domain:city-journal.org
anti_dan
9hr ago
Too much of this problem is derived from the coddling of your "autistic nerds" being allowed to sit out gym glass, walk the track, etc instead of having to do pull ups, push ups, and windsprints every day. School PE should mirror boot camp in most respects with a bit of additional recreational sports added in.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9hr 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.
anti_dan
9hr ago
15 isn't really the danger zone if we are talking about boys who do physical activity regularly. The gap widens after that, but still, the gap is surely there by 15 for the 90% or probably even the 95%.
SnapDragon
9hr ago
Please post an example of what you claim is a "routine" failure by a modern model (2.5 Pro, o3, Claude 3.7 Sonnet). This should be easy! I want to understand how you could possibly know how to program and still believe what you're writing (unless you're just a troll, sigh).
Tenaz
9hr ago
If God only grants you specific, insignificant, entirely-taking-place-in-the-mental-realm prayers
Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about at all. I saw (and see) entirely tangible results. My claim is specifically that if you pray for things, with a good understanding of who God is and what prayer actually is, you're likely to get those things. It's not limited to revelation or other mental changes.
If you really think that this is something that works empirically, it should be easy to design some studies that properly prove it. Has anyone done it? Or maybe there are too many confounding factors like true belief?
Well, studies can't truly prove anything, ever. But I've seen plenty of relevant studies. Some tested whether crops which were prayed over did better than others, some tested whether people who were prayed for survived longer than others. Some have positive results, some negative (no effect) results. I'm not satisfied with any of them.
If you look at some of the popular commentary on these studies it is shockingly bad. Just look at the first study mentioned:
Probably the experiment cited most often by advocates of prayer is the one performed by Byrd, a cardiologist at San Francisco General Medical Center. According to his report, he studied 393 patients between August 1982 and May 1983. He divided the group into 192 patients who were prayed for, and 201 who were not prayed for.7 He reported that, among other things, the people who were prayed for were five times less likely to develop pulmonary edema. None required endotracheal intubation, and fewer patients died.
The problem with this and any so-called controlled experiment regarding prayer is that there can be no such thing as a con-trolled experiment concerning prayer. You can never divide people into groups that received prayer and those that did not. The main reason is that there is no way to know that someone did not receive prayer. How would anyone know that some distant relative was not pray-ing for a member of the group that Byrd had identified as having received no prayer? How does one control for prayers said on behalf of all the sick people in the world? How does one assess the degree of faith in patients that are too sick to be interviewed or in the persons performing the prayers? Even Byrd acknowledges these problems and admits that “`pure’ groups were not attained in this study.”8 Since con-trol groups are not possible, such purported scientific exper-iments are not possible.
Basically the guy is saying "ok, evidence says prayer works, but maybe people in the control group were prayed for too, so it doesn't count." OK, but the experimental group was likely prayed for much more. It's like saying that a vitamin C supplement study (with a control that doesn't take the supplement) is impossible because the control group will still eat some vitamin C. No, that's not how studies work. The same calibre of commentary (easily dismissed by anyone with half a brain to think about these things) can be found everywhere. The studies themselves are not much better, and I think you can dismiss those that find positive results for prayer as easily as I can dismiss those that find negative results.
I could go on. Maybe a smarter person than me could define a good study. Maybe they already have and I haven't seen it yet. But in the meantime I think it's up to each person to figure this out for themselves. It's really not hard to do, as I did, a "controlled" study of the efficacy of prayer. Make a list of twenty things you want, good things that you think God wants you to have, come up with a rough estimate of how likely they are to happen, and pray for a randomized half of them. It doesn't take that long.
If you fail to pray for something and it happens anyway, did God do it?
Yes? God works the same way reality itself does--we don't fully understand him or have perfect knowledge of every detail of his mind. I don't understand the objection here, is God not allowed to do anything unless we pray for it? I don't believe prayer is guaranteed to achieve results--for that to happen I'd need a perfect understanding of who God is, rather than a pretty good one. I just think it raises the odds, basically proportional to how good my understanding of God is (and reality, too).
