The part you'd like to remove ("Not managing code...") may be not required to convey the objective meaning of the sentence, but humans have emotions, too. I could have written stuff like that. To build up a bigger emotional picture.
> The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended.
This sentence may not be relevant for whatever you experience to be the relevant message of the text. But it still says something the remaining paragraph does not. And also something I can relate to.
Also, as LLMs are statistical models, one has to assume that they write like this because their training data tells them to. Because humans write like this. Not when they do professional writing maybe, but when they just ramble. Not all blogs are written by professionals. I'd say most aren't. LLM training data consists mostly of humans rambling.
I also sometimes write long comments on the internet. And while I have no example to check, I feel like I do write such sentences, expanding on details to express more emotional context. Because I'm not a robot and I like writing a lot. I think it's a perfectly human thing to do. I find it sad that "writing more than absolutely needed" is now regarded as a sign of AI writing.
> Because humans write like this. Not when they do professional writing maybe, but when they just ramble.
I keep seeing this assertion and I keep responding "Please, point to the volume of writing with this specific cadence that has a date prior to 2024" and I keep getting... crickets!
You're asserting that this is a common way for humans to write, correct? Should be pretty easy, then, to find a large volume of examples.
Like I said: I think I write like this on some occasions.
I wouldn't know how I would search for examples. I guess you'd have to search old reddit comment threads or something. But yeah, I have no motivation to do that, tbh.
It could be that it's hard to find examples because they are scattered about in countless comment threads and single posts on countless platforms. Things I rarely keep links to, things nobody indexed on a large scale before LLMs.
It may be that it wasn't a very popular style of writing, because most people don't like writing a lot and keep their texts on the internet short. LLMs exaggerate this style because they generate exaggerative amounts of text in general. The style wasn't particularly annoying in the past because it wasn't that popular. It's annoying now because LLMs flood the internet with it.
The quoted example in particular didn't appear uncanny to me. And it still doesn't. I can see myself writing like that.
I'm sorry I have no example for you. But I'm genuinely unsure whether I'm oblivious to the patterns others see, or whether others see patterns because they want to see them.
Then again, I have a rough idea on how I could implement this check with some (language-dependent) accuracy in a linter. With LLM's I... just hope and pray?
It's JSON with some simple idea of RPC added to it. With the main idea apparently being that it is human-readable.
We've been using Varlink for one project, but I've never found myself in a situation where I had any benefit from the data being JSON. You rarely read the raw data. But compared to gRPC or CapnProto, you lost compile-time type checking and now you need 10mins of testing a vending machine before you get a "key not found"-error because you missed one spot on renaming.
Also, I've written varlink-cpp building on asio and nl-json at some point: https://github.com/wolletd/varlink-cpp.
But as our varlink usage declined, it never found much usage and isn't maintained.
"you lost compile-time type checking" makes it sound like you haven't been using code generation? Varlink has an interface definition language which makes everything type-safe.
You make it sound like that's generally a negative thing, implying that the information being promoted by other countries is made equal and has some implicit right to be spread. But it's not, it's geopolitic information warfare.
So we get down to actual situation - TikTok is way too popular and not under reach nor control.
The hell will sooner freeze that me as an European will believe US government is not weaponizing data of all US companies it can get it hands on, and well, it can get hands on all data. That's decade old story at best.
For an European, this is really funny, fight for who can control general population more. Don't get me wrong, I consider all social networks a brain and societal cancer, but to claim one is weaponized and the other is not, pinky promise... Snowden, NSA, secret courts and rulings that can't be even made public, recording basically whole internet traffic for further analysis including this comment (maybe apart from youtube traffic). Discussion who is doing worse is then just an academic one, lets make an Excel spreadsheet and compare numbers.
I'm sure the US government is also weaponizing information. But the decision to ban TikTok while controlled by the CPP isn't done on moral grounds. It's based on pragmatism.
As a european, talking to any american, we notice you guys have levels of propaganda that are way way higher than what we get. And we do get propaganda.
The notion that without tiktok you'll now get anything "true" is laughable.
I think what you are saying could possibly be true, but is probably hard to quantify. Anecdotally, I have a friend living in the EU that claims the opposite of what you are, but I have no plans on taking a stance until I see some kind of proof.
Personally, I'm not too concerned with the propaganda factor, but of course I'm still affected whether I want to or not. I just don't feel it's a strong point.
What is really concerning though is the other points that a lot of commenters fail to bring up:
#1 - The ability for a foreign nation to streamline targeting an American with real time location data is one - for example, a high ranking official has the app or has an aide that uses the app. The high ranking official can then be targeted.
#2 - Another really good one is that China subsidizes TikTok content creators. This is a form of economic warfare against Americans and also a way to generate more growth and users, which ultimately strengthens the capabilities of #1.
There are more of course, but I have no intention on writing a dissertation. My point is that propaganda shouldn't be worried about as much as the risk to national security.
Lastly, I say all this having a great respect for people of China. They feel like one of the countries in the world that takes the "knowledge is power" saying seriously, rather than just using it as a punch line.
At the end of the day, either users are really in control for what they can or they cannot talk about or it's censored one way or another and thus not free.
Information war is complex and if we don't allow our foes to express their povs then all we're left is our own manipulated media. If we do allow it we might face a spread of a different kind of information.
I wish this was all solved by allowing everybody to spread whatever information and educating citizens since young age about raising a lot of doubt about anything they hear/see in the news/socials.
But again this is also complicated on a social media level especially with those auto feeder algorithms that will either push you controversial content because it makes views or just because you stumbled on few videos on the topic so it's gonna push you even further in the hole.
In any case there's no simple solution.
The issue with China is that our own information and misinformation cannot reach them either.
We allowed Russian state media for long on our platforms because they allowed our on theirs too. Reddit or YouTube or X were never banned there. But again 90% of Russians get informed by tv, and the minority that doesn't gets it on VK or other Russian social media.
It's not uncommon in configuration management. Ansible has ansible-vault which encrypts secrets you then commit. When you need to use them you decrypt them and run your ansible commands.
It suffers the same problem as any other secrets management in git. If the decryption key leaks, even if your repo hasn't, you have to rotate every secret in case the repo is ever leaked in the future.
Even if Ansible has it that doesn’t mean people should put secrets in GIT repos. It just means a lot of Ansible users wanted it - and from my POV users don’t want correct features, they want what they feel they need.
GIT repo or config files should have references or secret names that should be filled in on the machine where scripts are running. Ideally secrets should never ever be transmitted even encrypted.
That’s people are lazy and don’t want to do proper setup is their problem.
There is nothing that should be encrypted belonging in GIT repo because secrets and encrypted stuff is not meant to be shared/dispersed. Where GIT main purpose is to share and distribute code.
If only there was some technology that would allow every peer to have its globally unique address, making direct connections only a matter of firewalls.
I don't know, something like IPv4, but with more addresses...
