The value extortion plan writes itself. How long before someone pitches the idea that the models explicitly almost keep solving your problem to get you to keep spending? Would you even know?
That’s far-fetched. It’s in the interest of the model builders to solve your problem as efficiently as possible token-wise. High value to user + lower compute costs = better pricing power and better margins overall.
What are the details of this? I'm not playing dumb, and of course I've noticed the decline, but I thought it was a combination of losing the battle with SEO shite and leaning further and further into a 'give the user what you think they want, rather than what they actually asked for' philosophy.
As recently as 15 years ago, Google _explicitly_ stated in their employee handbook that they would NOT, as a matter of principle, include ads in the search results. (Source: worked there at that time.)
Now, they do their best to deprioritize and hide non-ad results...
Only if you are paying per token on the API. If you are paying a fixed monthly fee then they lose money when you need to burn more tokens and they lose customers when you can’t solve your problems within that month and max out your session limits and end up with idle time which you use to check if the other providers have caught up or surpassed your current favourite.
> It’s in the interest of the model builders to solve your problem as efficiently as possible token-wise. High value to user + lower compute costs = better pricing power and better margins overall.
It's only in the interests of the model builders to do that IFF the user can actually tell that the model is giving them the best value for a single dollar.
I was thinking more of deliberate backdoor in code. RCE is an obvious example, but another one could be bias. "I'm sorry ma'am, computer says you are ineligable for a bank account." These ideas aren't new. They were there in 90s already when we still thought about privacy and accountability regarding technology, and dystopian novels already described them long, long ago.
The free market proposition is that competition (especially with Chinese labs and grok) means that Anthropic is welcome to do that. They're even welcome to illegally collude with OpenAi such that ChatGPT is similarly gimped. But switching costs are pretty low. If it turns out I can one shot an issue with Qwen or Deepseek or Kimi thinking, Anthropic loses not just my monthly subscription, but everyone else's I show that too. So no, I think that's some grade A conspiracy theory nonsense you've got there.
It’s not that crazy. It could even happen by accident in pursuit of another unrelated goal. And if it did, a decent chunk of the tech industry would call it “revealed preference” because usage went up.
LLMs became sycophantic and effusive because those responses were rated higher during RLHF, until it became newsworthy how obviously eager-to-please they got, so yes, being highly factually correct and "intelligent" was already not the only priority.
To be clear I don't think that's what they're doing intentionally. Especially on a subscription basis, they'd rather me maximize my value per token, or just not use them. Lulling users into using tokens unproductively is the worst possible option.
The way agents work right now though just sometimes feels that way; they don't have a good way of saying "You're probably going to have to figure this one out yourself".
This is a good point. For example if you have access to a bunch of slot machines, one of them is guaranteed to hit the jackpot. Since switching from one slot machine to another is easy, it is trivial to go from machine to machine until you hit the big bucks. That is why casinos have such large selections of them (for our benefit).
"for our benefit" lol! This is the best description of how we are all interacting with LLMs now. It's not working? Fire up more "agents" ala gas town or whatever
As a rational consumer, how would you distinguish between some intentional "keep pulling the slot machine" failure rate and the intrinsic failure rate?
I feel like saying "the market will fix the incentives" handwaves away the lack of information on internals. After all, look at the market response to Google making their search less reliable - sure, an invested nerd might try Kagi, but Google's still the market leader by a long shot.
My theory is that graffiti is tied to the feeling of lack of agency in one's life. Everyone wants to "make their mark on the world". Some of us get to do that with an interesting career, building a family, getting involved in the community. If you feel excluded from all that, like those things are beyond your reach, you might resort to things like graffiti. IMO it's something that says "I exist, and I can change things around me" for those who don't have a better way to do that.
Based on that we "fix" the problem by making sure that everyone has a chance to make a fulfilling life for themselves. Better & freer education; Healthcare; cost of living & wage support. Etc.
No, the idea is that storing cars takes up a lot of public space. Each parking space is basically a tiny garage.
Why do we give away garage space for free to car owners? Storage for your vehicle in a busy city shouldn't be subsided by default. The space is too valuable and could be used instead for better public benefit.
DHS flagged my passport on a list for literally fighting against terrorist in a US sanctioned anti-terrorist militia. When I returned they interrogated me as if I was a terrorist.
