jknoepfler

Let's just pause for a second and steep in the irony of "we're all in on AI, except where there are visible consequences."

The same problems that bedevil AI-written PRs here bedevil AI-written PRs at my place of work.

I'm sure it'll get better eventually, maybe, but something something Pareto principle.

were you able to block Elon?

They would have to ban Elon from his own platform. I wonder why that didn't fly. Anyone who worked for that absolute pustule of a human will have to go somewhere else to earn respect, sorry.

I'm 100% confident it's real but I have no expertise on the subject. Checkmate, Atheists.

As engineers we know that you can't catch everything. You build resilient systems by learning from your failures and investing/iterating in better practices over time. If you want to find out how to sabotage your company really quickly, just throw a bunch of politically radicalized interns with stupid red hats at your testing, QA, dev/ops, security, customer success (+etc) procedures, slash budgets, randomly, delete test suites and see where you land. Then when things go wrong, make sure your defense is "well we don't know they would have caught anything anyway."

The cuts were actual. There's no sense in calling something that is a matter of open public record which has been widely reported on "alleged."

I understand MAGA types like to fall over themselves to evade responsibility for their actions, because they think truth is a shell game and reality has no meaningful consequences if you deny them loudly enough (see: deaths due to science denialism during the covid response and shilling of bro-science alternative medicine, upsurge in preventable illnesses like measles due to vaccine denialism, brain drain from the insane gutting of public research funding institutions and cynical re-alignment of said institutions around corporations that donated to the presidency, drastic consequences of global warming, consequences of 2A zealotry in the form of school and other mass shootings... and so on and so forth).

The hard reality is that we've been trying to get a handle on food safety for over a century. It is incredibly laborious, difficult work that requires knowledge of the many and various ways contaminants make it into the food supply, how food producers like Taylor Farms obfuscate or lie to avoid legal liability or costly regulation, and knowledge of the law and how to shape and administer it effectively. If you slash regulatory agencies that have emerged over decades to own and shepherd this work, you're going to have to own up to a lot of nasty shit over the next few decades.

In my state, water pollution was so bad in the 70s and 80s you couldn't swim in major lakes and streams. Now you can. We got there through sustained public investment in regulation and oversight. We need more of that, not less.

What in the hell is that supposed to mean? 7 members of the security team of a mega corporation cooperated in a sustained, coordinated, criminal campaign to intimidate journalists critical of eBay.

The journalists, well within their rights, went to the law.

The state brought criminal charges against the 7 employees, and they served/are serving time.

The journalists further brought a civil complaint, and were compensated handsomely.

It is falsifiable, in the sense that we have ample evidence of the many forms of life that have existed on earth... including fossil evidence, genetic evidence, preserved tissue samples and a long litany of other pieces of data broadly consilient with our understanding the biological timeline.

On the other hand, we have zero evidence of Silurians or whatever.

Those two observations are inconsistent and require explanation.

Sure, one can hedge and qualify and excuse or whatever, and on pain of irrationality we have to allow that it's possible we're missing evidence of one of a bajillion possible competing hypotheses about intelligent life... but the theory most consistent with the evidence we have is that there wasn't any.

That's falsifiable enough for me?

The criterion of falsifiability pushed by positivists is kind of crappy anyway, it doesn't speak well to how we build models of the world while doing actual empirical work (and is itself non-falsifiable), but in practical terms idk, I don't see much to recommend the Silurian Hypothesis over the null hypothesis, so to speak.

The history of mathematics is tightly coupled to spirituality... some more famous examples off the top of my head are Cantor, Euclid, and Euler, but there are probably hundreds of examples of folks who explicitly tied their faith to their research.

I definitely don't think there's anything inconsistent with mathematical and theological thinking. That actually strikes me as a very strange idea?

Put yourself in the role of a consumer for a second.

As a consumer, I don't give a shit. I use my driver's license to apply to jobs, my passport to fly, and a password (with 2FA depending on how much I / my employer cares) for everything else. I prefer whatever I use for 2FA to not be device-bound, because that's obnoxious, error-prone and constraining.

As a consumer, I don't see any reason for my auth to be more complicated than that.

I do not want my identity to be device-bound. I want it to be me-bound.

If someone has written that in a paper or article they've ingested, as they no doubt have, then sure.

> "superficially superior code"

Can you unpack that a bit? It produces measurably, meaningfully inferior code everywhere I see it in use.

> "leadership encourages this because from what they can tell, there is no downside"

As said 'leadership' I find this a bit puzzling. I'm seeing strong, quantifiable evidence of increasing churn, increasing incident count, and length of downtime from the date of our biggest push into GenAI, and I'm organizing efforts on my teams to mitigate those issues and actively reduce GenAI adoption.

If you mean my c-suite, you're mostly correct although they are already rumbling about seeing zero or negative ROI on GenAI investments.

> Anyone not using LLMs all day is just not going to be as prolific

Agreed, but prolific != productive.

