Supply5411

My mind is blown that someone gets so little value out of an LLM. I get over software engineering stumbling blocks much faster by interrogating an LLM's knowledge about the subject. How do you explain that added value? Are you skeptical that I am actually moving and producing things faster?

You could argue that speech is literally noise that drowns out the signals of your environment. If you just babbled, it would be useless, but instead you use it intelligently to communicate ideas. LLM output is a new palette with which humans can compose new signals. We just have to use it intelligently.

Prompt engineering is an example of this. A clever prompt by a domain expert can prime an LLM interaction to yield better information to the recipient in a way that the recipient themselves could not have produced on their own.

While not exactly the same, the invention of the printing press caused a lot of controversy with the Catholic Church. With the printing press, people could mass produce and spread information relatively easily. I'm sure a lot of it was considered "low quality" (also heretical)[1]. Seems like we're going through similar growing pains now. Yes I know it's different, but it rhymes.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum

How do you secure AWS credentials on a compromised machine?

Any solution that you build is going to be more complicated and less secure than IAM. In IAM, your workload/server can have an identity. The software running on the server is issued temporary credentials as needed, and only has access to resources linked to the role. How do you do this without identity and access management? Roll your own because IAM is too crazy?

A short term memory is an acceptable substitute for trust

Very cool. Pessimistically, I think that having a clear, understandable view of legal text so that people can navigate the law safely is against a lot of entrenched interests.

I disagree. IAM is like having a house with doors that lock. It doesn't matter how big or small your house is, you're going to want the ability to restrict who can go where and do what. It's part of basic security.

If they're not doing that, and their 1 server is talking to AWS resources, it means its using superadmin credentials. If that 1 server is compromised, can you see why that would be a bad idea?

>I'm also enjoying staying sane avoiding IAM.

This sticks out to me. IAM isn't crazy, and having access controls in place is going to be the very first thing you want to do when you bring someone else on board. Maybe you're not there yet, but it would be a wise time investment to understand how these work, to the point where they don't feel confusing.

Issue bankruptcy is real. Speaking from personal experience, at some point maintaining OSS is incompatible with living in the real world. The work is free and often thankless (but not always). The problems are complex and compete with real world responsibilities, like work, family, rest. People get pissy and regularly want to argue with you or read the docs for them. It also carries enormous responsibility if your OSS is popular.

I am anticipating a huge collapse in the OSS ecosystem as the people who drive them say "fuck it" and walk away for more important things.

Simulation 16 is hilarious. By the state dynamically scaling how much they print money in order to support government workers, government workers accumulate more wealth than the producers of goods.

Where are the bad actors who exploit the system to steal from everyone? No economic simulator is complete without this.

Edit>> It appears to be the state.

Except not in this case. Elizabeth Chloe Romanis has written dozens of articles[1] arguing for new classifications for these unborn children. This is not a person saying "we're going into uncharted territory." This is a person arguing a very clear and opinionated perspective on the classification of human beings.

>Artificial womb technology and the significance of birth: why gestatelings are not newborns (or fetuses)[2]

In this abstract[3], she argues that a new classification is needed to determine what can and can't be done with each "entity", because it will impact the freedoms of women. How does a fetus in an artificial womb impact the freedoms of a woman?

1. https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/elizabeth-c-romanis/#publicat... 2. https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/11/728 3. https://academic.oup.com/medlaw/article/28/1/93/5510054?logi...

>Even what to call the entities in these devices is fraught, says Chloe Romanis, a biolawyer at Durham Law School, UK. They’re not fetuses in the conventional sense because they are no longer in the womb, she says.

Is this an attempt to nullify all existing laws that use the word "fetus"?

From the post:

>A cloned database view is some representation of your database that has been post-processed to only contain data that the user is allowed to see. This representation would typically be in the form of a separate user-specific sqlite database file. Because the cloned database only contains data that is theirs, a user may issue any query against it, and there is no risk to data security. And if a malicious user was able to issue a DDL statement, it would only affect their cloned database.

Maybe there is a better word than "cloned database view." Replica doesn't feel quite right though.

I've written about this solution in the context of running LLM-generated SQL safely. I call it the "cloned database view" solution[1].

The author touches on 2 issues that are tangential to this problem, restricting unauthorized data, and mutations, both of which are not really easily solvable with the cloned database solution.

However, the underlying theme of skipping the API is extremely compelling. So much code, both FE and BE, are just to serve as an elaborate interface to the database. Simplifying this will be a huge gain in software maintenance. But the challenge is to do it safely.

1. https://docs.heimdallm.ai/en/main/blog/posts/safe-sql-execut...

And there are humans that can jump 8ft in the air. Doesn't mean it's correct to say that "humans can jump 8ft in the air." Very few people are regurgitating verbatim information.

I would say it's Kafkaesque, but charging money for access to the legal text seems to take it a step further.

When there's no novel natural/social/political disasters to keep everyone distracted, they run with alien stories.

AI startups have inspired me to think more about what "value creation" really is. There's so many AI startups out there that add AI to make silly process X easier, when it really hides the problem of silly process X existing in the first place. From one perspective, adding AI solves the problem. From another perspective, it further entrenches the problem. Does this create net value? AI is both inspiring and demoralizing... inspiring in that it unlocks a million new doors, but demoralizing in that most of those doors appear to be empty.

>avoid suffering for a few minutes

Not sure where you live, but where I've lived, they form camps, do drugs in the open, scream at people, and vandalize their surroundings. They make a good environment hostile to everyone. That's what most people are angry about.

>without mobile devices

But 50% of the 2FA options you listed do not require a mobile device. Security key and TOTP app. TOTP apps are free. Try authy.