So if you are against the terrorists, you are also a terrorist.
The Americans who fought against the Francoists in the Spanish civil war faced enormous scrutiny back home for what was later described as “being prematurely anti-fascist.” The state worries about people willing to take up arms to protect their ideals without being told to do so (or what those ideals are).
This is the administration of the same FDR who stayed in power for 4 consecutive terms, which imprisoned nearly 150k ethnic Japanese, most of them US citizens, without any due process, and which executed one of the biggest power grabs by the federal administration. In a way, FDR was much more impudent towards law than Trump, but he was not publicly arrogant or silly, and WWII has been won under his rule, so he is considered a good guy.
FDR and the US were actively at war against Hitler and Nazi Germany. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. These were two of the worst, period, regimes to ever exist and they carried out absolutely abominable war crimes that are still studied in history books today.
Trump and ICE are at war with a middle aged mother and a VA nurse. And they're doing all this in Minneapolis because the gangs in LA scared them off.
Many of the interned Japanese were second or third generation US citizens. It was racism and economic competition, and also pandering to important voter constituences, pretending to have something to do with military circumstances. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
This was done despite multiple reports of the military officers who studied the problem and stated that the Japanese pose no threat, are often US patriots, and need not be isolated.
Imagine Russia interning everyone of Ukrainian descent up to third generation because of the war, and everybody be like "Well, fine, they are doing a reasonable thing, let them go on".
You should. It's not meant for your vanity and it represents and extreme overreach by the government. It doesn't make you "cool."
> But you couldn't pay me to go there.
Of course we could. Aside from that this mentality always shocks me. There are more civilians in the US than government agents. What were you expecting when you got here? It's madness..
> One man's terrorist...
Is another mans freedom fighter. Sure, fine, if you want a civil war. Perhaps a more civilized approach is called for? Unless you particularly enjoy digging graves for your friends.
The mentally-ill are running the asylum and executing citizens. No matter what crazy shit the gop/tea party/maga have accused the left of NONE of it came to pass until they themselves were in power.
The administration WANTS a civil war; they’re ensuring one happens.
If you’re against owning guns, you’re in for a world of hurt. So buckle-up butter cup, shit is gonna be insane soon.
> The mentally-ill are running the asylum and executing citizens.
The the natural outcome should be rebellion. Why would it be civil war? Do you presume that the "other half" completely agree with Trump and would literally fight you to the death over it? You bandy about these terms as if you do not understand their true meaning.
> The administration WANTS a civil war
So you're going to play exactly into that? Why on earth would you give your "enemy" precisely what they seem to want? You can't detect the manipulation here?
Arguably, there is a major contingency that will support Trump no matter what. We know this already. They are not shy about it.
So yes, there certainly would be some level of civil war.
It would be wishful thinking it would only be the people rising up against the government. If we had any level of that type unification then we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.
> You should. It's not meant for your vanity and it represents and extreme overreach by the government.
That's your opinion, I don't necessarily share it.
> It doesn't make you "cool."
What made you think that I thought it looked cool. I just realize that at some point play time is over.
> Of course we could.
No, you can't. And the fact that you think you can is interesting. 'No' means 'No'. You can not pay me to go to the United States, period. I have lived on the border for years and have friends there, already missed a funeral. It isn't going to happen until sanity returns and frankly I don't see that happening in the next decade or two so most likely I will never go back there.
> Aside from that this mentality always shocks me.
What shocks you? That people abroad look at the USA and evaluate their options? What's so shocking about that?
> There are more civilians in the US than government agents.
Indeed, and a good chunk voted for this and I can't easily tell them apart.
> What were you expecting when you got here?
Well, the last time I went it cost me a couple of really good boots. Who knows what it will cost me next time?
> It's madness..
Yes, but it is not my madness and I don't have to factor in ICE into my daily affairs. As a visitor into the United States that would be a major factor, as many people have already found out, which you seem to conveniently skip over. I don't visit places where the rule of law is that shaky.
> Is another mans freedom fighter. Sure, fine, if you want a civil war.