For example, say my dad is depressed because my mom is on her deathbed. So I pray for her to live a bit longer so that my dad can have more time with her before she passes. But, say I don't know some crucial detail--maybe he'll be happier and more at peace in the long run if she passes now. Let's assume I have a correct model of God, too, and I'm asking in faith. This doesn't necessarily mean the prayer will be answered, simply because my model of reality is correct. God knows my heart, and my prayer (which is really about alleviating my dad's suffering) doesn't force him to ignore the spirit of my request.
Now, I've been down this road before, with other interlocutors. So I'm going to politely request, using enough lines that you're sure to not miss this part--
please
please
please
please
please
please
please
think through the implications of this before typing up a snarky response. Assume I've done the same. My only claim here is that prayer increases the odds of the thing you requested happening. I'm not saying it's guaranteed. I'm not saying you're stupid, bad, or wrong if you pray for something and it doesn't happen. Please assume I've actually put ten seconds into thinking through the implications of this.
But I really can't stand these kinds of outrageous claims about how prayer really works when it's been pretty clear that it does not work at all for years.
Have you seriously tried to test it? It will take perhaps an hour to get started, and then five minutes a day for a few weeks. Provided you go into it with an open mind I'm confident you'll see results. Plenty of people put that much time into meditation on a whim.
YE_GUILTY
9hr ago
May I request that it be in the policy that posts that are "check out this LLM" without any other sort of culture-war significance be made in some other thread?
SnapDragon
9hr ago
There are plenty of tasks (e.g. speaking multiple languages) where ChatGPT exceeds the top human, too. Given how much cherrypicking the "AI is overhyped" people do, it really seems like we've actually redefined AGI to "can exceed the top human at EVERY task", which is kind of ridiculous. There's a reasonable argument that even lowly ChatGPT 3.0 was our first encounter with "general" AI, after all. You can have "general" intelligence and still, you know, fail at things. See: humans.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9hr ago
But then why aren’t the more upscale places and homes more colorful? If anything, they’re much more neutral toned than the middle and lower class based places.
My theory is that somehow color got associated with low class or cheap. In order to not look cheap, you do neutrals.
SnapDragon
9hr ago
I'm also not allowed to use the best models for my job, so take my advice (and, well, anyone else's) with a grain of salt. Any advice you get might be outdated in 6 months anyway; the field is evolving rapidly.
I think getting AI help with a large code base is still an open problem. Context windows keep growing, but (IMO) the model isn't going to get a deep understanding of a large project just from pasting it into the prompt. Keep to smaller components; give it the relevant source files, and also lots of English context (like the headers/docs you mentioned). You can ask it design questions (like "what data structure should I use here?"), or for code reviews, or have it implement new features. (I'm not sure about large refactors - that seems risky to me, because the model's temperature could make it randomly change code that it shouldn't. Stick to output at a scale that you can personally review.)
The most important thing to remember is that an LLM's superpower is comprehension: describe what you want in the same way you would to a fellow employee, and it will always understand. It's not some weird new IDE with cryptic key commands you have to memorize. It's a tool you can (and should) talk to normally.
MollieTheMare
9hr ago
see for example the Statue of Liberty poem about bringing America the poor and hungry and persecuted.
I do wish people would not truncate the stanza:
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
(Emphasis mine) Sometimes people even truncate the poem mid line "Your huddled masses." There's not even a comma breaking the sentence there! Critically she doesn't say send me all. Her command for who to send does not require nobility, but does require carrying an essential notion of liberty with you. It is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty after all, not the Statue of Unlimited Open Boarders.
There's not an entirely negligible portion of the population that is fine with even fairly generous immigration policy. They might prefer, though, if the plan is to vote for the same shit policies that you are fleeing from that you do not come to the US.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9hr 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.
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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.
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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.
zoink
9hr ago
fight the dandelion infestation on your front lawn again
I've never had a problem with broadleaf weeds. Are you against using herbicide? I find spraying the whole yard is a waist, I spot spray broadleaf's with 2,4-D. Hit the dandelions before they go to seed and I just have to walk the lawn two to three times.
LateMechanic
9hr ago
conventional theory is that borrowing is less inflationary than money printing. Do you disagree?
Definitely, primarily because the separation is just incoherent.
