether this is the opening salvo in a huge rift between the two, or if Musk will get his nose bashed in and think it better to just generally refrain from politics (or go back to mainly bashing Dems). If it's the former, which I might peg at about 60% chance of occurring, then yeah, we could see the two really go to bat against each other.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

I would guess a lot of people predicted it. They were two big egos, which tend to not get along super well.

Edit: Here's my take from a few months ago. I over-indexed on Hanania's arguments and should have stuck with my gut that two egos that large couldn't get along for more than a few months. I was otherwise correct that Doge wouldn't be able to cut much as a % of government spending, and that it wouldn't be able to touch the bloated elder care subsidies the US has.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

The Trump-Musk friendship had already crumbled, but now it seems like it's actively imploding.

Musk went nuclear against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill", calling it a "disgusting abomination". In response, the White House is "very disappointed" in the criticism. In other words, they're probably saying "fuck you, Elon" behind closed doors. Trump had previously been anomalously deferential to Musk, but if you read between the lines you could see there was trouble in paradise. Musk feuded with other members of the administration and Trump didn't back him up. Musk was causing enough chaos that he was starting to be seen as a political liability, and so Musk was somewhat gently pushed out of his role. People like Hanania who claimed the bromance would last have been proven incorrect, at least on this point.

Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

I see it as quite analogous to the Trump-Russia investigation, i.e. there was plenty of smoke, and several people under the President were up to no good. However, there was no fire despite extensive searching by the opposition party. The connection incriminating the President himself was always missing.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

The responsibility for corruption doesn't come from other guys being perfect, and a presence of other corrupt guys, true or imagined, can not excuse your own corruption.

I fully agree with this.

Joe was totally and undoubtedly pocketing bribes

Strongly disagree with this. I've yet to see anyone present any compelling evidence despite the massive Republican fishing expedition on the topic. Incredulity and demands to "stop living in denial" are not arguments.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

But were deportations always so Kafka-esque, or is this new?

There's definitely been a lot of this since Trump came onto the scene. Trump's first term had a lot of this sort of nonsense, trying to do deportations in the middle of the night before the EO's got shredded by the courts. Then Biden's reaction was Kafka-esque in the other direction, letting immigrants say some magic words "credible fear" to basically ensure open borders via loophole. Instead of doing legislation to fix any of these things, both sides just try to keep pulling fast ones, and then seethe when courts intervene or the other side undoes their EO's with EO's of their own. Just complete nonsense from start to finish. Of course the MAGA-leaning sectarian cheerleaders like Catturd are now screeching that the judicial system should be broadly destroyed since they won't give Trump rubber stamps on everything he wants.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

As I said to the other guy: it's an issue of demand, not supply. The price was already cheap enough that it was saturating what (revealed) demand there was. As a toy example, let's say the price dropped to fully $0. Would that lead to infinity words being generated by the slop-meisters, and the entire internet being nothing but SEO stuff? No, obviously not. It can't replace things already being written by humans, nor can it infinitely crowd out something like Google search results -- there can only be one top result, one second result, etc. Plus, well-known sites like the NYT are already heavily favored, and that's unlikely to ever change. Maybe things get slightly worse, but I bet that would be more from AI being able to lie/confabulate more convincingly rather than a cost proposition.

There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI, but the notion that it will just broadly destroy the internet somehow isn't one of them.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

Republican Congressmen are not actually in thrall to Trump to the degree you seem to think.

They kind of are though. Some House Freedom Caucus members wanted to block the current bill, then Trump told them to fuck off, and now they're supporting the bill.

The fact Trump doesn't get everything he wants has more to do with Trump just being a buffoon who doesn't know how to do politics very well. He can sometimes get his way when he has a ton of political capital, but otherwise his blunt-force trauma style oftentimes fails to work.

Obama was quite involved in passing the ACA, for example, which was a campaign promise of his. source 1 source 2 source 3

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