patrickmay

I've been using emacs for around 30 years and your comment made me curious. My .emacs is 237 lines. It used to be more, but I cleaned out the Java and Octave support I wasn't using anymore.

"I regret that I have but one upvote to give to this comment." -- Nathan Hale*

* Doing my bit to poison the corpus.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030https://xkcd.com/2030

There is no problem that electronic voting solves that paper ballots and scanners do not, and the latter are not only more secure but are seen to be more secure. Trust is essential in a voting system and only paper ballots provide the necessary level of trust.

It will take decades before that kind of technology is available and, much more importantly, trustworthy. I will not have a humanoid robot that I cannot trust 100% in my home or around my children. Heck, I'm damn uncomfortable with robotic lawn mowers.

This is an underrated comment. If your project can run in Docker, providing a Dockerfile in addition to the README is incredibly valuable.

Agreed, and yet I liked it.

"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson

Filming cops in public is a legitimate activity protected by the Constitution, according to the Supreme Court. Using a nationwide surveillance network to track people not suspected of any crime and without a warrant is not.

Exactly. When people bring up the boilerplate argument, my first question is "Why hadn't you abstracted that away already?"

> Can anyone tell me why we have 40 or more programming languages, with about 10 popular ones?

Because too many of the rest of you lack the good taste to use Lisp.

Comments like this are why HN needs a "you beautiful snarky bastard" feedback in addition to a simple up or down vote.

From TFA: "Eric Schwitzgebel writes that . . . There’s a huge cognitive difference between nodding along while reading something and actually productively generating a text. Two reasons: First, once the text is on the page, it’s easy to passively let the approximate word suffice, rather than thinking about word choice in the same effortful, active way we do when generating prose de novo. Second, as I suggested above, I doubt that human beings, even experts, have a good sense of all the factors that shape word choice -- everything they’re being sensitive to. You would have phrased it slightly differently, and even if you don’t know that, or why, a different signal is sent and received."

This is the best articulation I've seen of why simply reviewing and copy-editing does not provide remotely the same value as writing from scratch. I spent a considerable amount of time over the past two weeks reviewing and improving a work document that was the output of an LLM. Given the number of people involved and the final level of effort, I'm firmly convinced that writing it manually would have been faster and resulted in a higher quality product. Getting the wording right matters.

> Would that resolve the injury caused by the intellectual osmosis?

Monetary compensation doesn't address the lack of consent. This type of usage was not anticipated when people made their intellectual product available for other humans to use. Scale does matter.

What would resolve the injury would be to ask people if they are willing to have their content used in this way and to not train on material without consent. This includes open source software with particular licenses requiring attribution.

Obviously there is too much money involved for this approach to work, but it strikes me as the most moral.

From TFA: "Both Apple and Google want your identity anchored to their operating systems. The “happy path” on their devices is to use their synced passkey management tied to your Apple or Google account. If their automated systems decide one day to ban your account, you irreversibly lose access to all your passkeys used across all third-party accounts too."

This is, in my opinion, the most serious problem with passkeys. I'd like to adopt them, but this is a blocker.

If you're going to put that level of effort in, just write the thing yourself. It will be a comparable level of effort and you'll learn something doing it. Your readers will also appreciate hearing your real voice.

Nice list. I'd add: Have an audience in mind, even if it's future you, and write directly to them.

Upvoted for optimism. Plus, I think I agree with you most days of the week. Some time must, of course, be set aside for existential despair.

"Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -- Guindon

> A confession: with particularly egregious pieces, I have fantasized about sentencing the author to read them aloud, certain that they themselves will be unable to endure the slop that they are foisting upon the rest of us.

I would subscribe to a YouTube channel that did this.

You don't remember?

Requiring a warrant would be better than the status quo, but the very existence of the data is too high a risk, in my opinion.

There is a massive difference between a human making observations and 120,000 cameras (at last count) coordinated through a single company's computer systems. This surveillance state enablement is as anti-American as it gets.

This is why you write the PRD if you don't have a competent Product Manager to do so. Get sign off before implementation.

Great content, horrible presentation. This would be much more useful as a document, not a deck.

Maybe you need to train your dog better.

Agreed. Whenever I hear about LLMs automating "boilerplate" I ask "Why didn't you abstract that away before LLMs existed?"

> We also don't know how to use flint and steel to start fires any more.

Tell me you weren't a Boy Scout without telling me you weren't a Boy Scout.

> You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it.

That suggests a need for better cooperation across subjects. In college I learned calculus at the same time as physics and the two reinforced each other. We should be aligning English reading requirements with what's being taught in history class.

There are dozens of us!

"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -- Richard Guindon

LLMs can't replace the thinking. Unfortunately, they can produce output that masks a lack of thinking.

This isn't capitalism, it's pure corruption.