V0ldek @ V0ldek @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

I was thinking about ethics in game journalism in software engineering and I think it might be easier to create a whitelist than a blacklist:

What are some serious software/hardware companies that have NOT participated in the AI bubble? No AI nonsense in their marketing slides, no mentions of AI on their landing page, etc.

More recursion means more intelligence.

Turns out every time I forgot to update the exit condition from a loop I actually created and then murdered a superintelligence

On the other hand, I’m sure people are going to come up with excuses even for this by blaming the user, his mental illness, his mother or even society at large.

I mean, I am going to say it but not as an excuse. Should companies that supply these products be held accountable as the criminals they are? Yes. Is this all downstream from the fact our society hasn't treated mental health as a serious matter, therapy access is garbage, all the while being a young person in 2025 is a hopeless string of horrors and anxiety? Also yes.

Torment Chatbot That Kills You is a bad thing to create, but also no one would be chatting with the Torment Chatbot That Kills You if society hadn't utterly failed them beforehand.

C is a terrible programming language and I think we must be clear and open about it when teaching it. But it is perfect for what it is: a showcase of how terrible all those low-level details are, how pointers work and why you don't want to rawdog them, etc.

... thank almighty fuck

I'm sorry but this is zero percent surprising like ye of course he is, he was addicted to anime porn before AI generation probably

That's because we haven't helped them achieve their full potential

I don't think you'll be broken by learning Python, but in my opinion to be a good programmer you need to understand at least one layer of abstraction lower than what you're implementing. So, as an example, once you learn how to code in Python using idk numpy, you absolutely must learn how numpy works under the hood. And that means C, because you cannot escape C.

I teach people Rust and I always say that you kind need to know the nightmare that is C/C++ to be able to fully appreciate what Rust does for you and how it builds a much more sensible programming model on top of the same set of basic concepts we use and have always used to talk to silicone. And then you can write web apps with Rust and never even touch a raw pointer in your life, but it will make you an infinitely better Rust developer if you understand what's going on below you.

This works surprisingly well across the entire SE stack IMO, e.g. if you're using React you should be fully aware of the layer below you - raw JS and HTML. If you're coding in C you should be aware of assembly and memory models. If you're using SQL to query a database you should be aware of logical plans. If you're a project manager you should be aware of what software engineering entails and what people in your team actually do day-to-day.

I'm glad this exists even though I vehemently disagree.

I would bounce right off a course like this. I fucking hated the webdev course we had. I don't care about websites. Writing a program in C that finds a shortest path in a graph and dumps it to the terminal? Fuck yeah, that's where the dopamine lies.

I agree that teaching people Java or Python as the first language is a bad idea, but for me it's not because they need something simpler that has tangible results - that's the opposite of what my experience tells me! I want them to write code in C that doesn't produce any GUI at all. They need to know how to test code that has no visible buttons to click. How to debug code just using a debugger. Having a tangible result other than just a dump on the terminal is a blight, it makes people lazy. It's very easy to determine that the program works because when I click through buttons in the GUI it does what I expect. When you have a library that doesn't have a GUI but just does things to objects in memory you can't take a shortcut, you need robust testing to convince yourself it does what you want. If you are GUI-centric, they will think that the only code that matters is the one that they can see from the front-end. This is precisely the way people get taught coding now with Python - it doesn't actually matter what is the code, it matters that you get a plot that looks right at the end.

The way to enlightenment lies in having 200 lines of C code that segfaults but only sometimes and having to figure out where the bug is using nothing but a debugger and your brain to analyse the code you wrote. That's how you learn how a computer actually works underneath, and once you get through that then stuff like Java or Python is small potatoes. You'll get the high-level language because you've seen the nightmare underneath the surface.

If the problem is that people don't feel motivated to do that and need a pretty website to feel like coding is fun then idk maybe they should train in something different? If having to debug broken code feels bad then you might want to do something else that's more rewarding. It's fine if there's like 50% fewer programmers but they're more conscious of all the layers between the user and silicon on average and fixing arcane problems scratches their itch.

Watch till end the third option made me choke on my drink it was way too funny

We should have a cognitohazard tag

Finally, after years of research, we have managed to connect the smartest Orca to a text-to-speech device! What great wisdom will those superinteligent creatures bestow on us? How can we solve our world's problems?

Eat the rich.

... What?

Like take your billionaires, right, roast them and then eat their flesh. Burn their yachts too. We can help.

Don't they just radiate animal magnetism

Sorry darling, but according to my game-theoretical model this discussion ends in my victory in every possible combination of moves, so can we just skip to the point you apologise?

Where... where are you going

I, for one, am excited, because this could be the ultimate bubble. Like think about it, crypto was shit, but at least it was vaguely a thing, like you could buy Bitcoin and order drugs through SilkRoad and you'd have drugs, that's a material use case. LLMs suck ass but ChatGPT exists, you can go to that website and type shit and it will respond, it's garbage but it's garbage you can touch and smell.

Quantum has none of this. It's ultimate vaporware, a technology that literally does not exist, you can't have a PoC, you can't have an early version that you'll lie about being a "big step towards General Quantum Computing" or whatever. This is SV's wet dream, can we make money from basically nothing at all?

I wrote this post quickly and without thoroughly studying what people have historically written on this topic.

I think that goes without saying on LW but glad someone put it in writing

Banning him just before the funny number too, oof

Nice, I petittion for this to be the new description of SneerClub just like that magnificent Yud quote was on Reddit

So I was thinking about this recently with a colleague and there are two things that I think would be useful:

• I would actually like a HUD? Like a minimap when walking through the city. Or the ability to popup a small YT video in the corner of my eye. I have no idea if it would actually work with how human vision works, but that's a cool idea for me.
• Universally good idea: smart glasses that detect advertising billboards and other shit like that and automatically replace them with something. Could be just with white space, or with pleasant landscapes, or giant dicks if you're into that. The possibilities are quite endless. Would be universally beloved by everyone.

Not, it turns out, for the Meta Raybans, cos they don’t even have screens or projectors!

Wait what? So what are those glasses? I thought they were AR glasses? What do they do then.