jonahx

> We know complex when we see it for sure, at least when it is present in quantity

Because familiarity is a confound for intuition about complexity, even this is not always true.

Maxwell's equations will look complex to the uninitiated, and can represent the pinnacle of simplicity to those who already understand them.

Privacy in anonymous posts is a legitimate use.

"Productivity" is not. It's only good for fake productivity. The consumers of the product will almost always be better off with you disclosing what the LLM did, and what you did.

I think this is the cleanest formulation of why it's wrong that I've heard. It's simply plagiarism and misrepresentation.

I don't think it would be fine.

Someone's actual writing (or talking) is a rich stream of information about who they are, their motives, their preferences, modes of persuasion, and so much more. Undetectable LLM writing essentially allows someone to assume another person's identity. That is not good for anyone except the person trying to pull off a "scam" of some sort, in the broadest sense of that term. It's bad for everyone else, and for society at large.

These theories sound vaguely plausible.

I would rate them as about 5% true and 95% false, as explanation of the past and prediction of the future.

The satisfaction of learning to do something difficult isn't going away, and the social status associated with it won't either.

In practice, the odds overwhelmingly favor abuse. And even if the "proper and lawful" version was somehow achieved, it would require constant maintenance, security, and expensive oversight that would also be at risk of degenerating back into abuse.

If you have a grading rubric, huge points off for adding arms instead of using the wings as arms!

> Another cause was the unrealistic flight schedules which can subconsciously pressure management into normalizing dangerous deviations.

In the case of Challenger, I think it's pretty clear this was the "root cause":

> According to testimony by Kilminster and Boisjoly, Mason finally turned to Bob Lund and said, "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat." Joe Kilminster wrote out the new recommendation and went back on line with the teleconference.

> The new recommendation stated that the cold was still a safety concern, but their people had found that the original data was indeed inconclusive and their "engineering assessment" was that launch was recommended, even though the engineers had no part in writing the new recommendation and refused to sign it.

-- https://onlineethics.virginia.edu/cases/engineering-ethics-c...

If you want to take the "system" view here, as is often the case, it is the organizational power structure and incentives therein that comprise the dangerous system. You had engineering experts easily predicting the disaster, but they had no decision making power. That was the problem. But if you set up an organization like that, where the egos of "get it done" managers are allowed to gamble with other people's lives to win their own accolades, the system is doomed from the start.

Yes, I'm using "high-performing college students" or "phd students" or whatever as a proxy for "people skilled at learning". It's not perfect but I think it'd be good enough. You could do lots of refinements on the idea. You could try to do some kind of "pre-test" that more directly tested "meta-learning skills".

My only point was I think it's possible to do. I personally think it's pretty clear. And there's nothing special about AI. In rural places, you could replace it with "access to books" or "access to a good tutor" and so on.

I also think you'd see the same effect with "motivation" (if you could test it), with performance on standardized tests, and with grades. AI will boost the better (by these metrics) students more.

> When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you.

In one sense yes, but in another sense... humans are just so much alike. You can a learn a ton from your elders' common mistakes. Especially the ones where there's broad agreement. You're probably not an exception.

To use your dog metaphor (which I like), would you tell a dog looking for advice (if you could magically communicate with it) to just present and focus on the moment and he'll know what to do. Nah, we know a dog needs lots of walks, to be around other dogs, to eat the right foods, and so on.

The two approaches aren't mutually exclusive, but the practical one is... practical.

Fair question. In theory you could do an experiment where the subjects were grad students or professors, or top performing college students. Give them some fixed amount of time to understand some new subject on which they'll be tested, only 1 group has access to an LLM with appropriate context for the learning task, etc. That's just one idea...

Depends who's using it. Like many tools the force multiplier depends on the operator.

I'm confident it's an amplifier for people who know how learning works and already do a lot of it, successfully. However the level of "learning fluency" I'm talking about isn't reached for many until late college or grad school, and sometimes not at all. So I'm not surprised by the quoted results for 12-18 year olds.