No, I don't want a civil war. But I can't stand by idly while people are oppressed by their government and that makes it much better for me not to be exposed to such situations. Countries I will not visit: Russia, China, United States, Iran, North Korea, most of Africa, quite a few more countries in Asia. Countries that I would reluctantly visit: Most of Latin America, probably some others. Countries that I'm happy to visit: all of the EU, some countries bordering the EU, Japan, Australia, New Zealand.
> Perhaps a more civilized approach is called for?
Have you watched the news recently? I think it is pretty clear what the civilized side is in these conflicts.
> Unless you particularly enjoy digging graves for your friends.
No, I don't enjoy that. But my friends that have died in one particular struggle did so in the firm belief that what they were doing was just and right and I share their belief. I'm old enough to realize that if you don't stand up when it matters then you're just as bad as the rest.
Germany had a good chance to stand up to fascism and blew it. If fascists take over where I live or nearby you can count me in to be on the other side. I've read my grandmothers' diaries and I have written about that before, it is a stark reminder of what happens as soon as the gestapo starts doing the rounds.
I will do what it takes to defend my country and the countries of others that are attacked, from within or without. And take into account that I'm really a pacifist at heart, absolutely abhor war and do not believe in the kind of idiocy that war stands for. Even so, there are limits to what I'll let happen before I will reluctantly become an active participant.
You are all over this thread spouting your crap, I highly doubt that anything at all will change your mind. But you sound scared of protests, and you seem to believe that the attackers are the defenders and the other way around. One day the attackers will come for you, and by then there will be nobody left to defend you.
You mean the ones that we had the ability to remove in previous administrations without the need for harassing and assaulting non-criminals and citizens on the street?
As for the list, do you think this DHS compiles a list of its fuckups and publishes it? I can get you some news articles if you’d like.
And their list of fuckups is longer than their list of successes. It's like shooting with a machine gun into a random crowd because you think there might be a criminal in there somewhere. And that's when we for the moment pretend that their stated reason is their real reason, one that becomes increasingly less plausible.
This really is just domestic terrorism, only the government is the one doing the terrorizing.
Here's the problem, from what I've been hearing most of the actual criminals they've been "catching" are turned over by local and state law enforcement agencies with the rest are either in the process of criminal proceedings (that pesky "innocent until proven guilty" thing) or are involved in the immigration process as dictated by law.
They are literally pulling people out of judicial hearings, where the people are trying to comply with the law, and throwing them on airplanes without due process. Or just randomly snatching people off the streets with no probable cause including the occasional US citizen based on their (ancestors) national origin.
Seriously, my step-father's family became US citizens as a result of the Mexican-American War and the federal courts say it's probable cause to detain them based on their physical appearance. Like, WTF???
--edit--
Just remembered my grandmother saying she didn't teach her children Spanish because she didn't want them to grow up with and accent because she was literally beat if she spoke Spanish in school. True, this was 100 years ago but still...
No, blue state sanctuary cities do not turn over illegal alien criminals to ICE. They release them back into the community even though they have a ICE notice on them. ICE is then forced to track down these criminals themselves while being tracked and harassed by crazy far left agitators that do everything in their power to protect these criminals.
You know, for all my flaws I've always tried my hardest to be on the right side of history.
One can both believe that immigration policy is broken and also that the current way it's being enforced is immoral and unlawful. I took the same oath to the constitution when I joined the military as they did when they went into federal service and can see when when things are going off the rails.
My eulogy should be: "U.S. Paratrooper, Decorated Combat Veteran, Crazy Far Left Agitator"
> I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional
The rule of law has left the building. The SC is willing to rubber-stamp nearly anything right now.
Waiting and hoping for common sense to prevail is what allows authoritarian regimes to bulldoze through existing laws and norms. Even if the courts were an avenue for redress, they are being overwhelmed by the daily barrage of new illegal and unconstitutional actions. Once the courts get around to addressing these cases, the damage has been done and the precedent has been set.
Well, as an alternative to rubber stamping it they can overturn any injunctions and let him have eighteen months of moving drone bubbles until the issue has made its way through the lower courts.
See also Alito's outrage about deportations being fast tracked to SCOTUS.
