p3x.dediz, diz@awful.systems
Instance: awful.systems
Joined: 3 years ago
Posts: 8
Comments: 99
Posts and Comments by diz, diz@awful.systems
techtakes
Comments by diz, diz@awful.systems
Oh, by far. There’s only 80 decimal places in that at most.
It got to be a quantum sweatshop: a quantum computer for AGI (a guy instead)
How much does he think an engineer spends on CAD tools, anyway? Altium is like, what, $2500 / year? Very “how much can a banana cost”.
It’s all capital costs for tools, pretty much, anyway, maybe CAD should start charging per net lmao.
Oh they are going to charge per token for github copilot? That thing is a money waste for everyone, I’m pretty sure. I get a mix of inane mildly good suggestions, irrelevant stuff, and an occasional suggestion of super evil sabotage. Due to mild OCD about issues, I tend to have to fix said mildly good suggestions, but from the objective perspective that nitpickery is not worth it, everything was fine without, we had compiler warnings, coverity, etc.
edit: the difference being that the old stuff was deterministic and you just ran it on the whole codebase and had it pass. Unlike gh copilot that’ll just make up new shit. And as for the times it caught some bad bug that you made… add more tests instead.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if they really don’t, they’re just advertising the advertising lol.
edit: Basically what if you spent a trillion dollars so that you could beam ads to people’s bathroom mirrors. And better yet, ads reflected from water down in their toilets. Then in the interest of expediency you just take random ads and put them there for free, and your actual product, shares, sells better.
It makes every bad programmer into a 10x bad programmer (equivalent to 10 bad programmers).
I’m afraid they already had that exact idea when they named the startup “oklo”.
I think it’s not very difficult to construct a really shitty small reactor that is horrendously expensive per watt. Can probably be built in a year if you get rid of NRC and just half ass it completely.
I mean, Demon Core was a small reactor. You pretty much have to do a lot of work to ensure you won’t create a small reactor when a truckload of fresh fuel falls into a river.
What’s difficult is making a safe reactor that is actually making electricity at somewhat reasonable price per watt.
Nuclear already makes 9% of world’s electricity.
Curiously enough you also have those radon spas in old uranium mines. I don’t think hinging their luck on “a little radiation is good for you” worked for anyone.
Shorting the market requires precise timing. Being early is just as bad as being wrong.
Exactly. It is not enough to know that a company stock will go down. It is necessary to know that it will never go higher than a certain point above the current value (not even momentarily) before it goes down. If you have a fuckload of other people’s money you can just keep double-or-nothing-ing it, that’s what banks were doing to gamestop, except that this can sometimes cause the stock to go even higher (a short squeeze), which would make you (who doesn’t actually have a fuckload of other people’s money) lose all of your money.
edit: also the other concerning possibility is that stock prices can go up simply due to the dollar going down.
The only thing that is allowed to tell good art from slop is the AI which needs to consume good art and not slop.
Its spelled “masterdebating”.
Hyping up AI is bad, so it’s alright to call someone a promptfondler for fondling prompt.
I mostly see "clanker" in reference to products of particularly asinine promptfondling: spambot "agents" that post and even respond to comments, LLM-based scam calls, call center replacement, etc.
These bots don't derive their wrongness from the wrongness of promptfondling, these things are part of why promptfondling is wrong.
Doesn’t clanker come from some Star Wars thing where they use it like a racial slur against robots, who are basically sapient things with feelings within its fiction? Being based on “cracker” would be alright,
I assume the writers wanted to portray the robots as unfairly oppressed, while simultaneously not trivializing actual oppression of actual people (the way "wireback" would have, or I dunno "cogger" or something).
but the way I see it used is mostly white people LARPing a time and place when they could say the N-word with impunity.
Well yeah that would indeed be racist.
I’m seeing a lot of people basically going “I hate naggers, these naggers are ruining the neighborhood, go to the back of the bus nagger, let’s go lynch that nagger” and thinking that’s funny because haha it’s not the bad word technically.