The capital required to train Qwen at scale is enormous. The capital required to patch a linux distro is near zero. Any scale model coming out of China should be viewed as advancing a geopolitical agenda. The same skepticism should be applied to any model trained in the states, but that should be viewed through the lens of short-term business profits.

There are earnest nerds everywhere, in every society. No doubt. But "Chinese AI Labs" operate at the whim of the Chinese government, in the same way "American AI Labs" operate at the whim of billionaire investors. Inferring good will from either is naive at best at this scale.

Refusal to consider evidence to the contrary is certainly symptomatic of something, and it isn't a well-reasoned argument. "Us" sounds like the corporate leadership I work with that have actively pushed teams to incur mountains to tech debt. I was walking over org metrics this week and sure enough, there's a rising tide of unplanned work for bugs, performance problems, and security snafus introduced during an aggressive push into GenAI with pressure to "just make agents do it."

All of which was, of course, predicted by management, reported upwards, and ignored.

That right there is the mentality that is going to drive me into a hole. Engineers are already grumpy enough dealing with asinine human bullshit that doesn't translate into reality. Seeing blatant slop judged by blatant slop (and it is, in this case, extremely blatant on both ends) and then saying "geez if you're criticising this you must be butt-hurt, move on" is so mind-blowingly frustrating. Like you can't even start to reason with someone like that. Yes, the author of the comments clearly believes other submissions made sense and engaged in good faith with the competition parameters, and that those deserve to win. Are we stupid?

We tried! In good faith! We put a lot of time into articulating ourselves clearly! We even pretended to be nice, reminding ourselves to be charitable and that we might be missing something! And like... it's normal every once in awhile for someone to opine dumbly, but when it's all the time and the perpetrators are people who just do not care that they are spewing glorified Bayes-slop into the universe and then being rewarded for it by people who both can't tell the difference and don't understand why that's a problem... we all get really tired, really quickly, and we want to disengage.

Personally I have zero tolerance for this kind of lazy-ass approach to reality. I'm seeing it increasingly at work. I'm seeing it increasingly in corpo sludge. I'm seeing it increasingly in social interactions. I'm seeing it explode on social media. I want to engage in life-affirming activities with people who have actual minds that they cultivate and use. I will not waste precious time and attention on communities that tolerate slop. If you want me to care, communicate with me in good faith. I don't think we should be kind or forgiving about it. Kaggle got exactly one strike on this, now they're dead to me forever. Same with open source contributors. Same with content creators. Out of basic ethics I need to give multiple strikes to employees who report to me (and hold myself accountable for their actions first), but exactly one strike for leadership above. Trust is precious. We need to hold one another accountable. If that burns some bridges so be it. Enough is enough and we do in fact know better.

I mean sure... but I vote for education tax levies whenever they come up and choose to live somewhere where they pass. I wouldn't call my emotions about it negative.

Having learned math in an accelerated program that banned calculators, my experience has been that they do substantially diminish mathematical learning. They are useful for things like building an intuition about the behavior of functions... but ask a student to manually graph and compare the behavior of some fairly trivial functions ( ln x, 1/x, sqrt x, x^3 ) over the interval [0, 1] and you'll pretty quickly see the difference between kids who are trained to think for themselves and kids who aren't.

The ability to engage with math "critically" is fundamental to being able to use it constructively/creatively.

I think we're seeing the impact of LLMs more broadly in the drastic decline in incoming freshman academic competency levels, and will continue to observe people becoming measurably, meaningfully stupider until we clamp down on / outright ban LLM usage in education.

Of all the things a 250 year-old federal government serving hundreds of millions of people across the entire spectrum of services should be run like, "a start-up" is pretty close to the bottom of the list.

I'm impressed we managed to arrive on an idea more detached from the fundamentals of public governance and less worthy of trust than running government "as a business." It takes real, concerted effort to be that thoughtless and shallow.

Are we restricting this to businesses, or is the genocide of the Uyghurs fair game?

Note that every single person telling you to not learn to code currently knows how to code, often at an expert level, and is therefore capable of reasoning about code.

I learned to build such useless things as operating systems, databases and neural nets from scratch. That knowledge is foundational to my ability today to lead technical teams effectively, even in the era of copilot.

I would absolutely not hire an engineer who could not code. Don't get me wrong, I don't need code monkeys any more than I need assembly experts.

I need engineers who have experience building, tuning and maintaining complex software.

Someone who can't code can't crack open what they're working on and reason about it in a meaningful way. That's a huge liability. Also like... they just haven't ever done that work before. I don't even know if they're going to be capable of it.

I did some consulting a few years ago to convert startup codebases from Ruby on Rails to something that "would scale". Some of the projects I opened up were beyond comical. Millions and millions of dollars of investor capital burned torturing cut-rate junior engineers to get them to make a product-shaped solutions that could not be maintained, could not be scaled, could not be modified without everything breaking... entire teams of cheerful idiots who were replaceable with a single capable senior engineer who knew what they were actually doing. It was just tragic. Literal futures burned up as friction with reality, because neither the founder nor their engineers could write actual code to build clean, scalable systems without tripping over their own feet.