Anything but an administration being able to manipulate the Fed, it seems. Most legal experts believe that will be a hard strike down on the administration
If you think the SCOTUS has been arbitrarily rubber stamping the administration's goals, you haven't been paying attention. I'll fully agree with you it appears to have been fairly partisan, but less than a month again they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states:
>In one of its most consequential rulings of the year, just before breaking for the holidays last week the Supreme Court held that President Trump acted improperly in federalizing the National Guard in Illinois and in activating troops across the state. Although the case centered on the administration’s deployments in Chicago, the court’s ruling suggests that Trump’s actions in Los Angeles and Portland were likewise illegal.
> they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states
That is not what the decision stated - there was even a quote from a justice saying that the administration could easily attain the same result with a different legal mechanism, all but encouraging such a change in behavior.
Edit: the ‘improperly’ portion of your quote is the operative term
Yes, and my point is exactly that a rubber stamping SCOTUS would have literally allowed it even though it was "improper." That's what rubber stamping means.
"Change this sentence, change the date and resubmit" is rubber-stamping - they just require a big-enough fig-leaf and are bold enough to publicly hint at the parameters of the fig-leaf they will accept.
Trump claimed repeatedly and vigorously that whatever the President does is by definition legal. He also repeatedly and vigorously claimed that Obama had broken the law by spying on then-candidate Trump in 2016. I don't know if he himself noticed the contradiction but blustered on anwway or was too dense to notice.
[BTW, Trump wasn't spied on -- Russian assets were spied on and it turned out that some of those communications were with Trump's team. There are ~100 pages of these communications captured in the Mueller report. ]
Talking out of both sides of his mouth is kind of a daily thing at this point. But he's had a lawyer advocate the immunity point before the Supreme Court while he hasn't attempted to prosecute Obama.
They made that ruling while Biden was president. It seems hard to call that an example of rubber stamping for an administration that did not exist yet.
John Roberts and other conservative members of the court do have an ideological commitment to the Unitary Executive Theory of the presidency (foolishly, in my view) but this has the potential to benefit both Democratic and Republican presidents.
That ruling[1] is even worse than rubber stamping. It's saying that no stamp is needed at all.
> It seems hard to call that an example of rubber stamping for an administration that did not exist yet.
The Trump administration absolutely did exist, both in the past and the present (waiting in the wings) in July 2024 when the ruling was issued.
While it's true that all past and future presidents are affected by the ruling, there's exactly one former president and presidential candidate at that time that was likely to face criminal charges for actions taken while in office, in either first or second terms.
It's a bit much to claim that the ruling doesn't have at least the appearance of benefiting Trump exclusively, especially given the timing. The ruling caused many of Trump's trials to be delayed to be effectively concurrent with the 2024 election.
We went 235 years without clarifying that presidents had presumptive immunity; all previous presidents (even Trump) acted under the presumption that prosecution for official acts might be unlikely but was possible.
And they will be perfectly happy to walk it back when (or if) a Democrat is elected president in the future. Stare decisis is no longer a thing with this bunch.
This is all highly commical considering the US has black bagged a foreign president.
That is going to be the court case of the century by the way. Maduro will have lawyers begging to represent him. It will be America on trial and I'm looking forward to the Trump administration absolutely bungling it.
What benefit does it allow for, other than the ability to turn the country into a dictatorship in a matter of hours with a single phone call?
For anyone unaware, one of the main criticisms of that ruling is that the president commanding the military is always considered an official act, and this ruling means the president enjoys "absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate such as the pardon, command of the military, execution of laws, or control of the executive branch."[0]
The ruling made no carveouts or exceptions for blatantly illegal orders. The president could unilaterally eject or kill any member of opposing political parties and future administrations (if there are any) would be completely unable to legally hold them accountable for their heinous crimes.
The benefit is that the president is not subject to retaliatory lawsuits (similar to what the Trump administration is now doing against e.g. James Comey, et al), the threat of which might prevent them from performing their duties effectively while in office.
I’m sympathetic to your concerns, agree that it was a poor ruling, and frankly think we need a constitutional amendment to address the excessive power the presidency has, but the justices aren’t making these rulings without having a real, justifiable rationale behind them and they aren’t making these rulings because they’re in the tank for Donald Trump (Justice Alito excepted)
How so? The ruling was that he had full immunity during "presidential duties", which has many times been interpreted by the SC as "anything he wants to do while president."
And notably, before any further disagreement pops up the other dissenting judges literally said as much. The relevant quote:
"When he uses his official powers in any way, under
the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from
criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official
power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one
day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as
bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the
majority’s message today."
