The article brings up good criticisms, like all the minors getting molested due to the platform being negligent, and manipulative in game spending options. Paying for online content creation work doesn’t seem as bad as that to me though.
https://github.com/kylemcdonald/lapd-face-search/
It is crazy to me that they are doing all of this in clientside javascript
I very highly recommend getting a pressure cooker for this. Not only is it cheaper energywise and requires less planning ahead (don’t need to soak beans beforehand, much shorter cooking time), but you don’t have to keep tabs on a pot for hours. You just pour in the beans water and salt, press a button and come back later whenever you’re ready. Especially good for Garbanzo beans, which take a ridiculous amount of time to cook on a stovetop.
I once had a deal with my landlord to provide wifi to the other tenants. Of course I didn’t snoop, but it’s not like they had any real assurance of that. You’d think there might be some privacy concerns but nobody had a problem except when the internet was down. I think in general people don’t tend to care about that, though if you do there’s the option of using a VPN.
putting community conversations front-and-center in the user experience and blending AI-driven efficiency with real human perspectives
So, reading between the lines, Reddit is going to collaborate with advertisers to make their bot spam falsified social proof campaigns successful, while pretending that’s not what is going on.
sell things that you actually have the rights to print and sell.
This would exclude the thousands of makers who subscribe to designers like Cinderwing3D, and have permission to print and sell her articulated dragon designs.
It sounds like they do have the rights, and this policy is still causing problems for them because there’s a difference between having the rights and being the original creator.
To me it seems fine, especially if there’s still a free version that’s basically the same or it gets released after a delay. I don’t think I’d pay for something like this myself, and maybe they’re taking some legal risk, but if the money lets them spend time making media accessible, how is there a problem that outweighs the good?
What you confuse here is doing something that can benefit from applying logical thinking with doing science.
I’m not confusing that. Effective programming requires and consists of small scale application of the scientific method to the systems you work with.
the argument has become “but it seems to be thinking to me”
I wasn’t making that argument so I don’t know what you’re getting at with this. For the purposes of this discussion I think it doesn’t matter at all how it was written or whether what wrote it is truly intelligent, the important thing is the code that is the end result, whether it does what it is intended to and nothing harmful, and whether the programmer working with it is able to accurately determine if it does what it is intended to.
The central point of it is that, by the very nature of LKMs to produce statistically plausible output, self-experimenting with them subjects one to very strong psychological biases because of the Barnum effect and therefore it is, first, not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-exoerimentation(!) , and second, it is even harmful because these effects lead to self-reinforcing and harmful beliefs.
I feel like “not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-exoerimentation(!)” is necessarily a claim that reading and testing code is something no one can do, which is absurd. If the output is often correct, then the means of creating it is likely useful, and you can tell if the output is correct by evaluating it in the same way you evaluate any computer program, without needing to directly evaluate the LLM itself. It should be obvious that this is a possible thing to do. Saying not to do it seems kind of like some “don’t look up” stuff.
Are you saying that it is not possible to use scientific methods to systematically and objectively compare programming tools and methods?
No, I’m saying the opposite, and I’m offended at what the author seems to be suggesting, that this should only be attempted by academics, and that programmers should only defer to them and refrain from attempting this to inform their own work and what tools will be useful to them. An absolutely insane idea given that the task of systematic evaluation and seeking greater objectivity is at the core of what programmers do. A programmer should obviously be using their experience writing and testing both typing systems to decide which is right for their project, they should not assume they are incapable of objective judgment and defer their thinking to computer science researchers who don’t directly deal with the same things they do and aren’t considering the same questions.
This was given as an example of someone falling for manipulative trickery:
A recent example was an experiment by a CloudFlare engineer at using an “AI agent” to build an auth library from scratch.
From the project repository page:
I was an AI skeptic. I thought LLMs were glorified Markov chain generators that didn’t actually understand code and couldn’t produce anything novel. I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at. And then, uh… the code actually looked pretty good. Not perfect, but I just told the AI to fix things, and it did. I was shocked.
