Anamon

Can you explain what you think makes today's LLMs more than glorified Markov chains?

I know they're not technically Markov chains, but conceptually, it's still close enough. There's nothing revolutionarily new. No amount of loops and harness tricks is going to change that fact.

That's a problem of visibility, though. No one in management currently cares much that the delegator is actually the one 5 times less efficient in the long run (or just the one leaving the rest of the team with years of technical debt).

The exact same thing was the case with the outsourcing hype. Of course, nobody learned their lesson because those managers who messed everything up were long gone by the time the bills came due and everything broke down.

It was routine for preteen and teenage me to put any game CD or game magazine coverdisc in the Hi-Fi CD player at some point, and see if the track number indicator would show anything higher than 01. It was definitely quite common. Some that I remember are Grand Theft Auto, Carmageddon, Alone in the Dark 2, Rayman, Little Big Adventure 2, Tunnel B1, 7th Guest, The Dark Eye...

The music was made interesting by the sheer novelty of being able to listen to it that way, and get a bit of the game to enjoy even after the parents decided computer time is over =D

Corel once gave a German magazine a time-limited version of their graphics suite to put on the cover CD. You could overwrite a few .EXE files with their .BAK copies to turn it into the full version.

That issue of the magazine sold out pretty quickly once it became public knowledge. Corel issue a statement that replacing the files doesn't make it a legally licensed copy. I'm sure many people cared.

Edit: here's an article about it from that time. It was PC Direkt issue 5/2001. https://www.golem.de/0104/13530.html

Yes, our first family PC was a 386 that we could slow down from 33 to 16 MHz with the Turbo button. It even had the segment display to show the current clock rate.

I knew what it was for and had some old games that ran too fast, but from what I remember, in most cases 16 MHz was still much too fast, so I didn't use the button much.

I think it was no problem to switch Turbo mode on and off in the middle of running software.

Just a regular reminder that cookie banners are not mandatory. In most cases, they are a case of malicious compliance. The choice is between (a) not doing shady stuff with people's information, or (b) having to tell people about the shady stuff you do with their information. That almost every website chose to go with (b) seems to be a problem that goes beyond the EU regulation.

That's exactly how I see it. And 99% of LLM-generated comments are just that: annoyingly wordy repetitions of what's already in the code. Just redundant noise that is a waste of time to read. Usually because the LLM has no concept of the information that might actually be helpful in a comment.

The same goes for LLM PR descriptions and documentation. Those spaces were meant for additional information not already in the code, not superfluous prose.

Depends on the corporate environment. Refusing to look at oversized PRs makes good business sense, there's an argument to be made that working like this sabotages the quality of the product.

Neither were. They're also broken on Firefox for Android, because they're both displayed immediately and permanently.

Not tongue in cheek, but called that to distinguish it from ROM BASIC. AFAIK, Advanced BASIC had to be loaded from the DOS disk and mostly added disk management and graphics features.

Hidden side channel inputs for compilation? You lost me there.

It's vibecoders all the way down. I'm sure Anthropic et al. would like to reduce their resource waste if they could, seeing the insane amounts of money they're bleeding. But I had to come to the conclusion that these LLM companies have not a single developer good enough to implement a decent scraper. Their tools produce garbage code and they don't know enough about programming to realise it, or do anything about it.

One of the problems with this is that documentation is increasingly also written with LLMs by the vendors, and now is often so vague and riddled with errors to be basically unusable, if not counterproductive by sending you the wrong way.

Microsoft has a great racket going on there. Vibecode shitty, unreliable services, offer wrong information in the slop documentation, then charge an arm and a leg for premium support which, in many cases, will just be an employee regurgitating more wrong AI slop information to you.

A more benevolent interpretation might be that they, too, see that this AI bubble will crash on the near future, and they'd be sitting on expensively built-out capacity that they don't need.

My guess is that most of these ads are run from hacked accounts and/or paid for with stolen credit cards.

"I just know it gives you really, really bad diarrhea." -- "As opposed to really, really good diarrhea?"

(Bob's Burgers)

Did the goalposts move? I thought the discussion was about restaurants being required to declare allergens, not that they have to be able to accomodate every allergy under the sun and be able to offer a meal for everyone. I don't think that's the law anywhere, either. It's a perfectly fine response to say, sorry, all our ice cream is made with milk so I can't offer you an alternative. It's only about requiring them to be able to answer the question.

I don't see how it's such a big barrier to business for a food place to have to make sure their staff can answer the question "do you use ingredient X in dish Y?", which, at least in Europe, is sufficient. It's barely a step above asking them to know if the ingredients they use are even safe for consumption, and I'm all for that barrier being held up.