Unless ordering assassinations and launching a coup are "core constitutional powers" of the president, then no the ruling does not give him immunity for that.
As a practical matter, if the president is ordering the military to do those things and the military is obeying those orders, we are far beyond the point where concepts like legal immunity matter.
You’re a student of history, thus I think you understand how “commander in chief of the armed forces” is a constitutional duty without needing further explanation of why.
I think you intended to communicate the Supreme Court would balk at it happening.
Yes.
Much like Kavanaugh balking at ethnicity-based stops after allowing language + skin color based stops. By then, it’s too late.
> Two survivors of the initial attack later appeared to wave at the aircraft after clambering aboard an overturned piece of the hull, before the military killed them in a follow-up strike that also sank the wreckage. It is not clear whether the initial survivors knew that the explosion on their vessel had been caused by a missile attack.
> The Pentagon’s own manual on the laws of war describes a scenario similar to the Sept. 2 boat strike when discussing when service members should refuse to comply with unlawful orders. “For example,” the manual says, “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
It seems extremely relevant. Your argument suggests the president need only appoint a subordinate who will themselves give the desired illegal order without the president's public command. In the unlikely event the subordinate is called to account, the president can simply pardon them.
This is certainly not a hypothetical "parade of horribles", since Trump has already pardoned military officers convicted of war crimes.[1]
War crimes sounds scary as a whole mess of badness, but which one is kind of material. Eg Obama's drone strikes and CIA torture likely count as war crimes, though no court has actually tried him for them, so it's hard to get worked up about Navy Seals (whos job it is to go into war zones and do war-type things) having generically having committed war crimes. Did they rape women and babies, or did they shoot the wrong person in the dark of night who it turns out wasn't actually a threat.
> Gallagher was the subject of a number of reports from fellow SEAL team members, stating that his actions were not in keeping with the rules of war, but these reports were dismissed by the SEAL command structure.
> Other snipers said they witnessed Gallagher taking at least two militarily pointless shots, shooting and killing an unarmed elderly man in a white robe as well as a young girl walking with other girls.
Murdered a prisoner, and was shitty enough his fellow SEALs were uncomfortable enough to complain. Pardoned eventually, by Trump.
Ordering violence orchestrated by the military is a core constitutional power. It's called being "commander-in-chief" of the armed forces.
The ruling makes it very clear that core constitutional powers have conclusive and preclusive (absolute) immunity.
Other official acts have presumptive immunity.
In all cases, the motive is above question. If Trump has a fight with Melania, he can order the CIA to rendition and disappear her. He doesn't even need to claim that she's a spy. It can never be questioned in court. He can then pardon everyone involved, so even the underlings face no court.
In all cases, the official acts are explicitly not admissible as evidence. Using the example above, the District of Columbia can try to prosecute for murder, but is unable to introduce the fact of the order as evidence. If Trump receives a bribe, the official act that he undertook at the briber's behest is similarly inadmissible.
> Ordering violence orchestrated by the military is a core constitutional power. It's called being "commander-in-chief" of the armed forces.
Incorrect. The commander in chief, same as all military officers, has the authority to issue lawful orders to the chain of command below him. He does not have the authority to issue unlawful orders, and if he does, his subordinates have the legal obligation to disobey them. The president does not have constitutional power to order arbitrary violence.
> If Trump has a fight with Melania, he can order the CIA to rendition and disappear her
No he can't because this is against the law, and it is therefore not a presidential power. The president has no constitutional authority to order agencies to violate the law.
> He can then pardon everyone involved, so even the underlings face no court.
This is, unfortunately, true. But it has been true as long as the US has existed.
> If Trump receives a bribe, the official act that he undertook at the briber's behest is similarly inadmissible.
This is true, but the act of taking the bribe is not an exercise of presidential power so he can be charged with accepting a bribe. This is not new to the recent SC decision.
This decision says that he can issue unlawful orders, and there's nothing the court can do about it. He's immune. You don't need immunity for lawful acts. The very best you could argue is that this prevents prosecution for "gray area" acts that may or may not be lawful. But this decision essentially says that all of those "gray areas" are effectively lawful.
