mmcdermott

> It’s time to find out what value our values really have.

Which is exciting, as long as the net results are better for human beings. I really don't want to see us make human experience worse to ensure that AI is able to be more successful. That defeats the purpose of any technological invention.

I've had similar thoughts a few times over the years. "Let me lock myself in an office for a week with a pile of books and YouTube and I'll learn more than any conference" - and I say that as someone who kept a full day at conferences and took notes.

What I realized is that the learning was supposed to come from talking to other people working on similar problems, as opposed to an earth shattering realization from the presentation itself. I remember one year when I compared notes with a few people on authorization approaches because we were getting ready to overhaul our authorization systems, and I found the random discussions very helpful.

That said, I still dream about getting to do a stay-conference, analogous to a stay-cation, but for learning.

The people who cheered about the firing of 80% of the Twitter staff largely believed (rightly or wrongly) that they were being adversely affected by them. While Google may be seen with more wariness in tech circles, I don't think the average person believes that Google is actively harming them (again, rightly or wrongly).

I've usually found that this breaks down when there are a lot of filtering conditions besides the join condition, and multiple columns used in the joins. The WHERE clause gets long and jumbled and it is much easier to separate join conditions from filtering conditions.

I don't think the point was organizational, that decisions by the IARC must be respected by the EPA, but more common sensical: if a substance is roughly equivalent in risk to food, which is ingested, then it surely can't be more harmful to spray it than it is to eat it. That may not hold in all situations, but it doesn't seem crazy as a general principle.

Besides Amber, I found Jack of Shadows to be an accessible road into Zelazny.

For the longest time you could get away with this in cmd:

> dir c:\progra~1

So if forcing people to handle spaces was the goal, it took a long time to force it.

I was talking to a fairly avid scifi reader who hadn't heard of the book before.

It's always someone's day to be one of 10,000.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

True, but `/` is also a shortcut for quick find in Firefox.

I could see software having a future as a Rube Goldberg machine of black box AIs, if hardware is cheap enough and the AIs are good enough. There was a scifi novel (maybe "A Fire Upon the Deep"?) where there was no need to write software because AI could cobble any needed solution together by using existing software and gluing it together. Throwing cycles at deepening layers was also something that Paul Graham talked about in the hundred year language (https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html).

Now, whether hardware is cheap enough or AI is smart enough is an entirely different question...

Same here. I've never been able to stick with any extension post-Vimperator. They've all just felt too clumsy. It's led to my tinkering with qutebrowser from time to time because it is seamless.

When doing architecture work, I'm generally thinking in terms of data flows and state changes.

Programming seems more verbal to me than visual. It feels very akin to writing, I have an idea and I am talking through it. My editing of code tends to be nonlinear for this reason, drilling into areas as I would expound upon them verbally, rather than in the order the compiler will evaluate them.

Agreed, but the post above draws a direct line between a taxes and basic law and order, but one could support scaling back any number of taxes and spending programs without opposing or endangering law and order.

While I'm sure that someone somewhere objects to paying for law and order, I think most tax grumbling comes from taxes rising (and, arguably, still not rising enough) to pay for bigger and bigger programs with an increasingly tenuous relationship to law or order. Not everyone objects to every line item, of course, but the bigger the budget gets the more certain it becomes that those rising taxes are not just to keep up with inflation on basic essentials.

What I'm picturing is two divergent paths with very different impacts on human interaction.

1) Every human programmer becomes the surgeon in Fred Brooks's surgical team model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_sur...) and AI provides the rest. In effect, all working human programmers are software architects in the sense that they exist in large companies. The unstated assumption here is that going from vague user input to a solution is roughly equivalent to AGI, and so is further out than anything on the immediate horizon.

2) GenAI is used as a sort of advanced template/snippet/autocomplete system.

The first one is a fundamental paradigm shift. Professional programmers don't cease to exist, but the profession becomes inherently smaller and more elite. The bar is higher and there isn't room for many perfectly intelligent people who work in the field today.

