2,281 karma · joined September 23, 2025
Programming languages can't understand semantics, and that's why we program in the first place. I can't tell a computer "I would like a program to achieve this goal", instead I have to instruct it how to achieve the goal. Then, I would need to document elsewhere what the goal is and why I'm doing it.
LLMs change that, we can now legitimately ask the model "I would like a program for this goal". But the documentation is lost in the code if we don't save comments or save the prompt.
Git commits are also a good source of documentation. They shouldn't describe what we're doing, because I can just read the code. But often, I come across code and I'm thinking "why are we doing this? Can I change this? If I change it, what are the side effects?" If I'm lucky, the git blame will answer those questions for me.
Most companies, or at least the ones I've worked at, don't use row level security at all. Instead, the application just accesses the multi tenant database.
It's absolutely littered with broken access control vulnerabilities. You have to remember to put the user key and group in every query across the entire application. And then there's dynamic queries and ORMs, which make everything worse. Now you cant even audit the source code, you have to observe behavior.
Most people don't know their applications have these vulnerabilities, but they're very common.
If you're going to introduce a new thing, you have to make sure it justifies replacing the old thing. The new windows 11 taskbar was essentially a straight downgrade.
Well, now the calculator can tell you a meaning of life, but it'll get 2 + 2 wrong 10% of the time.
The same thing is true for C++. Value semantics have a cost. In C++, passing a string to a function is very expensive because it calls a copy constructor, so you have to remember to use a reference to avoid that. In Java, that's basically free because of reference semantics.
I also want to say that, while Java has immutable strings, that is a bit undone by the reference semantics of the language. C++ has mutable strings but value semantics, which means that passing a string to a function is safe. It won't be mutated, even though strings are mutable like most C++ containers. In Java, passing containers around is generally not safe, and you can't assume they won't be mutated.
For example, appending to a string in a loop. That only happens because of how Java handles strings. In C++, that's very fast. As fast as it can get, really. Since it all goes into the same buffer that gets mutated and expands at a good growth rate. Basically, equivalent to StringBuilder, but that's just all strings.
Or, boxing. C++ doesn't have to box generics to store them in a container.
Metabolisms fluctuate, although granted not by much. But what really varies is your response to food. And it's not just genetics. It's food scarcity, early childhood, your environment.
The (maybe) sad reality is that there will be people skinnier than you will ever be who have put in zero effort. Nada. That's life. Just like there's people who can sing better than me off the rip and I took vocal lessons for 10 years. Life's not fair.
But the bright side is, I can drink and not be an alcoholic. Maybe they're just lazy or something. Or, maybe this mentality is one people feed themselves (ha) to feel better about the circumstances of their life.
Wouldn't we all like to believe we're the way we are because we're strong, brave, and hard-working?
What you need to understand is there are a lot of people where all they have is being skinny and appearing to be healthy. Without that, there's nothing left for them.
For a long time, there has been a moat that they can use as a justification for why they're better. They can say "well I work hard, I eat right, I put in effort!" The idea that others can achieve that without any of that means... well, they did it all for nothing. In their heads.
The dirty little secret? Many of them don't do any of that, it's just a delusion. Always has been. I'm skinny, you think I go to the gym? Fuck no! I should, but I don't. And I eat whatever I want.
But if a lot of people have to face the reality that their most redeeming quality is nothing of their doing, that would ruin them. Ruin them. They could just, like, get achievements or something but that's hard. Continuing the delusion is easy.
I think this mostly boils down to our ever-connected society producing unreasonable expectations of communications. It is a very, very recent phenomena that you can instantly contact whoever whenever you want. Previously, it was common place to be unreachable for most of the day.
Realistically, your kid will survive, and even thrive, if you are not able to contact them for 8 hours a day. There is a downside to this kind of tether. It's a new type of ever-present anxiety, like someone breathing down your neck. Half of raising kids is teaching them what to do. The other half is leaving them alone, so they can learn to be competent adults.
Learning to read or to do mathematics is like anything else, it takes practice. We know, intuitively from our own lives and observes virtually all humans, that humans perform better with less distractions. It would be hard to learn how to play the Tuba with me screaming behind you. It would be hard to learn chess with a movie playing in front of you.
Phones are distractions. Less phones = less distractions = better performance, smarter kids, more likelihood to graduate, higher average income.
Also, even if it were not for the OSI, this still wouldn't be open source. Because there's no source code available. It's open-weight, which is a different thing. The models weights are, essentially, the "compiled" output. The input and algorithms, we don't know.
Exhibit A: Tobacco. Prior to regulation, it was advertised widely and thought to be not that bad.
Once we regulated knowledge and consent, use plummeted.
For knowledge, we display pictures on the pack and carton of people in agony dying of lung cancer. We tell them the odds. For consent, we mitigate by saying "WARNING: nicotine is an addictive chemical. Nicotine can be more addictive than Heroine".
The fallacy here is that markets are naturally free and government intervention makes markets less free. That's rarely the case. Often, intervention makes the market more free.
And for the operator, they make money by... doing nothing? That's a huge red flag. Usually if that's the case, then the business is not legitimate.