Decide that the protesters in Minnesota are an insurrection? Maybe they start turning up with long guns, like countless previous protestors? Order the troops to fire. It's up to them if they do or don't, but it's guaranteed if they don't, they'll be in courts martial for disobeying the order. The meeting minutes, the reports, what was known and when it was known, Trump's motive: all of them don't matter at all. The official records are inadmissible, his motive is unquestionable, and he is absolutely immune for his orders as commander-in-chief. He can pardon everyone and make them federally immune as well. Only state courts can do anything, far after the fact.
Do you think immunity is for lawful things? Why on earth are you arguing that unlawful acts are not covered by immunity? What exactly do you think immunity makes someone immune from?
> Unless ordering assassinations and launching a coup are "core constitutional powers" of the president, then no the ruling does not give him immunity for that.
Just to be clear: you are disagreeing with a dissenting Supreme Court justice on how much the law protects the president. Are you a lawyer? Do you know more about how much the law binds the president than the literal office that has the final say on the law?
Are you disagreeing with all 6 concurring Supreme Court justices on much the law protects the president? Are you a lawyer? Do you know more about how much the law binds the president than the literal office that has the final say on the law?
No, they aren't, because the concurring justices have not said that those acts are not covered. All we have is what the majority wow, which notably did not include any exceptions
Important to note that the majority and concurring opinions typically respond to the dissent. The fact that they declined to make any clarifications on those matters is significant.
If you think Roberts, Alito, and especially Thomas have actually been following the law as it was intended, then I have a beautiful bridge in New York to sell to you.
Make no mistake, I fully believe the Supreme Court is complicit in this manner and has long since abdicated their duties to uphold the law and the constitution. But my point is that when the Supreme Court comes out and says that the President is immune to all actions they take, it seems like a folly to try and pretend that they don't mean what they say, at least as long as Trump is President. The 'law' is what the Supreme Court says it is, and they've decided Trump is the law.
The coup question specifically came up in oral arguments. Trump's attorney said he would have immunity. The majority opinion more or less says it's up to congress to impeach.
> The ruling was that he had full immunity during "presidential duties"
Yes. This was basically agreed upon before that the president has legal immunity for exercising his constitutional powers, but was never explicitly ruled on by the court. If the president does something outside his legal authority, then that isn't his presidential duty, and he can be punished.
> which has many times been interpreted by the SC as "anything he wants to do while president."
that perspective is not backed by data, and the administration doesn't appeal everything
very few supreme court cases make it to headline news, and the ones that do are the ones you're thinking about it. those are the ones split by ideological lines, which are less than 10% of what SCOTUS rules on. the government loses many cases unanimously as well. there are some unsigned opinions that do punt things back to lower courts that may be in the government's favor, or not.
all to say, its more nuanced than that. the trend, as a last and compromised bulwark, is there, but that's not how the court consistently behaves.
This is literally backed by data. 21 out of 25 emergency docker cases taken up with the Supreme Court were ruled in the Trump administration’s favor. Only one of the cases against the administration was unanimous.
At the appellate level, Trump appointed judges vote in favor of his policies at a substantially higher rate than any previous president at 92% of cases.
And the emergency docket is exactly where one should look for these very recent very blatantly illegal actions and lawsuits aiming to counter them.
So yes the data is in, and yes it’s bad, and emphatically yes it’s exactly what this thread is saying. In case anyone reading in good faith was wondering.
The emergency docket is a preferred method for blatant partisanship because it lets them immediately prevent lower courts from stopping the administration but doesn’t require them to set a binding precedent or even explain the ruling. If it looks like they might be losing power, suddenly those “emergency” decisions which were subsequently back-burnered can be dropped to prevent a Democrat from using the same powers.
Compilers are deterministic. People who write them test that they will produce correct results. You can expect the same code to compile to the same assembly.
With LLMs two people giving the exact same prompts can get wildly different results. That is not a tool you can use to blindly ship production code. Imagine if your compiler randomly threw in a syscall to delete your hard drive, or decide to pass credentials in plain text. LLMs can and will do those things.