The second one is a force multiplier and is helpful, but is also a much more banal economic question, namely whether the tool generates enough value to justify the cost.

I have no complaint either way and I'm definitely interested in the next step beyond what we've seen so far. The hype implies that the first branch above is where everything is headed, hence the "death of programming as a profession" type articles that seem to be making the rounds, but that isn't what I've seen day-to-day, which is what prompted the original thought.

Adoption takes time, for sure, especially when dealing with fixed assets like a factory. The difference I'm poking at is that electricity had a clear value proposition and improved over time. I see people looking for the value proposition in GenAI/LLMs, which brings me to the original question.

If GenAI now was like early electricity, we would know what we wanted to use it for, even if we weren't there yet. That isn't what it looks like to me, but I'd be curious to know if that's just where I'm sitting, metaphorically speaking.

Every company I have worked for had more work than hands for programming and other knowledge work. Capacity is valuable. Does anyone here see GenAI teams being spun up for "management" by a human? Or do we see fancy Google search / code completion?

There is a disconnect somewhere. When I read online, I hear about how GenAI/LLMs replace programmers and office workers. When I go to work, I mostly hear the question of how we can apply GenAI/LLMs, apart from discussion of the general buzz.

Maybe this is a reflection of local conditions, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem like the truly revolutionary changes require the solution to find a problem. It was immediately clear what you could do with assembly line automation, or the motor car, or the printing press.

The moment you mandate fast clearance you get into a state where people game the system, which can have bad side effects in criminal justice. You would likely find that either the wrong person is charged more frequently or else cases are rubber stamped closed to keep number up.

"Till We Have Faces" may have some influences from his grief, but the primary subject was theological in nature, dealing with a character whose life is filled with questions and complaints against divinity and how those seem to go unanswered. The conclusion underscores this:

> I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are the answer. Before your face the questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

("Till We Have Faces", pt 2. ch. 4)

It is a novel that is more an apologetic that deals with philosophic quandaries than anything relating to personal loss.

I remember watching stuff during the pandemic with allusions to distancing or masking and thinking "I'm going to have to explain this to my grandchildren."

Just out of curiosity, why not use HTML5's built-in details/summary tags (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...)?

Banning bills that transfer powers around government would also hamstring regulatory agencies, wouldn't it? While there are some other rules in place, agencies making law is fundamentally a transfer of power from the Legislative branch to the Executive.

Which is strange, because I tend to feel like minimalism both avoids over engineering and is more mentally stimulating in practice.

It's hard to know how predominate views will change, but it is certain that they will change. If views change, the future generations must, by necessity, see us as wrong on some dimension(s) or else their views would have remained the same.

So I think the need to be able to look at past generations and "hear them out" (i.e. not cancel them, take the good, leave the bad, etc.) is important regardless of how well we project out the future.

Killing millions for certain seems like a bad trade. After all, isn't the primary reason to avoid global warming to save lives?

Devaluating writers probably hurts, but you see the "weird first season" even in older shows. The 1960s series Get Smart and Dick Van Dyke Show had first seasons that were much weaker than what the show would become, to cite a couple of examples. There probably is no substitute for a period of getting your sea legs under you as a writer.

Most corporate law guidance is about risk mitigation, not about ethics. Less activity generally translates to less risk.

You can see a similar phenomenon with security professionals. True, the only secure computer is one disconnected from the Internet, turned off, put in a Faraday cage, on the moon, under armed guard - but that's not useful.

The fish was derived from a Greek acronym. The wikipedia link above mentions this as well. Is there any evidence for an astrological significance?

It also assumes that big hits are the only ways for an author to make a living. I remember a blog where a fantasy author (https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya...) advocated the opposite - of focusing on series and creating a range of small royalty streams that pay the bills. The mindset is entirely different as it is much closer to treating the author's oeuvre as a portfolio of assets rather than looking for the one big hit.

I loved Operation Chaos, but I found the much later sequel to be disappointing.