DanHulton

That which is presented without evidence can be discarded without evidence.

Thus, no we don't.

Oh my god that's great, thank you for pointing this out!

Not infected. Maybe the story updated after you first read it.

One small thing we can all calm down about. =)

That sucks if that's your experience, but it's not the universal, or even the common, experience.

For reference, I get a sore-ish shoulder the next day, and that's it. Also for reference, when I got Actual Covid, I was knocked on my ass for almost two weeks. So for me, at least, the choice is easy.

This is incorrect for a lot of reasons, many of which have already been explored, but also:

> with every new iteration of the AI, the internal code will get better

This is a claim that requires proof; it cannot just be asserted as fact. Especially because there's a silent "appreciably" hidden in there between "get" and "better" which has been less and less apparent with each new model. In fact, it more and more looks like "Moore's law for AI" is dead or dying, and we're approaching an upper limit where we'll need to find ways to be properly productive with models only effectively as good as what we already have!

Additionally, there's a relevant adage in computer science: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." If the code being written is already at the frontier capabilities of these models, how the hell are they supposed to fix the bugs that crop up, especially if we can't rely on them getting twice as smart? ("They won't write the bugs in the first place" is not a realistic answer, btw.)

I forget where I read it originally, but I strongly feel that AWS should offer a `us-chaos-1` region, where every 3-4 days, one or two services blow up. Host your staging stack there and you build real resiliency over time.

(The counter joke is, of course, "but that's `us-east-1` already! But I mean deliberately and frequently.)

It may be a bad metric, if you're being proscriptive, but it's a great heuristic. If I see a 500-line function where I'm not expecting one, I'm going to pay a lot more attention to it in the PR to try to figure out just why it isn't shorter.

The thing about this, though - cars have been built before. We understand what's necessary to get those 9s. I'm sure there were some new problems that had to be solved along the way, but fundamentally, "build good car" is known to be achievable, so the process of "adding 9s" there makes sense.

But this method of AI is still pretty new, and we don't know it's upper limits. It may be that there are no more 9s to add, or that any more 9s cost prohibitively more. We might be effectively stuck at 91.25626726...% forever.

Not to be a doomer, but I DO think that anyone who is significantly invested in AI really has to have a plan in case that ends up being true. We can't just keep on saying "they'll get there some day" and acting as if it's true. (I mean you can, just not without consequences.)

You're still thinking too small. Think back to the heady days of intense Java popularity and strain your brain to remember your Gang Of Four...

What's better than a Factory?

A FactoryFactory!

Why order a burrito that is made in a truck, when you can order a BurritoFactory that is constructed en route to you, to your exact specifications, and from then on, will make you endless burritos from the comfort of your own home?!?

This is a well-written report, but... Does anyone NOT know this? I've deleted all my social media and actively try to limit my news ingestion and none of this, not the facts nor the conclusions, was novel to me.

I honestly don't think the problem is that people don't know, it's that a) nobody's doing anything to stop it (at least not very effectively) and b) a whole lot of people are doing their utmost to support it.

As an FYI, I had a similar issue and tried a whole lot of things, including different mechanical keyboards, with which I had a variety of successes and failures.

But ultimately what REALLY helped was going to physiotherapy and identifying muscle groups in my back that were weak, causing me to sit weird and support my arms with muscles in my shoulders that weren't designed for that. And because all of this is connected in weird ways, the pain I was feeling in my wrists originated way back in over-stressing those shoulder muscles.

After a few weeks of an exercise program designed to target those muscles, all my RSI pains aren't just reduced, which was the sum total of the results I got from different mechanical keyboards, they were GONE. Plus, I had the added benefit of naturally sitting and walking "better" and feeling better about it.

So if you've tried different mechanical keyboards with only limited degrees of success (or have a fave keyboard you don't want to have to switch from), consider an exercise program designed to improve your posture! It is literally the single biggest thing I've done in the past year to make me feel significantly better, and not just in the case of the RSI!

And if you want to get the same "we serve the code directly" benefit as well, you can set up an npm proxy and require its use. That way you're getting a very specific version, and downloading that version from a location you control.

(And then for the ultimate level of "slow your project to a crawl, but hey at least it's really secure", you can only allow versions that pass an internal security review to be added to the proxy and disable automatic fetching of un-cached versions. Ain't no sneaky code getting in unawares there!)

I, too, am still rocking the 13 mini, which they made good enough that nothing they've made since has made me wish to upgrade, though the fact that every phone since is Too Damn Big has made me happy I haven't yet.

We've got about three years left before these things are unsupported. Three years of hope for them to release _something_ a little smaller than "uncomfortably large."

Alternatively, it could have been over long ago with a lot less loss of life, if Ukraine had been supported more full-throatedly, instead of allowing to drag on as it has.

Sometimes you gotta rip that bandaid off.

I've begun to hate the term "democratizing."

In fact, I now tend to see it as a strong shibboleth from people who don't actually value the thing being "democratized" - computing, art, music, and who think in terms of "barrier to entry" instead of terms of understanding and appreciating.