You're signing future engineers up to be those utterly lackluster juniors for the rest of their lives. Stay in school kids. Learn to code.

Yes, but have you considered the performance of a few lucky outliers? Catch 'em fast before they regress to the mean!

Ick. Stop.

Ease off the adderall bud.

There's a lot of sloppy thinking in that post, starting with the pseudo-scientific framing in terms of evolutionary psychology... which is ironic given then ScIeNcE-bro tone... couched against an artificial and incorrect taxonomy of reason into "philosophical, logical and scientific"... in reality those are intersecting at times, orthogonal at others, and the devil is generally in the details... but it certainly doesn't make sense to impose some kind of juvenile "batman vs superman" power scaling hierarchy on top of them...

The reduction of the results of an argument to a binary win/loss between two people is probably the most humorously absurd bit. There are many outcomes of an argument. Sometimes it pivots research in a fruitful direction. Sometimes it leads to compromise. Sometimes parties talk past one another. Sometimes it serves to create an artifact for later analysis/reflection. Sometimes it causes us to pause and re-evaluate before acting. Sometimes it plants a seed that bears fruit later. Sometimes it strengthens both parties by refining their respective views. Sometimes it wastes everyone's time and nothing valuable comes of it.

Pursuit of knowledge or aligning action to truth isn't an arm-wrestling contest with winner-takes-all outcomes. That's just a silly framing that doesn't reflect reality, it's the kind of way you see the world of you aren't actually part of knowledge production and consume "debates" as influencer-slop from Ben Shapiro types.

I argue with people all the time. At work, with friends. It's generally a form of productive commerce. I see things one way and have knowledge/strengths that I bring to bear through my perspective. Others have their own knowledge/strengths. Working together, we might build a scalable data system, prioritize a road map, design a better game, make food decisions at a restaurant, have an enlightening political conversation, improve a speedrun. Whatever, the ends are various. The means are often spirited debate, in which, generally, everybody wins. That's just kind of the first principal of macro economic theory, if you need a bro-system to cash things out into.

Almost as though they were indefensible bullshit to begin with. I wonder who extorted whom and for how much.

Like gee, that was fast. If this had any bearing on reality, one would imagine the vetting process would take actual time and that there would be a real, material difference between what we knew then and what we know now.

The cartoon bullshit theater is exhausting.

I mean, I'd assume this deck was trying to sell something. But the relevant comparison is to stonk-bros on HN LARPing as hedge fund managers, not Vanguard.

Which, to be fair, Vanguard has earned a good deal of trust from me on the passive investment side of the equation, although I don't think it's meaningful to make it linearly proportional to the total size of their managed assets? I'm not even sure how I'd operationalize that in reality.

Having actual skin in the game on getting an answer right is generally a sign of credibility, though.

That said, without context I'm not really drawing any conclusions from this.

Checking back on this thread and wow. The absolutely rabid energy with which Republicans will fabricate information to evade personal moral responsibility for making the COVID death toll worse is incredible.

We have a completely medically illiterate user citing (one) of an endless supply of studies as evidence that vaccines killed people. The study doesn't say that... which isn't surprising because the rest of the literature doesn't either... and nor does the consensus of qualified medical practitioners...

It's as if the prospect of being responsible for contributing to the deaths of countless innocent people made them hallucinate exonerating text.

I wonder if post-genocide states see similar outbursts of insane flights of fiction about basic facts. I imagine they do.

Maybe they'll buy a failing AI company and update their grift portfolio.

It's fractured as a consequence of its own actions, which all of its constituent members bear direct responsibility for.

Epstein cover up? Iran? COVID denialism? Complete disregard for rule of law? Accepting massive, direct bribes? Trying to control broadcast media?

That's all on the Republican party as a collective, who did absolutely nothing to resist it and everything to put him in power TWICE. TWICE.

Ever since I've been conscious (the 80s), it's been the party of fear, violence and greed. They've consistently nominated actual clowns for positions of power. B-movie actor Ronald Reagan... Dan Quayle... Sarah Palin... the current, truly stunning iteration of absolute moral and intellectual bankruptcy TWICE after he killed hundreds of thousands of people due to COVID/vaccine skepticism and staged a violent attack on the capitol after losing a democratic election.

Free market? Small government? Big police state, trillions in defense contractor grift, unsustainable tax breaks to the wealthiest leading to massive spending deficits... all while doing everything to erode access to education, healthcare and basic services.

It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.

edit: typo

I know I RTFA, and I know I'm not interested in discussing things with people who don't. Maybe others feel differently, because more people is better or something. Information pollution is a serious, persistent, growing problem and I'm just not inclined to be tolerant about it anymore. Mistakes are one thing, deliberate stupidity is another.

If you come to book club without reading the book, and you derail the conversation into something completely irrelevant, you're not getting invited back.