morsecodist

> And that's how you end up with the interstate cutting off the poor/black section of town from the rest.

It is the exact opposite. Fighting this sort of thing is exactly why I want to get involved. The reason that these projects are put in poorer, less white areas is because we give small groups of individuals (sometimes even one individual if they are willing to file a lawsuit) veto power over projects provided they have the time and resources to use these levers. So people build projects through poorer less white areas because these areas often don't have the time or resources to fight back. In my town the plans were to build two wide fast arterial roads, one through the rich neighborhood and one through the poor immigrant neighborhood. Guess which one had a successful campaign to shut it down?

The whole concept of zoning was created, not to concentrate uses as you say but to enforce racial segregation and horde wealth among land owners.

> If every neighborhood says no to new section 8 housing, where does it go?

Exactly! We do have this happen because of this hyper-specific veto levers so we are left with section 8 housing pushed to the worst parts of towns.

People want a single family home but is it because they want the shape or because society is arranged such that it is functionally the only way for the middle class to build wealth and feel a sense of housing stability? And would they still want it if the subsidies were removed and they had to internalize the costs? I am sure that some people really do want it, probably a lot but it seems strange to use that as a reason to put your thumb on the scales.

I get that people are concerned but I feel like all of society is negotiating things like this. Some people feel uncomfortable seeing people with piercings or tattoos, should we ban them or restrict the places they should go? Everything is a trade off but I don't feel good treating certain types of people like they are toxic waste that needs to be contained.

I agree that people want things in theory but aren't willing support the policies necessary but that's why we need a movement to help change that.

Also I think it's important to consider what we call a community. We can't consider every single block a community, a community is a town or even a metro area. They use shared water, to to shared schools, and they need to make decisions together because these things are interconnected.

Is there a genuine market preference for single family home ownership? I'm sure some people prefer to live that way especially because it allows you to take advantage of the ample subsidies we give single family home ownership. But if there was a preference for it we wouldn't need to artificially restrict people's ability to redevelop them into multi family homes. No one would choose to live in them so no one would build them.

The idea behind the YIMBY movement is not that community input is bad it's that the community input process structurally encourages input only from people who don't like the project. The point of YIMBY activism is to show up in your own community (your back yard if you will) to say that you do want housing.

It's such a weird comment that has nothing to do with the rest of the article. The YIMBY movement is concerned with people saying no to housing, it doesn't say anything about community input on assessment or anything else. It seems like the author has some sort of ax to grind.

I am more referring to my experience in general not just in the thread. I see this PhD thing a lot in the media.

It's not that I think model version doesn't matter. I switch between them all the time (often to downgrade as much as upgrade honestly). It's that I think people are misrepresenting the kinds of results you can get from these models and seem to take it as a personal attack and come up with excuses when you talk about limitations that you've encountered. It makes it difficult to engage in conversations about tools and I've gotten to the point where I don't believe anything anyone says about it anymore and I just try tools for myself.

I said people are saying the models are PhD level intelligent not that you need to be. I get a ton of value from them and I don't have a PhD.

Thank you. It is so frustrating that you hear that LLMs are a PhD level intelligence capable of any task you can throw at it and when it can't solve your problem you hear: "well you are using a1.36 and b1.37-high is really the one this time" (despite the fact that you have been hearing these claims since before that model came out) or "you are prompting it wrong, have you tried describing all of your app features and your entire approach to coding in a text file then using that to get the AI to make a list of prompts then refining those prompts into different text files and put those back into the AI..."

I have had a pretty similar experience to you. I have found some value here:

- I find it is pretty good at making fairly self-contained react components or even pages especially if you are using a popular UI library

- It is pretty reliable at making well-defined pure functions and I find it easier to validate that these are correct

- It can be good for boilerplate in popular frameworks

I sometimes feel like I am losing my mind because people report these super powerful end to end experiences and I have yet to see anything close in my day to day usage despite really trying. I find it completely falls over on a complete feature. I tried using aider and people seem to love it but it was just a disaster for me. I wanted to implement a fairly simple templated email feature in a Next.js app. The kind of thing that would take me about a day. This is one of the most typical development scenarios I can imagine. I described the feature in it's entirety and aider completely failed, not even close. So I started describing sub-features one by one and it seemed to work better. But as I added more and more, existing parts began to break, I explained the issues to aider and it just got worse and worse with every prompt. I tried to fix it manually but the code was a mess.

This isn't really the meaning of the Chinese room. The Chinese room presupposes that the output is identical to that of a speaker who understands the language. It is not arguing that there is any sort of limit to what an AI can do with its output and it is compatible with the AI refusing to answer or wanting to talk about something else.

They may be different kinds of issues but they are the issues that actually matter.

I think it actually makes sense to trust your vibes more than benchmarks. The act of creating a benchmark is the hard part. If we had a perfect benchmark AI problems would be trivially solvable. Benchmarks are meaningless on their own, they are supposed to be a proxy for actual usefulness.

I'm not sure what is better than, can it do what I want? And for me the ratio of yes to no on that hasn't changed too much.

I agree on the diminishing returns and that the code doesn't cut it on its own. I really haven't noticed a significant shift in quality in a while. I disagree on the productivity though.