But understanding and testing code is not (necessarily) guesswork. There is no reason to assume this person is incapable of it, and no reason to justify the idea that it should never be attempted by ordinary programmers when that is the main task of programming.
The problem, though, with responding to blog posts like that, as I did here (unfortunately), is that they aren’t made to debate or arrive at a truth, but to reinforce belief. The author is simultaneously putting himself on the record as having hardline opinions and putting himself in the position of having to defend them. Both are very effective at reinforcing those beliefs.
A very useful question to ask yourself when reading anything (fiction, non-fiction, blogs, books, whatever) is “what does the author want to believe is true?”
Because a lot of writing is just as much about the author convincing themselves as it is about them addressing the reader. …
There is no winning in a debate with somebody who is deliberately not paying attention.
This is all also a great argument against the many articles claiming that LLMs are useless for coding, in which the authors all seem to have a very strong bias. I can agree that it’s a very good idea to distrust what people are saying about how programming should be done, including mistrusting claims about how AI can and should be used for it.
We need science #
Our only recourse as a field is the same as with naturopathy: scientific studies by impartial researchers. That takes time, which means we have a responsibility to hold off as research plays out
This on the other hand is pure bullshit. Writing code is itself a process of scientific exploration; you think about what will happen, and then you test it, from different angles, to confirm or falsify your assumptions. The author seems to be saying that both evaluating correctness of LLM output and the use of Typescript is comparable to falling for homeopathy by misattributing the cause of recovering from illness. The idea that programmers should not use their own judgment or do their own experimentation, that they have no way of telling if code works or is good, to me seems like a wholesale rejection of programming as a craft. If someone is avoiding self experimentation as suggested I don’t know how they can even say that programming is something they do.
The big advantage of paper for voting is the same as the reason the naive think replacing it would be an improvement; it requires the involvement of more people processing it, actually looking at all the votes. No matter what technological protections you put in place, you can’t replace the difficulty of getting a large diverse group of people in on a conspiracy and keeping quiet, there will always be some way to cheat with a computer, which is inherently complex and opaque.
Doesn’t that game already have a “behavior score”?
I don’t recognize this actor or movie but maybe its for the best
It’s not quite the same thing as deploying soldiers against protesters, but technically all of those things are done ultimately through the use of coercive and violent force. Don’t want to go to school? Your parents will make you, because if they don’t they could be imprisoned. Slightly inconvenience drivers by walking across a busy street not at a crosswalk? Could be fined or arrested for jaywalking. Pose a hazard to rocket launches by flying a makeshift aircraft in federal airspace with no flight plan? You know the drill. That’s not to mention the funding for all those things, the violence inherent in which doesn’t stop at taxes, but also is a central factor in maintaining the value of a currency in a variety of different ways.
This kind of reminds me of that time Apple made a big show of resisting court efforts to get them to unlock iphone data; they have every reason to cultivate an impression of caring about privacy, but this isn’t actually evidence that they do. Giving them all this info about your life by holding a continual ongoing conversation about what you’re doing on their servers is inherently pretty bad for your privacy in a way reassurances can’t really fix.
There’s a lot of reasons to prefer local AI instead and this is a big one.
It’s pretty controversial but imo financial privacy from your government is important and a legitimate thing to want, especially when your government is terrible. Hopefully Russians are able to find ways to evade this.
Well it is from the youtube transcript which interprets “ninety sixty” as 960. I didn’t want to watch the video either so there’s not much point trying to proofread for accuracy and I didn’t bother, but I’ll correct that detail. If you want to watch the video and come up with your own summary, feel free. To me the important details here are that it is $350 and 16GB vram.
The thrust of this article seems to be that the important thing is that automatic transcription services be compliant with unspecified “governance standards”. It goes on to give a generally glowing review of a specific medical transcription service:
However their website seems to indicate that their privacy practices are garbage as transcriptions are implied to happen on company servers:
This seems pretty absurd to me since the technology is at the point where effective on-device transcription is a reality. Why look at whether bureaucrats have rubber stamped something instead of looking at the actual commonsense properties of who has access to the data? That could easily be the doctor and no one else. The question of what constitutes good security and privacy isn’t even something this article wants to bring up for consideration.