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lr4444lr

8,041 karma · joined June 9, 2014

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lr4444lr··on Coding is not solved
Articles like this keep measuring to a red herring standard that was never achievable in the first place.

As for accountability, it always laid with the employer. You think those nameless contractors whom Boeing hired suffered any consequences for that 737 Max glitch? Using AI won't change that.

AI doesn't have to solve all these coding problems to be worth handing the reins to it: it just has to substantially better on average than humans over the long haul, which it already is, especially if you have good verification of "done" and "working" in place through automated testing mechanisms. Perhaps we might say that QA is having its moment.

It doesn't mean humans aren't needed, but they aren't writing much if any code anymore.

lr4444lr··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
Do you take the standard 5g or something else? What's your weight?
lr4444lr··on Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
Her farthest journey was a day's walk, to a nearby market town.

I think this is what boggles my mind most about antiquity: the vast majority of people rarely ventured much past where they were born (unless they did a likely once in a lifetime religious pilgrimage which took the better part of a year).

Seeing as most other people didn't venture further either, you really got to know the people around you very well. Common life limitations simply precluded much travel. The only foreigners you saw were either invading hordes, or traders who were constantly on the road.

lr4444lr··on Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)
This is exactly the question considered in Voltaire's short story "The Good Brahmin"[0]

0: https://www.online-literature.com/voltaire/4411/

lr4444lr··on US debt has hit $40tn - Will that be a wake-up call?
Anyone can speculate. If we fail to pay interest in a timely manner, then presumably fewer foreign entities will buy our debt, and we will have less money from debt sales to fund what debt funds. Whether that pain is spread equally or not is anyone's guess.
lr4444lr··on Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation
I don't think the "average" is a good metric for the social impact of this. Everyone (or almost everyone) being at a standstill would be the minimum that governments should worry about. When even a sizable minority loses ground, that could create unrest.
lr4444lr··on Will you have spent more of your life with computers than your family?
I don't think your ancestors sat around the living room while their kids were playing threshing wheat, though. They put the plowshares down once it got dark.
lr4444lr··on Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it
Nice.

May I point out that in "Crudam si edes, in acetum intinguito", that "edes" is more likely to be the future of edere/esse "to eat"? (Just guessing by context.)

lr4444lr··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
I honestly like the vocabulary and turns of phrase the frontier models use. Their choices of words are usually apt to the circumstance. This is a weird thing to get upset about, IMO.

The big problem I have is when they apologize and say something like "that tidbit changes my analysis substantially". I wish they'd more often prompt for questions or use language in their initial responses that suggest lower than declarative confidence given the information you supplied.

lr4444lr··on How Kalshi Infects the News
While your analogy is valid, I find it hard to get upset at people who flout an artificially imposed limit to a license to engage in employment.

I'm aware the vehicles and drivers were at first highly unvetted, but the moral impulse that's got everyone so up in arms about prediction markets isn't remotely the same as Uber smashing through antiquated monopolies that existed more by historical accident than any unavoidable public safety need.

lr4444lr··on Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence
I can't upvote this enough. As has been attributed to the Roman stoic Seneca: “An enemy is a bad witness to your merits, but a good one to your defects.”
lr4444lr··on I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
No one's arguing you can't stand up a good MVP.

It's when you have to iterate to handle changing business needs, scale issues, and integrate with other systems where the entropy becomes a scary concern over a long enough timeline.

And it's not just "checking" - it's wholesale rejections of code, reframing prompts to target specific classes or approaches, etc... I don't think you will take the human out planning any time soon.

lr4444lr··on I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
I can't imagine SWEs will be reduced to SDETs anymore than attorneys will be reduced to spell-checkers on AI powered case briefs.

I am a very AI-forward person, but hallucinations are becoming more pernicious than ever even as they get less frequent, especially if the code actually works. A human absolutely has to guide these processes at a macro level for sustainability for SaaS as it evolves with business needs.

