2,253 karma · joined July 8, 2015
But do those points actually move or the air medium changes the measurements?
I ask because I saw a very interesting documentary once about how they started accurate mapping in England with fixed points and measuring the angles between those points to a high degrees of precision.
My mental model has always been that those points are all fixed, but now that you mention it, why should they be fixed?
After all, my 7 grade teacher clearly demonstrated the thermal deformation or copper rods and all bridges have gaps that allow for thermal deformation, so indeed, this would apply to soil on the scale of tens of kms?
I could provide examples myself, but I'm not convinced it's about java vs c++ or go: hadoop, cassandra, zookeeper
I've seen these comments for over 15 years yet for some "unknown", "silly" reason java keeps being used for really,really useful software like kafka.
Ahh, the full spectrum of human motivation -- niceness for the sake of it, fear and let me add my machiavellianism -- I think being polite in your query produces better results.
Saying thank you to a LLM is indeed useless, but asking politely could appeal to the training data and produce better results because people who asked politely on the internet got better answers and that behavior could be baked into the LLM models.
LLMs are trained on internet data produced by humans.
Humans tend to appreciate politeness and go to greater lengths answering polite questions, hence the LLMs will also mimic that behavior because that's what they're trained on.
Only for short code you want to throw away.
If you care about the quality of the code -- how it is organized, naming things, meaningful tests it's not.
LLMs have gotten so much better at code that I'm surprised I still don't vibe code, but it's just laughable at how bad they are stil -- test cases that just add fluff and just how "autistic" they seem and how much they miss in context that a human would not miss.
I recently changed some code where a null was returned previously and what I really needed was sort of a java Optional but with a Reason for why the value returned was not present -- I called it AdviseDecision -- it had 2 constructors -- either the value returned or the reason a value could not be computed.
I then asked Gemini 2.5 to refactor a piece of code that dealt with the null previously.
Gemini 2.5 could not jump to the conclusion that it was not possible for both the computation result or the failure to compute could not be null at the same time.
Anyway, the examples of when LLMs fail are becoming the exception and it shows how good they have gotten, but I would never says cost time plummeted to nearly zero.
For me the biggest advantage is that even though I only get about a 30% programming speed boost, I get a 300% productivity boost because I procrastinate much less, because for me it's easier to fix/modify the LLMs tasteless code than getting over the initial bump of starting from scratch.
It probably is a contradiction then that I say LLMs are so bad and so good at the same time.
It's optimal for beings that have general purpose inteligence.
> would severely limit your capabilities as well because you'd have to dedicate more effort towards handling basic editing tasks
Yes, but humans will eventually get used to it and internalize the keyboard, the domain language, idioms and so on and their context gets pushed to long term knowledge overnight and thei short term context gets cleaned up and they get bettet and better at the job, day by day. AI starts very strong but stays at that level forever.
When faced with a really hard problem, day after day the human will remember what he tried yesterday and parts of that problem will become easier and easier for the human, not so for the AI, if it can't solve a problem today, running it for days and days produces diminishing returns.
That's the General part of human intelligence -- over time it can aquire new skills it did not have yesterday, LLMs can't do that -- there is no byproduct of them getting better/aquiring new skills as a result of their practicing a problem.
i.e. "Have you tried this vague, unnamed thing that I alude to that seems to be the answer that contradicts your point, but actually doesn't?"
AGI = 90% of software devs, psychotherapists, lawyers, teachers lose their jobs, we are not there.
Once LLMs can fork themselves, reflect and accumulate domain specific knowledge and transfer the whole context back to the model weights, once that knowledge can become more important than the pre-pretrained information, once they can form new neurons related to a project topic, then yes, we will have AGI (probably not that far away). Once LLM's can keep trying to find a bug for days and weeks and months, go through the debugger, ask people relevant questions, deploy code with new debugging traces, deploy mitigations and so on, we will have AGI.
Otherwise, AI is stuck in this groundhog day type scenario, where it's forever the brightest intern that any company has ever seen, but he's forever stuck at day 0 on the job, forever not that usefull, but full of potential.
There is no illusion - if Trump was a profesional working in any trade, the plebs wouldn't hire him, yet they elected him president.
It's just that the plebs think Trumps is the aristocrat most like them, and by electing him they somehow screw the arisrocrats over.
Oh, oh, also, electing a felon, you get a lot of grifring, including, but not limited to the trump crypto scam, the insider trading Trump boasted about on video (about his friends making billions in the stock market).
This guy is not playing 5d chess guys, he's just a clown surrounded by yes men.
My point was mainly that that kind of first tier city would attract those kind of people, not specifically that they should be targeted.
If you lived in a 2nd tier zone you shouldn't pay extra in taxes even if you're childless.
But specifically to your question, I do think that it's fair that childless people should pay more taxes, because having a stable population is a requirement for a stable society and single/childless people aren't doing their part.
That duty can be offloaded to parents with more children, but they should be compensated for that.
You can frame it whatever you want -- they pay more taxes, parents pay less taxes, parents get tax rebates, parents get higher UBI per child, the outcome is the same.
