antonvs

If you’re not gaming, what do you need a mouse for?

Some window managers let you configure that. Tiling WMs in particular are better for that kind of thing, IMO.

I don’t think the “desktop metaphor” is particularly important or useful. It seems more like a gimmick to help people who’ve never used a computer before have something concrete to cling to. If you take away the desktop, tiling WMs are a natural place to end up. (Not that you can’t have a desktop with icons etc. in a tiling WM, but it loses a lot of its significance and isn’t really needed.)

My unsubstantiated theory is that it’s due to large amounts of human slop in the training data: marketing blurbs, slide decks, motivational writing, copy designed to sell ad impressions, posts on LinkedIn, and so on. This style is what you get when you pile all that slop together and stir vigorously, i.e. when you train a model on it.

Sentences like the one you quoted seem to be deliberately attempting to create a hook that’s supposed to lure the reader into reading further to find out what, in this case, “that decides”. But when that deliberately manipulative style is jammed into every other sentence, the result is terrible.

It’s a true statement. The way you perceive it is in your mind, not a property of the statement itself.

That could make sense in the military. It could make sense for an offshore IT org whose role is to provide warm-bodied yes-men, or similar situations. But it’s catastrophic for a creative organization that’s actually doing anything other than CRUD apps or something equally mechanical, because it means management can’t possibly understand the systems that the company’s income depends on, which means they can’t possibly manage effectively.

Right, this is not even table stakes, it’s the whole point of a post-mortem.

When you have a bug in a program, you fix it. This is just a variation of that incredibly obvious “advice” applied at a slightly different level.

It had absolutely nothing to do with trust. People still worried about the security of their databases. Businesses understood perfectly well that their electronic records were just as sensitive as their paper ones. But the server closet had a lock on the door, and no wire connecting it to a global network of mostly scammers. It was just as secure as the paper records.

Something like 290 people have visited the ISS. If they all answered the survey and if the survey size was around 2900, then the 10% figure would be correct.

CGI already did that. It turned out… ok

What do you believe doesn’t reflect positively on the authors of that open letter? It raises valid concerns, and the statement you quoted is a factual observation.

That’s not a reasonable position to hold, unless and until Flock does much, much more when it comes to safeguards against abuse.

I can understand being pro-surveillance, but Flock is a case study in how not to implement surveillance systems. Believing that surveillance can be a public good can’t somehow turn Flock into a public good. It’s not.

> Types are properties of values, not variables.

In computer science, specifically programming language theory, types are properties of terms (syntactic expressions). It wouldn’t be possible in general to typecheck a program before running it if you had to have a value before you could discover its type.

Getting access to the weights for an OpenAI or Anthropic model could be payment enough.

I had an account banned simply for pointing out that there was a spare seat in that orbiting sports car, and implying that Musk would be a good choice of passenger.

It made me wonder how unlikely or impossible an event has to be before it would no longer be considered a real threat by whoever or whatever flags posts like that. Firing billionaires into the Sun? Hmm, probably too close to home. Sending them light years away to fire them into a black hole?

It might be regional? I haven't noticed it in the northeastern US, or in the multinational company I work at, where I talk regularly with people from at least 10 countries.

The point is that in saying "I bought a car", you're not attempting to specify which specific car you bought. The fact that you obviously did buy a specific car isn't relevant to the grammar of this.

If the audience already has some context about which specific car you were going to buy, then you could say "I bought the car yesterday." In that case you're referring to a specific car that the audience is expected to already be familiar with.

I think some of the confusion over this seems to be coming from attempting to apply knowledge that you have to a sentence when the audience wouldn't have that knowledge.

AI doesn’t kill people, people kill people.

The 260 character limit is just a Windows problem. See my other comment in this subthread for a summary of the eldritch horror in question. The tl;dr is that backwards compatibility is a helluva drug.

It’s a Windows problem. There’s still, to this day, a 259-character limit on path length in the Win32 API unless the OS has been configured to support long paths and the application uses the correct subset of Windows APIs. For example if you use ‘CreateFileA’, you’re stuck with the limit no matter what.