Even ignoring determinism, with traditional source code you have a durable, human-readable blueprint of what the software is meant to do that other humans can understand and tweak. There's no analogy in the case of "don't read the code" LLM usage. No artifacts exist that humans can read or verify to understand what the software is supposed to be doing.
yeah there is. it's called "documentation" and "requirements". And it's not like you can't go read the code if you want to understand how it works, it's just not necessary to do so while in the process of getting to working software. I truly do not understand why so many people are hung up on this "I need to understand every single line of code in my program" bs I keep reading here, do you also disassemble every library you use and understand it? no, you just use it because it's faster that way.
What I mean is an artifact that is the starting point for generating the software. Compiled binaries can be completely thrown away whenever because you know you have a blueprint (the source code) that can reliably reproduce it.
Documentation & requirements _could_ work this way if they served as input to the LLMs that would then go and create the source code from scratch. I don't think many people are using LLMs this way, but I think this is an interesting idea. Maybe soon we'll have a new generation of "LLM-facing programming languages" that are even higher level software blueprints that will be fed to LLMs to generate code.
TDD is also a potential answer here? You can imagine a world where humans just write test suites and LLMs fill out the code to get it to pass. I'm curious if people are using LLMs this way, but from what I can tell a lot of people use them for writing their tests as well.
> And it's not like you can't go read the code if you want to understand how it works
In-theory sure, but this is true of assembly in-theory as well. But the assembly of most modern software is de-facto unreadable, and LLM-generated source code will start going that way too the more people become okay with not reading it. (But again, the difference is that we're not necessarily replacing it with some higher-level blueprint that humans manage, we're just relying on the LLMs to be able to manage it completely)
> I truly do not understand why so many people are hung up on this "I need to understand every single line of code in my program" bs I keep reading here, do you also disassemble every library you use and understand it? no, you just use it because it's faster that way.
I think at the end of the day this is just an empirical question: are LLMs good enough to manage complex software "on their own", without a human necessarily being able to inspect, validate, or help debug it? If the answer is yes, maybe this is fine, but based on my experiences with LLMs so far I am not convinced that this is going to be true any time soon.
Not only that but compiler optimizations are generally based on rigorous mathematical proofs, so that even without testing them you can be pretty sure it will generate equivalent assembly. From the little I know of LLM's, I'm pretty sure no one has figured out what mathematical principles LLM's are generating code from so you cant be sure its going to right aside from testing it.
But surely if we demonstrate just how evil Nestle is just one more time, the rest of humanity will wake up and boycott them and it will be the end of suffering! Crazy to think I was libertarian minded when I was nineteen. Then again, who could actually maintain it much older? We're talking believing in the tooth fairy levels of delusion wrt to its interactions with the real world.
Wouldn't the solution to make the door so different handles can fit on both sides and then the installer can simply put the correct handle on each side as needed? Surely that is just as much of a manufacturing efficiency improvement.
For me, mostly time, time to learn it, time it takes to complete these projects. We have so many other things to do, why bother learning the details of a specific language or tool if AI can do it in minutes. More time to learn about architecture/management/ux/design/guitar/etc.
But couldn't you then extend the argument to everything? Like why learn design if AI can do it in minutes? Or why learn guitar when AI can create music in minutes?
Its always worth learning something if you enjoy it, the same applies to code and languages. You can definitely create better apps knowing the details of a specific language than not knowing it and I think its still worth doing if you care about the ultimate quality of your work.
> Its always worth learning something if you enjoy it
This argument is repeated often but what I think you're missing is that if you want to listen to music you put on the radio, you don't record an album.
Sure if I want to enjoy playing guitar I'll do that, but that's not what I'm paid to do and you're not paid write code. Nobody but me wants to hear me play guitar and nobody but you wants to look at your beautiful code.
I think architecture and UX have more impact on the quality of the software you write for the end user than the details of a specific language. And when you're creating guitar training software, music and guitar playing knowledge has more impact on the quality of the software, than the details of a specific language.
When working with an LLM i care more about prompting it about software architecture, software UX, and the domain we're working on, than the details of the language it uses.
> I think architecture and UX have more impact on the quality of the software you write for the end user than the details of a specific language. And when you're creating guitar training software, music and guitar playing knowledge has more impact on the quality of the software, than the details of a specific language.
hard disagree on both points. You're talking about "impact" but surely you'll be a better coder if you can actually, you know, code? The other stuff is important sure but if you literally cannot read the code and just pleasure yourself with dreams of architecture and UX, what you're generating is 99% bad quality.
