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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • what’s likely is that users will scatter across so many sites, apps, proxies, and channels that they’ll become untraceable, guaranteeing the failure of future regulations. And unlike today, many of those new destinations will be dangerous, unmoderated, and openly hostile to enforcement.

    That seems to be the argument; that these verification laws specifically target dedicated porn sites while similar content still exists all over and is not similarly punished, which given people’s extreme and natural aversion to doing KYC for porn will cause them to leave for wherever doesn’t demand it, killing off what protections now exist against especially shady material and practices.




  • Her data shows that violent and non-violent methods often work in tandem

    Does it? I read the whole interview in the OP post and it does not seem like this would be the opinion of the researcher:

    The finding is that civil resistance campaigns often lead to longer-term reforms and changes that bring about democratization compared with violent campaigns. Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns — whether the campaigns succeeded or failed. This is because even though they “failed” in the short term, the nonviolent campaigns tended to empower moderates or reformers within the ruling elites who gradually began to initiate changes and liberalize the polity.

    How do you justify the claim that her data shows the usefulness of violent civil resistance campaigns?


  • What you confuse here is doing something that can benefit from applying logical thinking with doing science.

    I’m not confusing that. Effective programming requires and consists of small scale application of the scientific method to the systems you work with.

    the argument has become “but it seems to be thinking to me”

    I wasn’t making that argument so I don’t know what you’re getting at with this. For the purposes of this discussion I think it doesn’t matter at all how it was written or whether what wrote it is truly intelligent, the important thing is the code that is the end result, whether it does what it is intended to and nothing harmful, and whether the programmer working with it is able to accurately determine if it does what it is intended to.

    The central point of it is that, by the very nature of LKMs to produce statistically plausible output, self-experimenting with them subjects one to very strong psychological biases because of the Barnum effect and therefore it is, first, not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-exoerimentation(!) , and second, it is even harmful because these effects lead to self-reinforcing and harmful beliefs.

    I feel like “not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-exoerimentation(!)” is necessarily a claim that reading and testing code is something no one can do, which is absurd. If the output is often correct, then the means of creating it is likely useful, and you can tell if the output is correct by evaluating it in the same way you evaluate any computer program, without needing to directly evaluate the LLM itself. It should be obvious that this is a possible thing to do. Saying not to do it seems kind of like some “don’t look up” stuff.


  • Are you saying that it is not possible to use scientific methods to systematically and objectively compare programming tools and methods?

    No, I’m saying the opposite, and I’m offended at what the author seems to be suggesting, that this should only be attempted by academics, and that programmers should only defer to them and refrain from attempting this to inform their own work and what tools will be useful to them. An absolutely insane idea given that the task of systematic evaluation and seeking greater objectivity is at the core of what programmers do. A programmer should obviously be using their experience writing and testing both typing systems to decide which is right for their project, they should not assume they are incapable of objective judgment and defer their thinking to computer science researchers who don’t directly deal with the same things they do and aren’t considering the same questions.

    This was given as an example of someone falling for manipulative trickery:

    A recent example was an experiment by a CloudFlare engineer at using an “AI agent” to build an auth library from scratch.

    From the project repository page:

    I was an AI skeptic. I thought LLMs were glorified Markov chain generators that didn’t actually understand code and couldn’t produce anything novel. I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at. And then, uh… the code actually looked pretty good. Not perfect, but I just told the AI to fix things, and it did. I was shocked.

    But understanding and testing code is not (necessarily) guesswork. There is no reason to assume this person is incapable of it, and no reason to justify the idea that it should never be attempted by ordinary programmers when that is the main task of programming.


  • The problem, though, with responding to blog posts like that, as I did here (unfortunately), is that they aren’t made to debate or arrive at a truth, but to reinforce belief. The author is simultaneously putting himself on the record as having hardline opinions and putting himself in the position of having to defend them. Both are very effective at reinforcing those beliefs.

    A very useful question to ask yourself when reading anything (fiction, non-fiction, blogs, books, whatever) is “what does the author want to believe is true?”

    Because a lot of writing is just as much about the author convincing themselves as it is about them addressing the reader. …

    There is no winning in a debate with somebody who is deliberately not paying attention.

    This is all also a great argument against the many articles claiming that LLMs are useless for coding, in which the authors all seem to have a very strong bias. I can agree that it’s a very good idea to distrust what people are saying about how programming should be done, including mistrusting claims about how AI can and should be used for it.

    We need science #

    Our only recourse as a field is the same as with naturopathy: scientific studies by impartial researchers. That takes time, which means we have a responsibility to hold off as research plays out

    This on the other hand is pure bullshit. Writing code is itself a process of scientific exploration; you think about what will happen, and then you test it, from different angles, to confirm or falsify your assumptions. The author seems to be saying that both evaluating correctness of LLM output and the use of Typescript is comparable to falling for homeopathy by misattributing the cause of recovering from illness. The idea that programmers should not use their own judgment or do their own experimentation, that they have no way of telling if code works or is good, to me seems like a wholesale rejection of programming as a craft. If someone is avoiding self experimentation as suggested I don’t know how they can even say that programming is something they do.


  • This constant surveillance could tax cognition in ways that we don’t yet understand. The faculties compromised by surveillance “are those that allow us to focus on what we’re doing: attention, working memory, and so on,” Belletier says. “If these processes are taxed by being monitored, you’d expect deteriorating capacity to concentrate.”

    Well that checks out






  • That’s a great way to do it, but human attention on your code is a scarce and valuable resource. LLMs are great for the sort of lazy stupid questions where you benefit from a quick answer, but also don’t want to waste someone else’s time on. When you are learning nearly all the questions you’ll have will be like this, your progress is gated on finding the answers, and even if you are taking a class and it’s someone’s job to look at your code and help you understand what’s wrong with it, you have to wait your turn for that and only get so much help.





  • as a commemoration of the anime Sword Art Online, Luckey created a VR headset art piece that kills its human user in real life when the user dies digitally in the video game, by means of several explosive charges affixed above the screen

    Luckey blogged, “The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me—you instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.”[77] Luckey additionally described it as “just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design”. He also mentioned that while it is “the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user, it won’t be the last.”[75]

    … and his job is making autonomous weapon systems. I wonder what the future built by Jigsaw types like this is gonna look like