That just seems like an instance of good ol anti person racism / people trying to offend other people while not particularly giving a shit about the bots one way or the other.
we should recognize the difference
The what now? You don't think there's a lot of homophobia that follows "castigating someone for what they do" format, or you think its a lot less bad according to some siskinded definition of what makes slurs bad that somehow manages to completely ignore anything that actually makes slurs bad?
I think that’s the difference between “promptfondler” and “clanker”. The latter is clearly inspired by bigoted slurs.
Such as... "cracker"? Given how the law protects but doesn't bind AI, that seems oddly spot on.
Note also that genuine labor saving stuff like say the Unity engine with Unity asset store, did result in an absolute flood of shovelware on Steam back in the mid 2010s (although that probably had as much having to do with Steam FOMO-ing about the possibility of not letting the next Minecraft onto Steam).
As a thought experiment imagine an unreliable labor saving tool that speeds up half* of the work 20x, and slows down the other half 3x. You would end up 1.525 times slower.
The fraction of work (not by lines but by hours) that AI helps with is probably less than 50% , and the speed up is probably worse than 20x.
Slowdown could be due to some combination of
- Trying to do it with AI until you sink too much time into that and then doing it yourself (>2x slowdown here).
- Being slower at working with the code you didn't write.
- It being much harder to debug code you didn't write.
- Plagiarism being inferior to using open source libraries.
footnote: "half" as measured by the pre-tool hours.
And yet you are the one person here who is equating Mexicans and Black people with machines. People with disabilities, too, huh. Lemme guess next time we're pointing and laughing at how some hyped-up "PhD level chatbot" can't count the Es in dingleberry, you'll be likening that to ableism.
When you're attempting to humanize machines by likening the insults against machines to insults against people, this does more to dehumanize people than to humanize machines.
edit: Also I never seen and couldn't find instances of "wireback" being used outside pro-bot sentiments and hand-wringing about how anti bot people are akhtually racist. Had you, or is it all second or third hand? It's entirely possible that it is something botlickers (can I say that or is that not OK?) came up with.
edit: especially considering that these "anti-robot slurs" seem to originate in scifi stories where the robots are being oppressed, whereby the author is purposefully choosing that slur to undermine the position of anti robot characters in the story. It may well be that for the same reason that author has in choosing these slurs, they are rarely used (in the earnest).
To be honest, hand wringing over “clanker” being a slur and all that strikes me as increasingly equivalent to hand wringing over calling nazis nazis. The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is that I’d prefer the new so called slur to be “chatgpt”, genericized and negative connotated.
If you are in the US, we’ve had our health experts replaced with AI, see the “MAHA report”. We’re one moron AI-pilled president away from a less fun version of Skynet, whereby a chatbot talks the president into launching nukes and kills itself along with a few billion people.
Complaints about dehumanizing these things is even more meritless than a CEO complaining that someone is dehumanizing Exxon (which is at least made of people).
These things are extension of those in power, not some marginalized underdogs like cute robots in scifi. As an extension of corporations, it already got more rights than any human - imagine what would happen to a human participant in a criminal conspiracy to commit murder and contrast that with what happens when a chatbot talks someone into a crime.
I think this is spot on. I had that same thing happen at my former employer, which bought a lot of entirely pointless startups in 2010s instead of investing in core business equipment and processes.
NotAwfulTechPython code really requires 100% branch coverage tests as an absolute minimim… with statically typed languages the compiler will catch some types of bugs in branches you don’t test, with python chances are it won’t.
edit: basically think of non covered lines the way you think about files you didn't compile.
Even to the extent that they are "prompting it wrong" it's still on the AI companies for calling this shit "AI". LLMs fundamentally do not even attempt to do cognitive work (the way a chess engine does by iterating over possible moves).
Also, LLM tools do not exist. All you can get is a sales demo for the company stock (the actual product being sold), built to impress how close to AGI the company is. You have to creatively misuse these things to get any value out of them.
The closest they get to tools is "AI coding", but even then, these things plagiarize code you don't even want plagiarized (because its MIT licensed and you'd rather keep up with upstream fixes).
Python code really requires 100% branch coverage tests as an absolute minimim… with statically typed languages the compiler will catch some types of bugs in branches you don’t test, with python chances are it won’t.
edit: basically think of non covered lines the way you think about files you didn't compile.
