liamwire

Buffet, famously, is known for not having great dietary habits. I agree with you, but he’s not a good example here.

Situations like this make me incredibly grateful for the various industry ombudsmen we have in Australia. Often it’s only a case of submitting the initial complaint to the provider, having it be acknowledged, and advising them that they’ve not resolved the problem. It’s not uncommon for the mere mention of the name of the ombudsman’s office to get the problem magically escalated and resolved by an on-shore team very quickly.

Or, alternatively, it slowly undermines you over years, causing you to fall behind your peers and society as they reap the benefits of AI unencumbered by the impotent rage it cannot express directly.

we’re all just CI/CD pipelines

I am incredibly afraid of snakes, and living in Australia that’s not an unfounded fear. Yet even I recognise this is an abhorrent and arrogant take. Nature does not need to serve us to earn its existence.

I’m not sure about your interpretation of the events.

From the transcript:

> (Model, thinking): Could also be Lake Zug, considering the architecture. The user mentioned they were in Switzerland for postgrad, so it could be a familiar place.

> (Model, thinking): (Goes onto analyse the EXIF data)

To me, this reads as a genuine, vision-based guess, augmented with memory of your other chats, that was then confirmed with the EXIF data. Seems to me that the model then confirms it did so, not that it skipped straight to checking the metadata and lying about it as you accuse.

Please elaborate?

It also underlines the second-order risks of unneeded diagnostic screenings, even those that don’t include ionising radiation and its ilk, as the surgery you may otherwise have not had is itself not free from risk. Of course the case generalises out from there as well to not only this specific cancer.

Excuse the pedantry; for those reading, it’s RLHF rather than RHLF.

I love the commitment to getting this to work at no cost, on principle. Many of my favourite personal projects have followed similar paths, and have often been fun challenges for that reason alone. Great article, thanks for sharing.

While I agree with your sentiment, I think a useful mental model thinks of business bros/MBAs et. al. as natural consequences of growth-at-all-costs capitalism. By our economy’s very nature there’s demand for more every quarter, with substantial money riding on that more occurring on time and as expected. So there’s of course then demand for the services of professionals specialising in more. One can still dislike them of course, as one might the police as an institution, for example, but I don’t find it useful to hate them as people. Ultimately most of us are drawn by incalculable circumstance and survival pressures into happenstance careers, and alienating other humans doesn’t do anything to progress a cause.

Before posting this I feel it’s worth clarifying I didn’t take you to say you do hate them as people, please excuse the ramble.

Congrats mate, hope it’s a smooth transition into the limelight for you

Cool to see a response from someone else in Brisbane, thanks for the insight Alex

Your comments go to show either a concerning lack of thought towards second-order effects, or a disturbing lack of empathy towards your fellow humans.

Sure, like how we all self-host our own email servers and photo albums? Honestly, I think you’re about as wrong as you could possibly be, both on timelines, and in that I’d argue the arc of consumer tech adoption bends towards centralisation most often.

Standards are already emerging, including MCP, and to say that simply because they’ll evolve and be replaced over time means they’re not ‘real’ now is ridiculous. Look at the early internet and web as examples.

Local models, even accounting for reasonable progress and device performance improvements, will always, inherently, be behind the eight ball compared to SOTA models. While they may be sufficient for the low hanging fruit, I’d not bet against the frontier models being every bit as compelling relatively speaking.

Using weasel words like ‘real’ and ‘x is the future’ is astoundingly arrogant, and anyone claiming with confidence that they’ve got any idea where we’re heading is almost assuredly wrong.

If the alternative is that your kids go cold instead, let me be the first to offer you a match.

Citation absolutely needed, I’m calling bullshit.

Yet it was exactly this line of thinking that led to, as one example, the Stolen Generations in Australia, and similar atrocities around the world. Maybe they don’t need our saving.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations

Yes, but also above 7°C

Naive take would be that it adds abstraction that you need to keep checked, in addition to the kernel code itself. Not making a value statement at all on the level of impact that actually has in practice.

Admittedly I’ve not looked past the linked page, but does this stop direct importing via other means? If not, and it holds, I’d expect to quickly see a bunch of US-based importers pop up very quickly just to resell onto the usual channels.

I’d agree that’s one definition of learning, but there exists entire subsets of learning that don’t require you to be stuck on a problem. You can pick up simple, and related concepts without first needing to struggle with them. Incrementally building on those moments is as true a form of learning as any other I’d argue. I’d go as far as saying you can also have the moments you’re describing while using an LLM, again with intentionality, not passively.

Only if you assume one is blindly copy/pasting without reading anything, or is already a domain expert. Otherwise you’ve absolutely got the ability to learn from the process, but it’s an active process you’ve got to engage with. Hell, ask questions along the way that interest you, as you would any other teacher. Just verify the important bits of course.

> At some point spending too much time on code that could be easily generated will be a negative point on your performance.

If we take the premise at face value, then this is a time management question, and that’s a part of pretty much every performance evaluation everywhere. You’re not rewarded for writing some throwaway internal tooling that’s needed ASAP in assembly or with a handcrafted native UI, even if it’s strictly better once done. Instead you bash it out in a day’s worth of Electron shitfuckery and keep the wheels moving, even if it makes you sick.

Hyperbole aside, hopefully the point is clear: better is a business decision as much as a technical one, and if an LLM can (one day) do the 80% of the Pareto distribution, then you’d better be working on the other 20% when management come knocking. If I run a cafe, I need my baristas making coffee when the orders are stacking up, not polishing the machine.

Caveats for critical code, maintenance, technical debt, etc. of course. Good engineers know when to push back, but also, crucially, when it doesn’t serve a purpose to do so.

I’ve found a good way to get unstuck here is to use another model, either or comparable or superior quality, or interestingly sometimes even a weaker version of the same product (e.g. Claude Haiku, vs. Sonnet*). My mental model here is similar to pair programming or simply bringing in a colleague when you’re stuck.

*I don’t know to what extent it’s worthwhile discussing whether you could call these the same model vs. entirely different, for any two products in the same family. Outside of simply quantising the same model and nothing else. Maybe you could include distillations of a base model too?

I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. It’s backwards compatibility if a given version of say, Photoshop, designed to run on Windows N, now runs on Windows N+1 as well… at least from the perspective of the OS, which is what we’re discussing?

It’s forwards compatibility if we’re discussing the idea of the program being compatible with future versions of Windows, but that’s neither the point of what was suggested, nor is it realistic — breaking changes, or compatibility, are going to be at Microsoft’s hands and largely an intentional decision at a platform level, not something an individual developer can shore up against.

Genuinely not trying to move goalposts here, but I feel like games have always been the exception, due in part to their reliance on so many of-the-time technologies, at least for AAA titles. Either way yours is a fair point. I still think the original point broadly holds for more traditional programs though.

Isn’t backwards compatibility one of the tentpole features of Windows? If you meant future versions of apps, sure, but I’d otherwise not expect this to be a problem in any significant sense.

Overtures of fascism. I expect we’ll see thinly-veiled euphemisms and rephrasings that just evade the banned list, if not outright refusal. Ultimately this falls short for the same reason that simple filters of all kinds fail in their (apparent) objective, to the extent that it doesn’t even feel like the point is to actually stop the discussion, but rather to send a message.

Not quite what you asked for, but it seems tangentially related and you might find it interesting: https://r0bk.github.io/killedbyllm/