aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1d ago
A lot of words are abused in modern discourse but "arbitrary" is certainly one of the most abused words. Citizenship and borders are not arbitrary. They could be otherwise of course, but that isn't what arbitrary means. The modern world order would fall apart if we did away with borders and citizenships, one can imagine a different world order but we don't live under that world order.
aqouta
1d ago
You should turn on your turn signal every time you switch lanes or otherwise would be expected to use it, even if nobody is around.
You should do it as a habit but not doing so when no one is looking isn't a major infraction. Not doing so when there are other people around that could benefit from the knowledge is shitty behavior.
Stop signs and red lights need to be fully stopped at, even if nobody is around and you know there isn't a red light camera.
Stop every time, if there's literally no one around you can maybe not come to a total complete stop.
Speed limits should be followed to the letter when possible.
Depends heavily on the location. It's fine to speed like 5-10+ on highways. In neighborhoods much less.
The left lane is for passing only, and also, if you are in that lane and not passing and someone cuts you off or rides your bumper, that is fine.
Left lane is for passing but tailgating is also stupid and dangerous.
If someone does not make room for you and you need to come over (and properly signaled) you can cut them off guilt free.
Depends heavily on circumstance, if it's a zipper merge and you're in the right place then you should be going over. If you're trying to skip the line then no.
Any other possible driving scissor statements?
You should go when it's your turn at a stop light and not hesitate to cross as a pedestrian at a crosswalk. The half starts are dumb. If everyone just consistently took their right of way everyone would get where they're going faster.
aqouta
1d ago
Maybe you do but I consistently find that the sorts of people who resist thought experiments tend to have deeply conflicted world views that they never examine. As I said, if you're being accosted by some rude stranger feel free to dodge out and stick to small talk. But With people you know well who are curious about how you think? On a discussion forum where the whole purpose is battling out ideas? What's the point? You could just go do something else with your time.
aqouta
1d ago
The level of skill where LLMs are immediately useful, not the literature background. Obviously 95% of programmers don't have a literature background.
aqouta
1d ago
I understand the catharsis in cheating to win the Kobayashi Maru challenge but it really is the cop out answer. Oh, so you're guarded and cynical and don't want to discuss sacred values? That's fine, you can use this maneuver to get out of it when it's an inappropriate time to have the discussion but are you genuinely just committed to never exploring which of your values plays master to the others? Too afraid of judgement for making a call?
Fighting the hypothetical is small talk, it's a dodge. It exchanges a kind of low grade cleverness to avoid substance.
aqouta
2d ago
In your effort to declare LLMs as incapable programmers you're excluding 95%+ of the profession, not literature majors. not high school students. Professional programers with CS and SE degrees. All I've been asking is for you to acknowledge that. If your standard is quant on a hft desk then great for you. I'm sure you're an excellent programmer. You'll probably have a job for six months longer than me.
aqouta
2d ago
What do you imagine is the ratio just at banks between people writing performant net code and people writing crud apps? If you want to be an elitist about it then be my guest, but it's a completely insane standard. Honestly the people rolling out the internal llm tooling almost certainly outnumber the people doing the work you're describing.
aqouta
2d ago
I'll chime in to note that all of my china visit posts went through an ai spelling check pass because as a dyslexic with only a phone for composing them it was that or a lot of typos.
aqouta
3d ago
Prompting is a skill like any other. Sending it off without context is like telling an underling to fix your config file without explaining or letting them look at the system they're writing it for. It's often a mistake to assume the prompt needs to be something a human would understand. You can and should just dump unformatted logs, barely related examples of working config files, anything you can imagine an underline with infinite time in a locked room might find useful in solving your problem.
If you're a high-school student or literature major with zero background in computer science looking to build a website or develop baby's first mobile app LLM generated code is a complete game changer. Literally the best thing since sliced bread.
You have to contend with the fact that like 95+% of employed programmers are at this level for this whole thing to click into place. It can write full stack CRUD code easily and consistently. five years ago you could have walked into any bank in any of the top 20 major cities in the united states with the coding ability of o3 and some basic soft skills and be earning six figures within 5 years. I know this to be the case, I've trained and hired these people.
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 did allude that there might be a level of programming where one needs to see through the matrix to do but in SF's post and in most situations I've heard the critique in it's not really the case. They're just using it for writing config files that are annoying because they pull together a bunch of confusing contexts and interface with proprietary systems that you need to basically learn from institutional knowledge. The thing LLMs are worst at. Infrastructure and configuration are the two things most programmers hate the most because it's not really the more fulfilling code parts. But AI is good at the fulfilling code parts for the same reason people like doing them.
In time LLMs will be baked into the infrastructure parts too because it really is just a matter of context and standardization. It's not a capabilities problem, just a situation where context is splined between different systems.
Finally if you're one of those dark wizards working in FORTRAN or some proprietary machine language because this is Sparta IBM/Nvidia/TMSC and the compute must flow, you're skeptical of the claim that an LLM can write code that would compile at all.
If anything this is reversed, it can write FORTRAN fine, it probably can't do it in the proprietary hacked together nonsense installations put together in the 80s by people working in a time where patterns came on printed paper and might collaborate on standards once a year at a conference if they were all stars. but that's not the bot's fault. This is the kind of thinking that is impressed by calculators because it doesn't properly understand what's hard about some things.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. No one's examples about how it can't write code are about it writing code. It's all config files and vague evals. No one is talking about it's ability to write code. It's all devops stuff.
aqouta
4d ago
Apologies if I came on too hard, it's just you've been expressing this opinion for a while and had gone down several reply chains without bringing the thing to the object level. It's emblematic of the whole question, AI is "spikey", as in it's very good at some things and inexplicably bad at some other things. I don't think a lot of people would take so much offense if you just said it still seems bad at some tasks, that's broadly a consensus. But when you just say it "sucks at code" it's perplexing to the people watching it effortlessly do wide swaths of what used to be core programming work.
