653 karma · joined February 9, 2021
I have to wonder if Git could somehow report this better. I guess it depends on exactly how GitHub is down, but "fatal error in commit_refs" made me worry that my local repo was somehow hosed.
* You don't have experience with basic technical decision making -- e.g. why would you pick Java vs. C vs. Python vs. Go vs. any other language, and how would that decision change if you were building a web app vs. mobile app vs. embedded software?
* You don't have a familiar set of tools and established preferences for the aforementioned decisions -- i.e. if an experienced programmer is building a web app, there are probably specific languages and tools they're inclined to reach for.
* You don't know about application deployment and productionization. How do you get your project somewhere people can use it? You don't know about deploying code to servers or running it in Docker or K8s or PaaS.
* You don't have the practiced logical thought process for things like algorithm design, debugging, figuring out user bug reports, identifying edge cases, predicting user behavior, etc.
* You don't have the experience with things that experienced programmers find "obvious" -- e.g. if you're building a web app, you need an authentication system, registration flow, password reset, etc.
I think the main effort to address this will be LLM-driven low-code solutions. Imagine something like Airtable, but with an integrated LLM assistant that can make changes to your app and write code to implement business rules and automation. This gets rid of problems like choosing your tech stack, deployment, etc. and it minimizes the amount of code the LLM has to create.
I imagine this will have effects comparable to those of spreadsheet software: non-programmers will be able to build custom tools with a newfound ease and some will end up learning a lot of programming skills in the process.
And, much like with spreadsheets, these tools will end up becoming business critical in unexpected ways and will turn out to be a huge pain in the ass to maintain. They'll find that parts of their business logic don't work as expected and that they can't figure out how to prompt the LLM to get it to implement the rules the right way. The users of these tools will basically have to learn some programming anyway or they'll have to hire experienced programmers to figure the problems out for them.
Even as an LLM skeptic, I've had chat sessions with ChatGPT that felt unbelievable at the time, where it almost seemed to be generating incredibly cogent ideas and arguments all on its own. Then, after a few days, I went and reread the transcript, only to realize I'd been hinting and nudging it along much more than I consciously thought at the time. I only remembered the answers that were the most impressive and forgot about the ones that missed the mark.
ChatGPT is really good at picking out the key ideas in the prompt and responding to them. It's really easy to inadvertently nudge it to give a certain type of response, which of course makes it feel all the more astounding when it gives you exactly the type of answer you already unconsciously expect.
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/networ...
PyPI is the Python Package Index. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_Package_Index
PyPy is the Python implementation with JIT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyPy
(Yes, it is extremely confusing that there are two Python projects with homophonous, nearly-identical names.)
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA:
> The original iteration of the service was a mass collaboration platform designed for the digitization of books, particularly those that were too illegible to be scanned by computers. The verification prompts utilized pairs of words from scanned pages, with one known word used as a control for verification, and the second used to crowdsource the reading of an uncertain word.
Not to mention that malvertising is still an issue that affects even major sites. In my view, browsing the web without an ad blocker is like hooking up with strangers without using PrEP - it's just not a good idea.
From the article:
> But, the department seemed to reach a breaking point this January. In addition to the woman's defiance hitting the one-year mark, on January 11 she was involved in a car accident as a passenger. The incident clearly showed the woman was violating her self-isolation order, which put the driver at risk of infection. Additionally, the woman went to the emergency department a day later complaining of chest pain and did not tell doctors about her active tuberculosis case, putting them and other hospital staff at risk. When they did lung X-rays, they initially suspected she had cancer. But in fact, the images showed that her tuberculosis case was worsening.
> Google may argue that it relied on individual custodians to manually preserve history-off chats. But that argument should be rejected for two reasons.
> First, it is and was Google’s obligation to suspend auto-deletion policies; it is no defense to suggest that individual custodians—Google employees—owned that obligation. Samsung, 881 F. Supp. 2d at 1137 (“[I]t generally is recognized that when a company or organization has a document retention policy, it is obligated to suspend that policy . . . .”) (cleaned up) (italics added). Google designed the chat systems and document preservation policies at issue here.
> And Google elected to set the default to history off for many chats. Indeed, Google maintained the “off the record” default despite employee complaints that the default caused them to lose important conversations.19
> Second, Google cannot escape sanctions by shifting the blame to its custodians. For spoliation purposes, destruction of evidence by Google’s employees is attributable to the company. See, e.g., E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. v. Kolon Indus., Inc., 803 F. Supp. 2d 469, 506‒07 (E.D. Va. 2011) (“A party may be held responsible for the spoliation of relevant evidence done by its agents.”). Courts commonly sanction corporate litigants for the spoliation of their employees and executives. See, e.g., Borum, 332 F.R.D. at 42 (emails deleted by employee). Accordingly, Google violated its duty to preserve potentially relevant evidence on a daily basis from May 2019 through the present.
Where are all these ads, movies, and TV shows depicting non-monogamous queer relationships? How is the government providing this "top-down" support? Are there now tax breaks for people in poly relationships?
This is a vile take. It is sickening to compare liking a genre of music or wearing a certain style of dress or being queer to hating people because they're queer, not white, not male, or because they're a woman who won't have sex with you.
> The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination. It is not illegal for an employer or other covered entity to favor an older worker over a younger one, even if both workers are age 40 or older.
(Yes my previous comment was generated with ChatGPT. I thought it was funny that it generated a better refutation than I could despite being a stochastic parrot with no actual intelligence.)
It is true that ChatGPT and its variants can generate text that appears to be more than just "word salad", but this is a result of its training on large amounts of text data and the use of advanced techniques such as deep learning and transformer architectures. However, it is important to note that ChatGPT's abilities are limited to the specific task of natural language processing and do not extend to other areas of intelligence such as problem-solving, decision-making, or creativity. It can generate creative solutions but it does not have the ability to come up with something novel, it is more likely that it is recombining the information it has seen before to come up with a creative looking answer.
Therefore, while ChatGPT may be able to generate text that seems intelligent, it is not a true general intelligence and should not be mistaken for one.
Like, Netflix's UI has some annoyances, but it would be so much better if I could access all my streaming content in one central place instead of having to manage a dozen different shitty services, all with their own separate accounts, apps, watch lists, etc. and their own idiosyncratic quirks and buggy (or outright missing) features.
> Neither instance caused any psychological damage
Really now? I would consider acute fear to be, at the very least, psychologically detrimental, if not to you then to the vast majority of people. Generally, fear is not conducive to a healthy learning environment.