In the end, this bizarre drive just ends up cheapening our enjoyment and interactions. We get shallow music, soulless art, and miserable computer programs, because there's no active intelligence involved in their creation that truly understands what's being created.

Don't forget gaming back in the day! Facebook games started taking off, then Facebook decided that the _only_ way you could get paid on the Facebook platform was with Facebook Credits, and to incentivize Facebook as the gaming platform of choice, Facebook would give out free Credits to players to spend on Facebook games. Of course, if your game was the one they chose to spend those Credits on, you wouldn't actually get paid, not with promotional credits, what, are you crazy?

No, I'm not still bitter from that era, why do you ask?

That battle was long-ago lost when the leading LLM companies and organizations insisted on referring to their products and models solely as "AI", not the more-specific "LLMs". Implementers of that technology followed suit, and that's just what it means now.

You can't blame the New Yorker for using the term in its modern, common parlance.

Objects should also stop having always-on blue LEDs for power indication or whatever. When I turn off the lights at night, my living room basically stays the same luminescence, because of the wash of blue LED light from every stupid little gadget that is desperate for me to know at all times that it has power.

> 99% of programming is repetitive plumbing

Even IF that were true (and I'd argue that it is NOT, and it's people who believe that and act that way who produce the tangled messes of spiderweb code that are utterly opaque to public searches and AI analysis -- the supposed "1%"), if even as low as 1% of the code I interacted with was the kind of code that required really deep thought and analysis, it could easily balloon to take up as much time as the other "99%".

Oh, and Ned Ludd was right, by the way. Weavers WERE replaced by the powered loom. It is in the interest of capital to replace you if they are able to, not to complement you, and furthermore, the teeth of capital have gotten sharper over time, and its appetite more voracious.

It's perfectly reasonable for critics of powered flight to point out that steam engines will never be truly useful for the job if that's the only kind of attempts at powered flight that anyone's shown, and they've been claiming that steam engines WILL actually get good enough, just you wait and see!

Of course we can't predict rapid introductions of heretofore-unknown technology, but that doesn't mean that every scam artist and huckster should get a free pass because there MIGHT be a shiny new technology just about to be discovered that will retroactively make their wild claims sound prescient.

Unless you are yourself a robber baron the likes of Zuck, you should look up this little concept called "class solidarity."

> The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.

Oh, is it now? So you know for a fact that intelligence comes from token prediction, do you, Mark?

Look, multi-bit screwdrivers have been improving steadily as well. I've got one that stores all it's bits in the handle, and one with over three dozen bits in a handy carrying case! But they're never going to suddenly, magically become an ur-tool, capable of handling any task. They're just going to get better and better as screwdrivers.

(Well, they make a handy hammer in a pinch, but that's using them off-spec. The analogy probably fits here, too, though.)

My POINT, to be crystal clear, is that Mark is saying that A is getting better, so eventually it will turn into B. It's ludicrous on its face, and he deserves the ridicule he's getting in the comments here.

But I also want to go one step further and maybe turn the mirror around a bit. There's also an odd tendency here to do a very similar thing: to observe critical limitations that LLM tools have, that they have always have, and that are very likely baked into the technology and science powering these tools, and then to do the same thing as Mark, to just wave our hands, and say "But I'm sure they'll figure it out/fix it/perfect it soon."

I dunno, I don't see it. I think we're all holding incredible screwdrivers here, which are very impressive. Some people are using them to drive nails, which, okay, sure. But acting like a screwdriver will suddenly turn into precision calipers (and a saw, and a level, and...) if we just keep adding on more bits, I think that's just silly.

Poor developers use tools poorly, film at 11.

But seriously, yeah, every time I see a complaint about ORMs, I have to wonder if they ever wrote code on an "average team" that had some poor developers on it that didn't use ORMs. The problems, as you describe them, inevitably are worse.

Imagine using this defence with regards to airline crashes. "The crashes happen by accident not by intent" would be a clearly ludicrous defence, as it ought to be here as well.

If we were serious about preventing these kinds of things from happening, we could.

We really need to get used to treating PII as poison, storing as little of it as possible, and getting rid of it as soon as we're done with it.

Oh it's not pockets. I just have tiny raccoon paws for hands.

I like being able to reach across the keyboard one-handed (to shift, etc) and I can't do that on modern, larger phones.

It doesn't have to be a lawsuit preventing them from leaving. Golden handcuffs usually work pretty well for such a situation.

I used to defend tabs for this reason, except I kept running into source code formatters/displays online that would attempt to display my code with the tabstop set to 8 spaces, which made it nigh-unreadable.

While I run into fewer that do this nowadays, it still reminds me that with tabs, What I Write May Not Be What You See, which can lead to readability issues, which I feel is a solid enough point against tabs that I've switched.

I write code so it is easy to read, and spaces are better for that than tabs, so now I use tabs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And it's not about those people. It's "Master Foo and the Script Kiddie", not "Master Foo and the Professional Red-Teamer".

It's about a fictional archetype, and the story isn't meant to be taken literally, it's illustrative for the sake of a lesson.

Well, typically, they start with safer cities, something that's out of the purview if the MTA.