I could definitely see it struggle with highly context dependent config files but something seems strange about it not producing at least a valid file, did you try different prompts and giving it different contexts? I find giving it an example of valid output helps but I'm not familiar with fluentd and it's possible giving it enough context is unreasonable.
aqouta
4d ago
This is talking about the cost to run on a test where they gave it a ludicrous token budget to perform sota evals, not the thing you run by default as a consumer.
aqouta
4d ago
I join the chorus of people who don't quite understand what your problem is with LLMs. What kind of code do you write? The tools are at the point where I can give them a picture of a screen I want along with some API endpoints and it reliably spits out immediately functioning react code. I can then ask it to write the middleware code for those endpoints and finally ask it to create a sproc for the database component. It's possible you hover high above us react monkeys and barely even consider that programming but surely you understand that's the level like at least half of all programmers operate on? I had copilot do all these things today, I know that it can do these things. So where is the disconnect? It's truly possible there is some higher plane of coding us uninspired 9-5 paycheck Andy's can only obliquely perceive and this is your standard for being able to program but it'd be nice if you could just say that to resolve the confusion.
aqouta
4d ago
The newest being deep research, which according to some estimates, costs a thousand USD per query.
I would bet fairly good odds that this is not true.
aqouta
5d ago
Isn't the freedom of form objective already achieved in practice? Surely the motte dwellers should be wherever possible advocating against the gender essentialist model?
aqouta
6d ago
My point is that believing in the motte version excludes them from the group under discussion. They believe something entirely different. It'd be like a libertarian responding with of course we care about the deficit when discussing whether the people supporting the big beautiful bill care about the deficit. Great that you care but the actual party passing the actual bill isn't listening to you and thinks your concerns are stupid and wrong.
aqouta
6d ago
What does believing the motte cash out to? If it's mere preference, a transhumanist freedom of form where we let people edit their own bodies as much as they want surely this doesn't imply much in terms of trans women in women's sports, endorsing childhood intervention or nearly any other culture war hot point. Consenting adults can do whatever they want is the old truce if people want to return to it then they shouldn't be on the trans rights advocates side of most disputes.
aqouta
6d ago
The problem with this position taking is that the popular messaging and what most activists actually say is against you. So they're either cynically lying or you very transparently are on the outside.
aqouta
8d ago
Yeah, when you realize something like half the federal budget goes to elderly people who had a whole lifetime to save up it's kind of black pilling.
aqouta
9d ago
how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases?
It's not that hard really, flipping any binary identity is a pretty natural operation. It's not that far away in mind space. One can imagine what it's like to be the opposite sex, idealize it and then fixate on it. Once something like that cements itself as an identity it's hard to shake. People convince themselves of all sorts of nonsense through this pathway. It's much much more likely to happen through social contagion than ex nilo but it's always the kind of thing that might happen.
aqouta
13d ago
Sounds like you're just talking about rivalrous or zero sum work, which certainly exists but I don't think is usually what people mean when they invoke bullshit jobs. Usually people are trying to bring to mind people digging holes and filling them back in again, not competition.
aqouta
15d ago
I haven't worked at very many firms but it has not been my experience that any of the office jobs in my department are perfunctory. Around 200 of us move billions of dollars in investments, originating and underwriting new construction investments, managing those investments over their lifecycle, inspecting them and eventually exiting them. As one of the tech guys that builds and maintains the tools used by the teams doing these various tasks I have a decent idea of what each group does and I just don't really think it's the case that any of the job categories are bullshit. How big each group is does have some politics to it, maybe originations could be run leaner and our tech team could run at either a lower headcount and need to focus on keeping things working or a higher headcount and build more tools in our backlog but ultimately that isn't arbitrary and the marginal employee will add more value even if it's not clear if the marginal value exceeds the marginal cost.
Some of our employees are very much doing email jobs, they interface with outside syndicators who hunt for deals for us to evaluate and then enter the deal information into our system. We even build tooling and imports to make this process smoother but someone actually does need to be the person to ask the syndicators what's going on when things aren't perfectly normal and build up the case for or against an individual investment.
I'm not sure what exactly people are imagining when they think about bullshit jobs, it's always some vagueness or pointing out that a lot of time is spent waiting around rather than hammering nails for the whole shift or whatever. But it actually is genuinely important that when the email comes in you have someone to evaluate what it's saying and pull the right levers in response. The act of coordinating these people is also itself a pretty complicated job and I can attest that automating these tasks is tricky and full of difficult process questions.
aqouta
15d ago
And it remains a silly thing to believe while also demanding resources and concessions from the rest of society. If there is nothing to the claim but a preference, an extreme form of self crippling tattoo, then we are certainly not giving minors access to it, we are certainly not bending over backwards to allow people with a sports league preference, we are certainly not paying for this tattoo with a substantial amount of my tax dollars. I believe enough in freedom of form that people should be allowed to whatever they want to their own bodies but if what they're doing is for preference they owe it to the rest of us not to do harm in their pursuits.
If you and someone else believe different things then this is the process of finding out where the underlying disagreement is. Seems pretty reasonable, if you're confident in your beliefs you should be able to object to the part of the hypothetical that is wrong. This is a perfectly fair way to investigate someone's beliefs.
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