Even for something like a script to do some quick debugging or answering a question it's been a huge boon to my productivity. It's made me more ambitious and take on projects I wouldn't have otherwise.

I also don't really believe that workers are currently being replaced by LLMs. I have yet to see a system that comes anywhere close to replacing a worker. I think these layoffs are part of a trend that started before the LLM hype and it's just a convenient narrative. I'm not saying that there will be no job loss as a result of LLMs I'm just not convinced it's happening now.

Setting aside predictions about the future and what is best for humanity and all that for a moment this is just such a bummer on a personal level. My whole job would become the worst parts of my job.

Isn't this what Rc is?

I feel it doesn't make sense to conflate resource management with garbage collection. The cleanup actions here are more like releasing a lock, deleting temporary files, or closing a connection. This doesn't lead to a lack of safety. These resources already need to deal with these uninitialised states. For example, consider a lock management object. You shouldn't assume you have the lock just because you have a reference to the manager resource. It's totally normal to have objects that require some sort of initialization.

It doesn't seem to be widely used yet. I used it to clean up temporary files for a loader that downloads them.

I just wrote a blog post (https://morsecodist.io/blog/typescript-resource-management) about this feature. I love it and I feel it still hasn't caught on in the ecosystem.

This is a super fair summary and has shifted my thinking on this a bit thanks.

No I think almost all people doing altruism at least think what they are doing is effective. I totally get that they EA people believe they have found the one true way but so does do others. Even if EA is correct it just makes talking about it confusing. Imagine if Darwin has called his theory "correct biology".

Effective Altruism is such an interesting title. Almost no one views their Altruism as ineffective. The differentiator is what makes their flavor of Altruism effective, but that's not in the title. It would be like calling the movement "real Altruism" or "good Altruism".

A good name might be rational Altruism because in practice these people are from the rationalist movement and doing Altruism, or what they feel is Altruism. But the "rationalist" title suffers from similar problems.

Subjectively the "getting lost" feels totally different than human conversations. Once there is something bad in the context it seems almost impossible to get back on track. All subsequent responses become get a lot worse and it starts contradicting itself. It is possible that with more training this problem can be improved, but what is interesting to me isn't it's worse than humans in this way but that this sort of difficulty scales differently than it does in humans. I would love to get some more objective descriptions of these subjective notions.

This matches my experience exactly. "poisoned" is a great way to put it. I find once something has gone wrong all subsequent responses are bad. This is why I am iffy on ChatGPT's memory features. I don't notice it causing any huge problems but I don't love how it pollutes my context in ways I don't fully understand.

I totally get that there are reasons to use proton mail and I even use it. But I was purely talking about product here. I think some people allow their feelings about data privacy and business practices to cloud their judgement about product.

I feel that people are so weirdly negative about Google's products. I have some concerns about Google but I need to admit their products are good. I think a lot of people on here don't like them as a business and it clouds their views of the products.

> Gmail

Gmail is the best email provider of all time by a huge amount and has been since it's inception. I use proton mail as well and it's worse, a lot worse. It's slower, has fewer features and is not as good looking. From what I've seen of apple Mail and outlook they are worse still.

> Android

Personally, I prefer Android. There are a lot of things I'd miss going to iPhone. Like custom launchers, having a different browser, an app drawer, the way widgets work, ect...

> Chrome

I am concerned about the chromium engine creating a browser monoculture so I use Firefox. I have used Firefox every day for years and I have to say it's worse. Whenever I use chrome for a small thing I need I realize that its better. It's faster, better looking, things just work on it (I know part of this is because of its dominance but that's irrelevant when evaluating product quality). I don't use it but I'm not going to pretend that it's worse.

It's always great to see someone post about something I think about a lot. Most people want to lead a happy life but that doesn't really help you navigate these time trade offs. Assuming your job makes you unhappy and you work super hard for 40 years and then retire and are having a great retirement and are loving life for 10 years you may say the hard work was worth it because current you is now only experiencing the benefits. But was it really worth it? Conversely, if you pursued a life of hedonism and in your later years are unhealthy and feeling a lack of meaning does that invalidate the happiness you felt earlier? I am not sure there is ever a clear answer to these questions. Most people accept some degree of short term sacrifice for longer term happiness but there is always some limit to what you are willing to go through today for a better life tomorrow.

I see a lot of concern like this about dependencies, mostly in node. I'm sure it's an issue I'm just not convinced it's as big of a problem as people say. We have scanners that can help keep your dependencies secure automatically. If you take a dependency and it goes unmaintained is it really that much worse than the relevant code in your own codebase going unmaintained?

I totally agree with the sentiment. I am pretty skeptical of this sort of broad advice. People who achieve success did so under specific conditions. It is unclear which aspects of their strategy are universal and which were only effective under their conditions. Advice based on a broader survey of examples may be a bit better but we need to be honest about how hard it is to extract meaningful insights from this sort of thing. Even something like the time period you picked your examples from has huge implications for what you are studying.

For me it's the opposite. We don't really have a reliable way of getting the models to do what we want or even to measure if they are doing what we want.

Agreed. I have had almost the same experience. The package management and building alone makes Rust worth it for me.

What kind of answer would you expect to a question like that? I couldn't tell you how much time and money I save writing in a programming language instead of raw machine code but I can rest assured that it's the right call.