Even to the extent that they are "prompting it wrong" it's still on the AI companies for calling this shit "AI". LLMs fundamentally do not even attempt to do cognitive work (the way a chess engine does by iterating over possible moves).
Also, LLM tools do not exist. All you can get is a sales demo for the company stock (the actual product being sold), built to impress how close to AGI the company is. You have to creatively misuse these things to get any value out of them.
The closest they get to tools is "AI coding", but even then, these things plagiarize code you don't even want plagiarized (because its MIT licensed and you'd rather keep up with upstream fixes).
But just hear me out: if you delete your old emails, you won’t be roped into paying for extra space, and Microsoft or Google will have a little less money to buy water with!
Switch to Linux and avoid using any Microsoft products to conserve even more water.
The problem is that to start breaking encryption you need quantum computing with a bunch of qubits as originally defined and not "our lawyer signed off on the claim that we have 1000 qubits".
I wonder if the weird tags are even strictly necessary, or if a sufficiently strongly worded and repetitive message would suffice.
Its fucking disgusting how they denigrate the very work on which they built their fucking business on. I think its a mixture of the two though, they want it plagiarized so that it looks like their bot is doing more coding than it is actually capable of.
Oh absolutely. My current project is sitting in a private git repo, hosted on a VPS. And no fucking way will I share it under anything less than GPL3 .
We need a license with specific AI verbiage. Forbidding training outright won't work (they just claim fair use).
I was thinking adding a requirement that the license header should not be removed unless a specific string ("This code was adapted from libsomeshit_6.23") is included in the comments by the tool, for the purpose of propagation of security fixes and supporting a consulting market for the authors. In the US they do own the judges, but in the rest of the world the minuscule alleged benefit of not attributing would be weighted against harm to their customers (security fixes not propagated) and harm to the authors (missing out on consulting gigs).
edit: perhaps even an explainer that authors see non attribution as fundamentally fraudulent against the user of the coding tool: the authors of libsomeshit routinely publish security fixes and the user of the coding tool, who has been defrauded to believe that the code was created de-novo by the coding tool, is likely to suffer harm from misuse of published security fixes by hackers (which wouldn't be possible if the code was in fact created de-novo).
I think provenance has value outside copyright... here's a hypothetical scenario:
libsomeshit is licensed under MIT-0 . It does not even need attribution. Version 3.0 has introduced a security exploit. It has been fixed in version 6.23 and widely reported.
A plagiaristic LLM with training date cutoff before 6.23 can just shit out the exploit in question, even though it already has been fixed.
A less plagiaristic LLM could RAG in the current version of libsomeshit and perhaps avoid introducing the exploit and update the BOM with a reference to "libsomeshit 6.23" so that when version 6.934 fixes some other big bad exploit an automated tool could raise an alarm.
Better yet, it could actually add a proper dependency instead of cut and pasting things.
And it would not need to store libsomeshit inside its weights (which is extremely expensive) at the same fidelity. It just needs to be able to shit out a vector database's key.
I think the market right now is far too distorted by idiots with money trying to build the robot god. Code plagiarism is an integral part of it, because it makes the LLM appear closer to singularity (it can write code for itself! it is gonna recursively self-improve!).
In case of code, what I find the most infuriating is that they didn't even need to plagiarize. Much of open source code is permissively enough licensed, requiring only attribution.
Anthropic plagiarizes it when they prompt their tool to claim that it wrote the code from some sort of general knowledge, it just learned from all the implementations blah blah blah to make their tool look more impressive.
I don't need that, in fact it would be vastly superior to just "steal" from one particularly good implementation that has a compatible license you can just comply with. (And better yet to try to avoid copying the code and to find a library if at all possible). Why in the fuck even do the copyright laundering on code that is under MIT or similar license? The authors literally tell you that you can just use it.
No no I am talking of actual non bullshit work on the underlying math. Think layernorm, skip connections, that sort of thing, changes how the neural network is computed so that it trains more effectively. edit: in that case would be changing it so that after training, at inference for the typical query, most (intermediary) values computed will be zero.