In seriousness, music is one of the small joys of life. Like a morning coffee or the smell of winter. It makes living a little bit more bearable.
It's not a coincidence that Linux distros are much less susceptible to malware in their official repositories. It's a result of the system. Trusted software currated and reviewed by maintainers.
The play store will always have significant amounts of malware, so this entire conversation is moot.
Like, we have a log of all our work done, it's git. It tracks and timestamps each individual commit. But my manager can't use our git frontend. I guess it's too hard? Not sure. So, we then re-enter our time in Jira.
Of course, his manager can't open up Jira. So, we also create a word document every week documenting everything we have done. We actually also spell out and link the Jira issues (???). And then that gets sent to him.
Some of this I can understand. Reporting and distilling data is important. But nothing is being distilled, it's the same information just duplicated. This could all be automated but, of course, it's not.
The fact I'm young-ish and healthy looking, with good skin and hair, leads many doctors to outright dismiss me. Never mind my history of cancer and the undeniable fact that I am obviously not healthy. But I can also use the squishyness to my advantage. I talk confidently, I push back, and that works. It sort of short-circuits a lot of doctor's brains.
Okay how are we measuring this? We can't even quantify intelligence for humans accurately, let alone compare it to machines. Hell, we can't even really define intelligence.
I mean, humans can learn on the fly and progressively, and currently no LLMs are capable of that. Literally none of them, and no context doesn't count. So if that's the measure, then LLMs sit at a 0 along with rocks and twigs and humans closer to a 1.
Obviously that's not really the measurement, LLMs are quite good. But I don't think we can say, for sure, LLMs are a replacement for humans. They might replace some specific tasks, but humans are not a set of tasks. I'd still rather have 10 engineers than 0 engineers and 10 Claude Code licenses.
The thing is, it was really bad the first time. We got through in spite of the incredibly dogshit fiscal policy and foreign affairs. So, if you do that again but go 10x further... will we make it through? Dunno.
If anything, the first Trump term proved to me the resiliency of the US political and economic structures. Even in the face of an absolute lunatic with an almost religious drive to destroy everything, we prevailed. Of course, little did we know that was just the beginning. Do we have the endurance? We'll see!
This is a thing that basically does not exist. This is, again, more right-wing culture war bullshit that was cooked up in a meth lab. It's not real.
Can you get fired if you purposefully antagonize your boss at work? Yes. That's always been the case. Guess what, if I call my boss a jackass I'm probably getting shown the door, and that's not even a pronoun.
Can you get in trouble for discriminating based on gender and sexual orientation? Yes, and that's been the case for a while.
Nobody is getting into legal trouble because they don't personally believe trans women aren't "real" women, whatever "real" might mean to them. Nobody, not a soul. It's just a non-issue.
What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right. And, when they say, "hey, don't do that", we somehow have the gall to point at them and yell "Culture war! Culture war!"
It's not that people's goodwill is being burnt on trans people. It's that the right has been playing to the populist messaging they have in order to continue their crusade.
While the economy is burning down, and the climate is worsening, and we are entering wars, they are trying to convince you the problem is some set of people who are doing nothing. And, that the solution is simple: beat down this set of people.
This includes immigrants, trans people, gay people. Of course, it's just not true. But humans are stupid. We're already pre-wired to be uneasy around people we don't understand who are different from us, especially visibly different. And, humans understand and have high confidence in simple solutions.
I mean, God, look at the border wall. Will that work? Did that work? Of course not. But it's such a simple, almost child-like understanding of the problem that people had very high confidence in it.
And, you don't need an app, I would imagine most scamming is done without an app.
So, really, we're solving a subset of a subset of a subset of a subset of the problem.
For example, healthcare in the US is basically exempt from typical free market dynamics like supply and demand because of how the market works. Consumers don't choose, everyone has a moat and parents, and costs are often subsidized.
When did Louis Pasteur die again? 1895? Okay.
The difference is that the New Deal is one of, like, 3 reasons the US isn't a complete shithole. Basically everything you like about the US can be traced back to the New Deal.
If you just fill in the gaps yourself, your software doesn't work. Software that doesn't meet the requirements is legitimately useless. The problem is, most of the requirements are in the customer's head, and you have to squeeze them out. Most of them are unconscious, they might not even know them.
Sure, or per-device, or per-network, or per-organization. It depends on how each particular person wants to implement it.
> As you say, I can see a few ways around this ;)
Yes, notably less than the current proposal. Which, again, will just straight-up not work.
> f something screws up and Little Timmy gets to see some boobies, who gets blamed?
I think this really hit the nail on the head. None of this is about solving problems or helping little Timmy. It's about accountability management.
If we implement the OS syscall, then Meta gets to point their grimey finger at someone else while they continue to fuel genocide in Myanmar.
> Did the parents actually configure this themselves? If so, who taught them how to do that? Or did they buy the machine pre-configured? So does the vendor take responsibility?
Well, um, both. You can configure your router, sure, or your Linux computer. But I imagine a new iPhone would just come with a checkbox you can check at account creation time. Again, very similar to this proposal, except it works.