There’s no problem with Python in general. The registry value LongPathsEnabled, which is probably the one you were asked to set, affects the entire Windows system.

However, there’s also an older workaround that allows programs to use “extended paths” even if that setting is off, by prefixing path strings with “\\?\”. So applications using that workaround can use long paths no matter how Windows is configured. But Python doesn’t use the workaround, it uses the modern APIs and if you want long paths, you need to configure the underlying Windows system to enable it.

> Mining probably also plays a decent role.

In the Johannesburg area in South Africa, gold mining has produced up to half of all gold ever extracted in the world, with mines reaching depths of 4000m.

This has resulted in frequent seismic events, in the 2.0 to 3.0 range on the Richter scale, occurring on a daily or weekly basis, more occasionally reaching 5.0. This started around 1906 and still continues today. See:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S167477551...

“Pro-social” is a strange way to describe something that’s actively contributing to the death of our civilization.

> Also if I'm the guy receiving a security report and it's AI generated and poorly formatted, I'm failing you short of producing something for a human to parse. Simple as that.

It’s clear that you’ve never worked for a compliance company and probably have never been involved in a compliance project. As such, you don’t have the context needed to participate usefully in this discussion.

The term “hallucination” is a projection of inappropriate expectations onto a program. We know that LLMs are not “truth machines,” but we really want them to be. So when they produce a result that happens not to match external reality - which, it should be noted, LLMs don’t generally have access to - we call it an hallucination.

“Bugs” are completely different. With bugs, we have a clear specification and we have a program that’s supposed to meet that specification. If it doesn’t, we say the program has bugs, and if it’s important enough we can change the program to eliminate the bugs.

You can try to apply similar logic to LLMs, but you’d be making a category error, and you’ll fail to get the results you want in general. It’s not the same thing at all.

If anything, the concept of an LLM hallucination is a bug in human understanding of LLMs.

It's gotten to the point where I assume "product manager" is a synonym for "incompetent person who breaks working products."

Yes, I think it can be a sign of a very deep difference. When they say "spend time learning AI," they mean work through some teaching materials to learn how to replicate what others are doing. This often doesn't result in a deep understanding, but it can be enough to allow them to do their job.

Ironically, people with this mindset will sometimes ask people who they recognize as having strong skills to share their magic secret, which is assumed to be some books they read, videos they watched, courses they attended, etc. If you tell them that experimenting, playing around, etc. is a key element, they may assume you're just selfishly hoarding your fount of knowledge.

It’s hard to find good new literature - it may be out there, but it’s hard to find. But there’s lifetimes worth of good older literature, that’s much easier to find, that you haven’t read yet.

I used an LLM a year or more ago to generate a description of our SDLC for a compliance certification. Perfect application of LLMs IMO. Do you want to die on that hill as well?

A lot of documentation generated in corporations has marginal real value.

> If your commands are bulleted instead of numbered and code blocked, it's wrong.

That’s easy to instruct an agent to do. Put it in a skill.

> If you didn't crawl through the playbook, it's immoral to hand that to me, you're wasting my time with untested slop.

Using an AI doesn’t absolve the user of their responsibilities. This is an easy problem to solve, just make sure teams know what’s expected of them and encourage everyone to push back (professionally) against offenders.

That comparison isn’t automatically valid, because the criteria for what makes acceptable code are very different than for natural language prose.

It’s perfectly possible to consider e.g. working, LLM generated, human approved code acceptable, while considering LLM writing that hasn’t undergone major human editing unacceptable because of its repetitious, formulaic, marketing-oriented style - a criticism that doesn’t even make sense for LLM generated code.

Yup.

Somewhat amazingly, John Stuart Mill addressed this as long ago as 1869 - a full hundred years before The Personal Is Political, in his essay The Subjection of Women:

> “But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? ... Those who enjoy the benefit of an institution or a social arrangement, have a strong interest in believing that it is just; and they are rarely slow in finding arguments to convince themselves of what they wish to believe."

I take it you’ve never used a modern agent.