In the conventional view, you call central bank reserve account balances "money" which is evidence of "printing", while you call treasury t-bills "debt" which are evidence of "borrowing". But they are both are just government liabilities which promise to pay nothing in redemption other than other government liabilities, and which pay the policy rate of interest. To make it funnier, these are literally both types of accounts that the central bank runs on their books, because the Fed does the banking on behalf of the Treasury. You can call them checking & savings accounts at the government bank, although they pay the same interest, and you can freely swap between these accounts (you're never 'stuck' holding them). To call only one of these accounts "money" takes a special kind of incoherence.
Physical paper/coin money cash is just a bearer receipt version of the electronic reserves. That's the only government money that doesn't pay interest now, as a tiny fraction of the money supply, held for some types of convenience.
The MMT people often try to be more precise and avoid the word 'money' because it can lead to confusion sometimes, but I just plow ahead and risk it. The clear definition of money from what we use now and even throughout history is "transferable credit". So we can just talk about money as IOUs. Someone issued a financial liability, which someone else gets to hold as their financial asset. A bank balance is your valuable asset because it's the bank's debt. A reserve account balance is the bank's valuable asset because it's the central bank's debt. A $5 bill is your asset because it's the central bank's liability. Always credit-debt relationships, the issuer owing the holder.
So I'm perfectly happy to call the outstanding reserve balances part of the "government debt", just like I call treasury bonds/bills/securities "money". These are all both money and debt.
So issuing/printing new reserves or issuing/printing new t-bills, which are nearly perfect equivalents, no, they would not have different inflationary impacts. The size of the government deficit is the size of the amount of money being printed, and it always has been.
Many mainstream economists like Summers & Krugman got to this a bit late, in the 2010's, when they reconsidered that 0% government debt instruments were essentially 'money'. So they started reconsidering what they thought they knew about 'monetizing the government debt' and QE, etc. I'm not sure if they ever caught up to the fact that in 2008, central banks switched to paying interest on reserves directly, making 'money' look just like securities even when we're not in a 0% interest environment.
So far, youve shown that just printing the deficit gets you the same effect as cutting expenditures to balance the budget, with some inflation along the way.
But in the previous model, there is no ongoing deficit in the equilibrium youre inflating towards.
I'm sorry I couldn't really parse what you were saying in these 2 paragraphs. That balancing the budget was the same as running a deficit, or somehow it had the same outcome in a particular way?
And in what way is the equilibrium of your strategy better than just spending enough for full employment, and raising taxes to balance the budget?
Well if anyone is ever saving money, then by identity someone else must be dis-saving an equivalent amount (running down prior savings, or just issuing debt). Because it's all zero sum. In aggregate, what we find is that people like to accumulate monetary savings over time (even with populations that aren't growing I think). So unless your hypothetical has some way to stop that, that saving is a leakage in aggregate demand which will not let you get to full employment without the government being in deficit to supply the desired savings. A government balanced budget means they are draining out exactly as much money as they're injecting in to the economy.
Corvos
9hr ago
Thanks, that’s good to know! LG seems to be the best brand, although Sony have some nice ones.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
9hr ago
None of my pseudonyms tries to project a unique personality. They speak with exactly the same personality—just on different topics.
It might actually be a good sign if they did. If even different fake online faces are only shaped by their own incentives and not each other, then your real life face is propably safe.
5434a
9hr ago
I've got to say I find your all-encompassing scepticism towards Reddit a smidgen excessive - they were only saying the same thing that you said here in response to posts that echo what you've heard people say to your face, only at scale.
Practically everyone here is or was a Redditor of relatively long standing. Reddit is not a high quality forum populated exclusively by intelligent and thoughtful people, but it's not completely devoid of them either. Eternal September began a long time ago.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
10hr ago
I did wonder if the name derived from "face". I didnt think of a letter being alphabetical numbering without any indication its not part of the word.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
10hr ago
I sometimes wonder if I'm the last user who still goes to each user's personal page a specific subreddit when I want to see something.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10hr ago
I don’t see this as all bad, to some degree everyone is acting. You don’t curse in front of grandma even if you do in other places. You don’t dress the same for work as you do to just hang out. As long as the character you play is something of a decent human being, it’s probably not harmful.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
10hr ago
Yeah I always categorized it as a name like Louis Freeh, a former FBI director
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
10hr 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).
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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.
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".
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