I do think that first tier cities leach and profit from the work of the parents, educators of the people who migrate there (and generally the whole area -- it takes a village to raise a child), profit from exorbitant property taxes so, I think the only way to solve this curse is higher taxes (if it's required) on those areas and subsidized living in less desirable places -- provided that those 2nd tier places produce competent citizens.
I think AI could make UBI + moving to a lower cost of living much more appealing if it solves education and healthcare. The housing is solved for by market forces.
First tier, high cost of living should be for high earners, singles or childless people, they should pay more taxes while second tier areas should offer UBI, and should generally subsidise people having children and augment the kind of high grade services first tier locations have, especially education and healthcare with AI. Or at least that's 90% of the reason me and many people I know don't move to smaller towns
OSINT I immagine would be kind of useless to analize with LLMs because the kind of information you're interested in is very new so not enough sources for the LLMs to regurgitate.
As an example -- I read some defence articles about Romania operating in the future 70 F-16 and it immediately caught my eye because I was expecting in the 40s range. Apparently the Nerherlands will leave those 18 F-16s to Romania -- but I'm not that curious to dig into enough -- I was expecting those would go to Ukraine.
So just for fun I asked the question -- to Gemini 2.5 and Chat gpt -- "How many F-16s will Romania eventually operate" -- they all regurgitated the 40s number. I explicitly asked Gemini about the 18 F-16s from the Nerherlands and it kept its number estimate, saying those are for training purposes.
Only after I explicitly explained it my own knowledge did Gemini google it and confirm it.
Or I asked about the tethered FPVs in Ukraine and it told me those have very little impact. Only after I explicitly mentioned the recent russian successful Kursk counter-offensive did it acknowledge them.
To me it feels there is no plateau and the models are already very useful and impactful.
I believe there is no plateau because there is nothing objectively special or magical about the human mind and it all can and will be eventually solved, one hack at a time.
One anxiety of mine is being teased by an FPV drone -- with fiber optics it's much easier to defend against as a foot soldier -- if you can loop once around a tree and find the fiber optics cable, you can easily snap it and bye bye drone.
Also, given the pilot has to be more conservative with his maneuvers, shotguns will be more effective because the target is easier to lead.
Russian FPV operators have already lost their life due to this precise effect and the fact they operated from the same building multiple times.
But we are both humans, limited by our own experiences. I have no problem admiting these are my own deductions about the world and my own perspective.
Unless I had scientific data to back the generality of my statements, I see no reason to use such a third person view.
If China could turn democratic and open, the World would have such a bright future.
Alas, I think we're headed into some distopian future because China is not going that way but indeed, they're very likely to surpass the USA in every other way.
That's a thing we were taught in "Civic Culture" in grade 5 -- that slaves can become masters through hard work and making the master dependent on them.
But now I see it more in a figurative way, because it rarely happens with actual slaves, but in a more metaphorical way, it certainly can happen.
I never said you did, I just added another bogus reason CEOs use to justify why layoffs are necessary, when really, the only reason is the market is bad and we want to have more profits and we thought we needed more people but really we don't. Or we just like to keep people in line with a 5% culling like facebook (?) now does -- things we could not do in the market conditions before but we can now do with impunity.
But all that shines a negative light on management, and people are generally empathetic to other people losing their livelihoods and why do that when it's so much easier to scapegoat.
>Your comment completely lacks an objective perspective.
But you feel your original perspective is objective?
Every time there's a downturn in labor field, common courtesy goes out the window (I might say more nasty things, but the truth is I don't know you so it might very well be unwarranted for in this case, but I do know many callous people who spew/project similar things). Sort of like what Buffet said about the tide -- you see people's true colors.
The company I'm working for fired people because of financial issues and the new CEO instead of being humble and just saying what it is, indirectly called those fired or about to be fired "lazy". I know those people, none were lazy.
I've worked in this field for 20 years and very few people are actually incompetent or lazy (mainly banks) -- and those are not the people to get fired in a downturn, because those people usually move into management (because why would you get rid of a good sd, qa ? or if you're a good senior sd or qa, why would you move to a junior manager position?). It's usually the environment and management problem, not a incompetency or laziness problem for why things go wrong when they do.
And finally, who and why hired those bad people in the first place? Or did they become bad after they were hired?
> have attempted to short circuit this problem with open source helpers like Spring Boot, jQuery, React and so forth.
It's not a short circuit at all, just common sense. Every time I see a long running java project that uses some obscure bullshit frameworks ("spring is overrated") I KNOW there's huge cost in the future for the re-invention of features spring boot has out of the box and solving many many issues and quirks with library integrations, lifecycle management, hours upon hours of people learning the quirks of the spring-less project idioms, that spring users will never encounter.
Genuine curiosity, are you a Trump fan?
It's obviously a bad idea at the moment.
My favorite is where they painted a cardboard wall to match the road, Coyote and Roadrunner style and Tesla was the only car to smash into it.
Put a radar/lidar already into the Tesla!
Why not make it an amazing car, just because Elon is a narccisistic/sociopatic asshole?
I swear Elon is his own greatest enemy.
And neural nets are "just" matrix multiplications, human brains are "just" chemical reactions