But prove me wrong, would love to see something you've made.
Best thing of Claude Code is that it's cheap to change your mind: you can try some idea, test it, and if you don't like it you simply have it refactor the code. No more big design up-front, "we need all the specs and requirements".
I can tell you from my perspective that it really is a different story when you're over 65, I'm 73 so it's even more different. It's obligations that distract keep coming. I'm just having fun with it at this point. I just can't imagine what you guys are facing right now. Some existential s**. It's like you were swinging through the trees and all the trees disappeared now you got to learn how to live on the desert. You can do it!
I'm such a noob for an OFG; I responded to you at the top of the post. TL;DR is so much stuff got in the way, mostly of my own creation. A lot of excuses but all seemed reasonable at the time.
> Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off
In the 80's people who did this were known as "corperate raiders". Nowadays it's just called business.
Vimeo employed somewhere north of a thousand people a year ago with 28% being in the engineering team (according to random google results - this isn't an area I have personal knowledge of). If they dropped from around 300 people to 15 that sounds like gutting - not trimming.
They will be hiring up but not the same people. Bending Spoons tends to replace high silicon valley wages with high Italy wages which is a considerable saving.
This is why I can't take any anti-immigration sentiments seriously in this country. An american founded company runs a business for 20 years, sells it off overseas, and the new owners kick all Americans out of the equation.
Response from America: "well that's just business, I guess". It was never about preserving American labor.
If the company was profitable they wouldn't have needed to sell. It was always living on borrowed time. If a US owner bought it they'd have done exactly the same thing (layoffs) albeit possibly with new jobs in a different state than country.
>If the company was profitable they wouldn't have needed to sell.
And it's always the workers who pays the price, not the businessman. Does that see fair?
>If a US owner bought it they'd have done exactly the same thing (layoffs) albeit possibly with new jobs in a different state than country.
That'd be unfortunate, but it still means jobs are created in the US. It also gives he opportunity (slim) to have people move in the country. Moving the jobs overseas, not quite as mobile.
But yes, the big issue here is the lack of decorum in how we recklessly cut jobs here. This isn't how most 1st world coutnries work.
It sounds like they're trying to extract as much money as possible from a SaaS subscription service that's no longer actually paying any devs.
From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team?
Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I'm sure as fuck not going to pay a company $100+ a year subscription to store under a GB of data.
So now I host bookstack and I pay backblaze ~$0.22/m to back up all my notes, which is much closer to real costs for these services if they're not under development.
Genuine question, why not use a free Git service or something
I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).
The honest answer is because I backup a large number of other things to backblaze anyways.
I went on a mission about 5 years ago to essentially stop paying for SaaS services if there was an opensource alternative available that I could self host.
I have old machines lying around anyways since I was upgrading about every 5 years for gaming. So I have a 5 node k8s cluster in my basement serving about 20 different services that I use, and I no longer pay for basically any subscription software.
Git is fine for text content, (hell, I have about 25 personal repos on github anyways, although speaking of... most are mirrored to a local gitea instance) but it's not a great solution for backing up DBs, binary data, media, photos, etc...
Eventually - I'll likely replace backblaze with a NAS at a family member's house, but for now - it's very cheap and the billing is fair (usage based billing, not the exorbitant monthly fees most SaaS services charge).
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Plus - I really like the flexibility of web based services. I don't have to remember to sync anything with bookstack, I just hit 'https://bookstack.[mydomain]' in a browser from any machine I want - Friends house? works. Public library? works. Wife's phone? works. Work laptop? works. etc... you get the idea.
Even after accounting for the initial outlay for a large NAS and my extra power consumption - I broke even in just under 3 years self hosting. Turns out SaaS is sorta a scam if you're technically capable.
And absolutely more power to ya for finding your own alternative solution!
Corporate raiders is a bit of a different concept. That implies a hostile takeover. Like aggressively buying up shares in order acquire a majority stake and set company policy against the wishes of other insiders.
Bending Spoons is what we'd call vulture capitalists which have and continue to exist. Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.
> Basically they buy weakening businesses and carve them up for parts, selling anything of value and squeezing max revenue of whatever is left.
People say this like it's a bad thing, but without "vulture capitalists", struggling companies would default and banks would attempt to do the same, except they are much worse at it and even more people would lose their jobs.
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