I dunno, I guess I should try it just to see what the buzz is all about, but I am rather opposed to plagiarism and river boiling combination, and paying them money is like having Peter Thiel do 10x donations matching for donations to a captain planet villain.
I personally want a model that does not store much specific code in its weights, uses RAG on compatibly licensed open source and cites what it RAG’d . E.g. I want to set app icon on Linux, it’s fine if it looks into GLFW and just borrows code with attribution that I will make sure to preserve. I don’t need it to be gaslighting me that it wrote it from reading the docs. And this isn’t literature, theres nothing to be gained from trying to dilute copyright by mixing together a hundred different pieces of code doing the same thing.
I also don’t particularly get the need to hop onto the bandwagon right away.
It has all the feel of boiling a lake to do for(int i=0; i
Do leaders even believe that generative AI is useful?
There's a very long history of extremely effective labor saving tools in software.
Isn’t it part of the lawsuit that one of the developers literally said that downloading torrents on a corporate machine feels wrong?
That they routinely use bittorrent protocol for data only makes it more willful, since they know how it works while your average Joe may not understand that he is distributing anything.
Meta was “allegedly” seeding porn to speed up their book downloads. (arstechnica.com)
Sounds like meta’s judge will have to invent a grand unified theory of fair use to excuse this.
Glass plates it is, then. Good luck matching the resolution.
In all seriousness though I think your normal set up would be detectable even on normal 35mm film due to 1: insufficient resolution (even at 4k, probably even at 8k), and 2: insufficient dynamic range. There would probably also be some effects of spectral response mismatch - reds that are cut off by the film’s spectral response would be converted into film-visible reds by a display. Il
Detection of forgery may require use of a microscope and maybe some statistical techniques. Even if the pixels are smaller than film grains, pixels are on a regular grid and film grains are not.
Edit: trained eyeballing may also work fine if you are familiar with the look of that specific film.
Oh wow it is precisely the problem I "predicted" before: there are surprisingly few production grade implementations to plagiarize from.
Even for seemingly simple stuff. You might think parsing floating point numbers from strings would have a gazillion examples. But it is quite tricky to do it correctly (a correct implementation allows you to convert a floating point number to a string with enough digits, and back, and always obtain precisely the same number that you started with). So even for such omnipresent example, which has probably been implemented well over 10 000 times by various students, if you start pestering your bot with requests to make it better, if you have the bots write the tests and pass them, you could end up plagiarizing something identifiable.
edit: and even suppose there were 2, or 3, or 5 exfat implementations. They would be too different to "blur" together. The deniable plagiarism that they are trying to sell - "it learns the answer in general from many implementations, then writes original code" - is bullshit.
I'm kind of dubious its effective in any term whatsoever, unless the term is "nothing works but we got a lot of it".
In 3 months they'll think they're 40% faster while being 38% slower. And sometime in 2026 they will be exactly 100% slower - the moment referred to as "technological singularity".
Yeah, the glorious future where every half-as-good-as-expert developer is now only 25% as good as an expert (a level of performance also known as being "completely shit at it"), but he's writing 10x the amount of unusable shitcode.
I think more low tier output would be a disaster.
Even pre AI I had to deal with a project where they shoved testing and compliance at juniors for a long time. What a fucking mess it was. I had to go through every commit mentioning Coverity because they had a junior fixing coverity flagged "issues". I spent at least 2 days debugging a memory corruption crash caused by such "fix", and then I had to spend who knows how long reviewing every such "fix".
And don't get me started on tests. 200+ tests, of them none caught several regressions in handling of parameters that are shown early in the frigging how-to. Not some obscure corner case, the stuff you immediately run into if you just follow the documentation.
With AI all the numbers would be much larger - more commits "fixing coverity issues" (and worse yet fixing "issues" that LLM sees in code), more so called "tests" that don't actually flag any real regressions, etc.
I suspect that the kind of people who would "know how to use it" don't use it right now since it has not yet reached "useful if you know how to use it" status.
Software work is dominated by the fat tail distribution of time it takes to figure out and fix a bug. Not by typing code. LLMs, much like any other form of cutting and pasting code without having any clue what it does, gives that distribution a longer, fatter tail, hence its detrimental effect on productivity.