EliRivers

In many cases it very much is the definition of socialism.

In that case, the pattern matching was against every segfault I've ever fixed, which is a lot, and traipsing through assembly, which is also a lot. Lots of experience in tracing back to source code. So did that. Matching patterns. Didn't understand the language, don't know what it's trying to do, but I know what memory access is (because I've seen the pattern "access memory" a lot in my life) and this piece of code must be matching that pattern; whatever this code is, it must be touching memory. Now scroll up and down to look for similar code in other places, that I also cannot read but I can see when things look the same; match the pattern of pieces that work with this piece that doesn't. Oh, this looks the same but it has this extra piece; part of the pattern matches, part does not. Matching patterns. What if I copy it, paste into the bad place, apply a single change to match the symbols I see in the bad place, and see what happens... fixed.

It's not something I do every day and it's not nearly as good as actually understanding it, but the problem was solved and I did not know what the code was trying to do or how to read it.

All the above aside, surely it must be possible, because we have machines that do exactly that. They're made of statistics and patterns and they're doing it. Right in front of us. There is nothing else in there and they're doing it right now.

The fact that you have a long history in the business makes me think we're either talking about wildly different things and this is a mismatch of language and context, or you're deliberately trolling me.

It can take a good few years to get to the point that one no longer has to think and understand in a concrete language. There are whole sets of common mistakes that get made across languages and tools. I've fixed errors in Pascal, which I do not read, because the person writing it was clearly thinking in C and made a mistake in their C thinking which they then translated into Pascal. Luckily for me they used common C naming and layout for that piece so I matched the whole thing up to C patterns.

Copy paste errors are easier ones to see; cases where replicated code is clearly meant to be different in a few keys places or values, and whoever did it just missed one. Array errors are common, no matter how the array notation works in language du jour. The list goes on.

All that aside, we know it's possible because there are machines doing it right now. They are made of stats and patterns. There is nothing else in there.

Sure, but the realm of fictional problems is so huge that we just can't come up with solutions to all of them. I like watching the Terminator movies (well, the first couple) as much as the next person but I can't be spending my time imagining how we could defeat skynet.

People have fixed software bugs with zero knowledge of what the code is doing and no knowledge of the programming language at hand, purely by statistical pattern matching. Solving the problem with no understanding of it beyond the idea that whatever it was, the right answer was probably something that kind of matched the kind of patterns found in things they'd seen before.

So what does it mean, "to be able to solve your problem"?

Someone applying for a tourist visa, who recently had an immigration renewal denied, who has no life to get back to in their country of origin (because they built a life in the US) but clearly has a life in the US (owns property in the US, has family in the US, has work ties -maybe even still has a job in the US); that applicant is an enhanced overstayer risk and this increases the chances of being denied a tourist visa.

Looking like a big man in your near waters, no more than a few days away from a home port, is one achievement (and it is an achievement - many nations can't do this). Sustaining a war on the other side of a serious ocean or two is a game very few countries in the world can manage right now.

The US would look extraordinarily strong to anyone bringing a war to the US.

If every living creature on earth ended tomorrow there would be no individual realities, yet actual reality would continue.

Yet people frequently don't. This assertion and reality disagree.

That you know what that is makes you the right kind of person to be delegating it to an LLM; you can be trusted to use the LLM for this sort of thing because you understand what the problem is, what the right outcome should be, and how to know when it's been done correctly.

It's the person sitting behind you who doesn't understand any of those words who is going to do something dangerous at LLM-accelerated speed I'm concerned about.

We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat.

It never left a mark, regardless of how hard we hit it. Why don't we produce that quality anymore?

I would hazard that given the inflation adjusted price of a mid-range TV appears to have dropped about 99 percent since 1975, if we were willing to pay 100 times as much for a TV as we actually do here in the year 2026, we could have one made out of bulletproof glass too :)

I understand that somewhere is Australia is a supermarket which appears to be generating its own carrots in that it sells far more carrots than ever arrive, but is a black hole for parsnips; the store should be exploding with parsnips given the difference between amount delivered and amount sold, yet mysteriously there's just the one bin of parsnips visible.

It's a model of language, yes? Trained on a big corpus of text.

I have read a lot of stories and accounts in which people were told not to do something and inevitably they did it. Like, lots. Far more than stories and accounts in which people were told not to do something and they then didn't do it.

If I'm reading a story or account of something, and it's really hammered home that they've been told not to do something, it's kind of inevitable that they will then do that. I'm not even an LLM and I noticed that's the way these things usually go.

So is an LLM just doing what it's been trained to do? Sometimes in the stories and accounts, there's a whole lot of time and tension before the bad thing happens, but that's just part of the fun.

Do you mean, in general, as a society/culture, or are you just having an incredible run of jobs where each time that business is the problem?

This seems just plain wrong. It is not at all extremely biologically conserved.

Pregnancy and birth varies wildly across species. Not conserved. For primates, it's got problems; in humans, pregnancy is an absolute mess. The birth itself is historically one of the most dangerous things a woman can do, and remains not exactly a walk in the park even with the best of modern interventions.

I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?

Some of these houses have been transformed into being unfit for human habitation due to the damp and mould. In some cases, the botched insulation has resulted in an increase in heating costs (along with the damp and mold). Some have suffered structural damage due to the botched insulation, costing tens of thousands to repair.

And an awful lot more written by Jimmy Maher on that site.

This was always so odd to me. I used to think it was just a US weird thing but I understand it happens in many more countries as well (and maybe in my own country as well; I did go through my first degree literally two decades ago, and only at one university). When I went through my first degree, the lecturer provided the material - lectures and some handouts. Every so often there would be a reference to some book for some particular additional topic, but it was never required.

"Uh Oh" realization of what these models can do?

The code reviews was just how I first saw it, but the rot goes deeper. The "uh oh" was my realisation of how much these can damage people's professional development. These people will never get better at their job than they are right now.

A lot of what else GenAI does is great, but this is an "Uh oh" indeed.