> People aren’t dropping dead from not being catered for their allergies.

They literally are, though.

Restaurants have a choice of refusing service to people with allergies (not allowed in many places; not a great idea anywhere), allowing those with restrictions to bring their own food, or just putting the bloody 2-minute effort of writing on the menu which ingredients they use.

Yes, people have died from restaurants doing the last option improperly.

You mention further down that you're in academia, and with that knowledge this post makes some kind of sense to me. I used to do academic research. Like you, I almost only worked on my own code and nobody else worked on mine. I also knew I wouldn't have to maintain, usually not even expand it, so I worked accordingly.

None if this holds for programming in business, and this is why you keep hearing people saying that the output of coding agents suck. It does! I won't accept the insinuation that people just dismissed it. I use frontier models daily and try to keep up with best practices. Even under the best circumstances, it still sucks, but you learn to apply it only in places where the suckiness matters less and you can mitigate it.

It's been disclaimed so many times that it's a tired trope already, but no, this is in no way comparable to compilers! Compilers relieve you of a tedious layer of deterministic (!) machine translation. It's offloading drudgery and busywork. What agentic coding is offloading is concept and understanding. Not even remotely the same ballpark! One is using a calculator when doing the maths for the structural engineering of a new bridge. Saves time, is more reliable, gives deterministic results based on the inputs of the engineers. The other is having an intern look up some numbers of how it was done for other bridges. It's unreliable, risks missing context, has an unacceptable error rate, nobody knows how to check the numbers because nobody knows how the heck they were jumbled together, and nobody wants to be responsible when the bridge inevitably collapses. How can anyone get the idea to even try to equate the two?

LLMs don't understand a damn thing. They can't. They're not built to.

An LLM doesn't "understand" its own slop. It can use that slop as further input for generating more slop on top of it, but at no point of the process does anything like a concept or understanding come in.

It's not just about the digital readiness. I assume it's the same in Germany, but in Switzerland there are many smaller stores that very proudly only accept cash, or even used to accept cards and stopped. Some shops around where I live even put signs like "cash only, always and forever", to get people to stop asking. It's an interesting divide happening, some going cashless only for speed, safety and convenience, others going cash only for fairness and sovereignty.

German dubs used to be great in the 80s and 90s. Check some TV shows from that time to see what I mean. They used to take care that the voice fit the actual situation, mood, and character. There were many good dubbing voice actors who sometimes became famous in their own right.

I'm not sure why, but something changed in the late 90s, early 00s. Suddenly, all the voice actors started shouting all their lines, and seemed obsessed with extra weird or supposedly funny enunciation. No relation to what's happening on screen.

Dubbing seems to be a lost art.

It's also related to having a social healthcare system. People who keep stepping into traffic and get run over really rack up the hospital bills which, ultimately, are paid by everyone. So the country decided that they need to adopt some measures to keep stupid people from getting hurt.

I love that. It's part of what's hilariously called the "Beamtendreisatz" (roughly, the three rules of public servants)

1. Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht (that's how we've always done it)

2. Das haben wir noch nie so gemacht (we have never done it like that)

3. Da könnte ja jeder kommen (then everyone would try it)

They're so German that they're very difficult to faithfully translate. Just imagine a grumpy older guy looking for every excuse not to do what you want him to.

My experience living and travelling in Europe was that this is definitely true for TripAdvisor, but much less so for Yelp. Mostly tourist traps (that you'd find anyway) on TripAdvisor, while I found some amazing, hidden, non-touristy (think no printed menus, just staff that explains the day's dishes in the local language) restaurants on Yelp.

I concluded that Yelp is used more by locals, but maybe the people using it just align with my tastes better.

Yeah, just doing some basic maths in my head when I'm eating out -- cost of ingredients, salaries, rent, taxes, ... -- I wonder how any restaurant can even turn a profit at all, even with meal prices as high as they are.

Except maybe for the hyped influencer places which always have a queue. But which, unfortunately, also almost always serve terrible food with terrible service (hygiene...).

You don't open a restaurant to become rich... or to have the easy life. The owner of one of my favourite "mom & pop" takeout places once told me that even though they're only open for 6 hours a day on weekdays, with all the shopping, cleaning, preparation, paperwork etc. he's still working six and a half days a week (he's the only chef).

A Japanese former co-worker of mine once said the best sushi in the world is served in Vancouver BC :)

It's explained in the readme. Granting access to folders on the file system is a process independent from permissions.

This is from the Android documentation[1]:

"Because the user is involved in selecting the files or directories that your app can access, this mechanism doesn't require any system permissions […]"

[1] https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/d...

They're not great for accessibility, either.