Maybe for one and done systems with no maintenance/no updates/no security patches you can reduce humans to SDETs, but systems like that are more the exception than the norm.

lr4444lr··on Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house
> At the gas station, Bradley accused Holland of driving under the influence. When asked if he would submit to field sobriety tests, Holland calmly refused.

Much as I hope Bradley would be fired and lose his pension for abuse of power, this part is on Holland. In my state, refusing a breathalyzer is by law an automatic penalty because of the "implied consent statute" that you accept when you get behind the wheel: automatic license suspension for 1 year, and you still have to face the officer's testimony. There are consequences to the refusal that have nothing to do with the officer.

lr4444lr··on Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen
After reading this, I wonder whether maybe low doses of morphine over a short period are safer than either.
lr4444lr··on The happiest I've ever been
To quote H.L. Mencken (paraphrasing), a teacher's job is miserable because they must ceaselessly try to get masses or people to think who have no real capacity to.

You might be lucky to reach a small minority of your students, assuming environmental forces of poverty, dysfunctional family, and peer influence don't muzzle their gifts. But the day in day out bulk of your work isn't those "Mr. Holland's Opus" moments: it's handling a bunch of kids who don't want to be there in a bureaucratic set of rules imposed on you from above. And private schools are not immune to these problems either.

lr4444lr··on The happiest I've ever been
As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.
lr4444lr··on Layoffs at Block
I dislike Jack going back several years, but I think in this instance he's admitting that he's taking responsibility between weighing the risk of doing this vs. not doing this. Maybe morale will tank anyway and the company will hold on, but be out-innovated by competitors that invested in growth. There are future outcomes that could prove he made the wrong call, and I any time layoffs are announced, there is a tacit mea culpa about past over-hiring.
lr4444lr··on Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows
Downsizing your house? Picking your long term care location? Changing your asset balance? Recording more photos, audio, and video?

Knowing an early, painful fate allows you to approach it with dignity.

lr4444lr··on Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows
Okay but even that analogy is limited. Incurable progressive diseases almost invariably have lifestyle factors, supplements, or medications that can at least slow the rate of progression for many people. Those are also often more effective when started during early stage detection. There is literally nothing the average person can do about the asteroid.
lr4444lr··on $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents
Stats? Who do you think is buying the kids the phones and the data plans? Who is letting them take them to school in the first place?

The kids would be better off being told to read chapter 7 than play sensory overload edutainment tools that fragment their attention.

lr4444lr··on My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker
At this point, I trust LLMs to come up with something more secure than the cheapest engineering firm for hire.
lr4444lr··on Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants
They've been losing ground to placebo in more recent research.

Plus, most of the more serious side effects take a lot more time to manifest than the typical length any given patient remained in the older clinical trials that secured FDA approval and grounded the official manufacturer literature.

I am glad we have these tools, but I suspect they are vastly overused, and patients not well informed.

lr4444lr··on Iran Protest Death Toll Could Top 30k, According to Local Health Officials
On what basis do you call it "slop"? I would agree that it's not much relevant to HN, but it seems to report that the number is at odds with most other figures.
lr4444lr··on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant
Were any of the prior fears totally wrong?
lr4444lr··on I'm addicted to being useful
Counterpoint - she should have known what she was getting into marrying an engineer. It cones with the territory.
lr4444lr··on 90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet
"China bad"?

Do you have any idea how much Chinese economic leverage has caused Hollywood to censor against CCCP criticism?

As for Iran, we have a literal embargo, so it's not quite the same.

lr4444lr··on Indifference is a power (2015)
As I get older, I read this entirely differently (as an appeal to empathy) than I did when I was younger (as an appeal to stolidity).

In other words, you should be pained for your neighbor when his slave breaks his cup. Maybe his grandmother left him that cup, and he's developed many fond memories around which he drank a soothing beverage in that heirloom. That empathy how we connect with people, build meaning, and make life richer.

lr4444lr··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
It's debatable - to put it mildly - whether Maduro is the legitimate president of Venezuela.
lr4444lr··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
... and then President Vance maintaining the status quo would bring you back to reality.
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