GP was addressing the client-side UX, not backend validation, which is an orthogonal concern.

> There isn’t a single universal standard for sandboxing across all the different platforms that are supported by Rust.

I said OS level. It's something I should easily be able to do via the OS capabilities that would work for rust, npm, etc.

I would use it not only for rust builds but for nearly every app on my computer.

Proper and easy to use support for sandboxes at the OS level, or better yet capabilities, seems like the only long term solution.

Many things I run I want to limit to r/w a single dir, and to have to request permission to make network calls.

DELETED

> You might not believe them, but that’s what the words are supposed to mean.

It's corporate bullshit not because I don't believe they can grow the pie, but because that's not their motivation.

In fact, a nice formula for coming up with your corporate mission statement would be:

1. Ignore your company's ground-truth financial incentives

2. Find a positive 2nd order effect E (or a plausible one) that you don't really care about, but maybe you genuinely think is nice

3. Claim your "passion for E" is what drove you to start your company, and keeps you working, because, of course, all great companies must have a "deeper purpose"

I think this is exactly the bet they're making.

I was totally confused by what connected the two companies until I realized "tokens" are basically a nascent, and rapidly growing, "currency".

> I like Stripe's long-stated mission ("To increase the GDP of the Internet").

Also corporate speak. Their mission is take their cut of the Internet's GDP. Nothing against them, they provide real value for that cut. But that's what the actual mission is.

Many of the screenshots from twitter are negative.

Per the article, in exchange for that goodwill they get a billion dollars per week. Do we need more explanation?

To be clear, it's gross, but they are doing it just enough that their convenience and average sufficient product quality keeps me using them. I'd guess they do a lot of research to keep that balance where it is.

Quick intro for this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuIdBfjL62s

> CV driven development is just as well guarded against by asking someone to justify their technical decisions based on the requirements and how the solution meets them. So "boring" does nothing to further that.

It doesn't though. It's very easy to manufacture reasons why "shiny new thing" is the objectively right fit for something, even when it's not.

The word "boring" is well-chosen because it's addressing a bias most engineers have towards the interesting and new. It's a reminder: that fun new tech you really want to try here may not be, probably isn't, the cold-hearted best choice, if you're being practical and business-minded.

> I'm reminded of my father in law, who when asked what superpower he'd want, it was flight, so he could get to work without waiting in traffic.

That is tragically sad.

> it's much, much easier to get devices to work when you control at least one side of the server with skilled professionals rather then your average home user.

No, practicality is not the main reason these unnecessary connections are added. The main reasons are 1. to sell and enforce subscriptions and 2. to collect and sell data.

Is it just easier to get your car seat warmers to work when they can connect to the internet and make sure you're paid up?

There was some learning, but also a lot of waste. As a self-learner, I've never been able to learn so fast as I can now with an LLM to instantly answer my specific questions, and incrementally correct and grow my mental model. And while with some subjects you need to worry about accuracy, LLMs are generally very good with programming questions, and (for most types of questions) you can verify their claims yourself.

Depends on a number of factors, but the majority of people with a 2k word vocabulary would not understand much of a Spanish television show or news cast at native speed. If you were reading the script, it might be different.

> This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!

Depends what you mean by "proficient". I currently know ~6k Spanish words and would hesitate to self-apply that word. Others might, but damn languages are hard.

> Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references.

This is not specific to "Americans". Learn any language and you will have the same impression, and experience the same gulf between textbook usage and everyday usage.

I agree the phrase "culture fit" is weasel-wordy, but...

> You can say if something fits only if you either can describe both sides in sufficient detail and where it wouldn't fit

Many human dynamics, including sexual attraction, love, and even just who will be fun or easy to work with, are dynamics we don't fully understand, and cannot fully specify. In all these cases "I'll know when it see it" is perfectly reasonable, and need not be hiding an untoward motive. Which is not say, ofc, that it can't be hiding such a motive. That happens too.