Obviously the most effective of altruisms is whatever is most likely to create more paperclip believers. The EA games (it's in the game!) philanthropic singularity will allow us to reach the next stage of human evolution: all economic output devoted to mosquito nets and button press simulators.

"Are you telling me I can jump a bus across a 50 foot gap at 67 miles per hour?"

"No Neo, I'm telling you that when you're ready, you won't have to."

20 bucks their database schema was copy pasted from chat-gpt.

Commit messages are overrated.

Now that's the kind of bad hot take I read awful.systems for! Let's all call ourselves "engineers" but write no documents but emoji laden jokes, and produce no work except for the copy-pasted excreta from a chatbot!

Even with inadequate tests, inadequate monitoring, and an inadequate integration testing environment; how did it not go like this:

"Hmm the web server appears to be working, but maybe the database is making an oopsie we did just do that whole stupid db migration without a gradual ramp up"

"Oh hey here's an idea, why don't we make sure error messages from the database are logged maybe it's silently crying out in pain right now :D"

I just want to share this HN comment because it was the worst thing I've read all day.

Wait until they have kids. The deafness gene will be passed along. Soon enough we'll be like the cars with the hardware without the software or the locked features.

A treatment for a type of genetic deafness sounds good and all; but think of the implications man. The no-longer-deaf people might hear some steamy music and then get frisky and in the mood to make deaf babies. And next thing you know bam! There'll be activation keys for hearing.

There's this weird trend where some people simultaneously think:

1. Chat-GPT will do everything for them and makes all problems trivial
2. Whatever they decide to do with it still has value and is a good career choice

Obviously 1 is false, but if we lived in a bizarro world where it was true then the "prompt engineers" would very quickly realize that literally anyone is capable of engineering prompts and they are not in fact a unique and special person who is better than anyone else at asking jarvis to wipe their butt for them.

See also: the weirdos on twitter who argue that all careers except "prompt engineering" are on borrowed time.

"So wait, you mean you're willing to condemn my mind clones to an eternity of suffering so you can get tiktok views?"

Unprecedented benefits to humanity?

I mean you're competing against bicycles, campfires, bagel slicers, minestrone, electric toothbrushes, and the Sega Saturn; so that's a pretty high bar buster!

These risks range from the further entrenchment of existing inequalities to manipulation and misinformation to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction

Two of these things are happening today. Hint: they're the ones that AI people give lip service to before going back to role-playing about acasual basilisks and paperclips and digital clones and whether the ability to auto-respond to auto-generated emails is worth the P(doom) risk.

Great way to turn what might have otherwise been a petition based in reality into a joke I guess.

From their blog: Acupuncture for Dogs: What You Should Know -- I can't tell if it was written by a chatbot or not, but it could very well be based on the article quality.

There are no real systemic side effects of using acupuncture as a treatment for your dog because it covers a more holistic approach. For dogs in poor health who could be at higher risk when undergoing certain surgeries or using certain medications, acupuncture might prove a suitable alternative.

Also note how they call their chatbot "brand-supportive". Of course it's not just an unlicensed robo-doc, but a billboard masquerading as an unlicensed robo-doc.

So... what are the chances Zoom ends up recording people in Zoom meetings to use as training data?

Many will point out that magic eight balls are not yet writing award-winning books, let alone patenting inventions. But most of us also don’t do these things.

I'm sad that I can't reproduce this because looking at bad website coding is my favorite kind of gawking.

I'll be damned if we let the chatbots take our existential dread jobs from us too.

An article about Opera going from a normal browser company to a predatory loan / cryptocurrency / chatbot / edgelord gamer / vtuber company: https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-opera-browser/

Now I'm a healthy woman. I think all browsers having associated vtubers, or at least mascots, is a great idea. But not at the expense of silently ending support for one of their browser branches leaving any users brave enough to use it to face huge security vulnerabilities.

OK sorry this is rambly but I gotta get these programmer feelings off my chest.... If anything 4 hours is an understatement.

Back in university I once spent an entire week tracking down a latent bug in my program after the professor changed the project requirements a week before the due date. It was an accidental use of =instead of a copy in Java. We're talking every waking moment both in and out of class (I was not the best at debugging back then...).

Now in the working world there's bugs-- but they're not just my bugs anymore. Rather there's decades of bugs piled on top of bugs. Code has dozens of authors, most of whom quit long ago. The ones that remain often have no memory of the code.

Just last week I did a code review of a co-workers bugfix for a bug introduced in 2008. The fix was non-trivial due to:

1. The code being a tangled mass of overlapping state and (more importantly)
2. No one actually remembering anything about the code or where it is called or why it is there in the first place or what the implications of changing it are. Except that it's causing problems (An O(n^2) slowdown case harming production) now in 2024.
3. The original design doc was in the personal folder of the original author (no longer at the company), which was garbage collected years ago.

So reviewing the code involved comparing every iteration of the code, from the initial commit, up to where the bug was introduced, up to the state it was in today before my coworkers fix, and my coworkers fix. It turns out he got it wrong, and I can't exactly blame him because there is no right in this sort of environment. Fortunately the wrongness was caught by me and whatever meager unit-tests were written for it.

This all took maybe half a day for me, and a day for my coworker, for 1.5 days of work between the two of us. All to fix a condition which was accidentally negated from what it should have been.

And this is indeed what LLM for code enthusiasts miss.

Even if the LLM saves some time with writing boilerplate code, it'll inevitably mess up in subtle ways, or programmers will think the LLM can do more than they actually can. Either way they'll end up introducing subtle bugs; so you have a situation where someone saving 20 seconds here or there leads to hours of debugging effort, or worse, at an unpredictable point in the future.

At least with human written code you can go back and ask them what they were thinking, or read the design doc, or read comments and discussion. Even the most amateurish human author code has the spark of life to it. It was in essense a manifestation of someone's wish.

On the other hand with code that's just statistical noise there's no way to tell what it was trying to do in the first place. There is no will / soul / ego in the code, so there is no understanding, so there is no way to debug it short of reverting the whole change and starting over.

"New". The crypto bros already thought of this for GPUs years ago (they probably weren't the first), and the basic idea goes at least as far back as SETI@Home.

Also I guarantee these people haven't thought about, or don't really care about, the security implications of GPU rental. It ain't trivial that's for sure, I'd never connect my GPU to the internet with any program that has thought about this less than web browsers have (WebGL / WebGPU) for that reason alone.

Unsigned integer means an integer that hasn't been cryptographically signed by the chain of blocks right?

The verdict quotes this exchange (page 163):

Q: Just out of curiosity, do you know what unsigned means in that?

A: I do. Basically it's unsigned variable, it's not an integer with--

Q: With what?

A: It's larger. I'm not sure how -- I mean, on the stand here, I'm not sure how I'd say it, but --

Q: Take a wild guess.

A: How I would describe it, I'm not quite sure. I know what it is.

Q: Okay.

A: I'm not terribly good when I'm trying to do things like this. Writing it down would be different.

Q: Well, do you recall you mentioned that you had a book by Professor Stroustrup?

A: I do.

Q: You haven't disclosed that book, but you have disclosed three other books about C++, so I want to take you to one of those. It's {L1/199/1}, and could we go to page 47. Do you see that it explains that "unsigned" means that it cannot be negative?

A: Yes, I do understand that. Would I have thought of saying it in such a simple way? No.

I mentioned this in the last weekly thread, but check out the 5th citation in their example paper (the one that says nothing in particular about type 2 diabetes)

T. Schnurr, Hermina Jakupovi, Germn D. Carrasquilla, L. ngquist, N. Grarup, T. Srensen, A. Tjnneland, K. Overvad, O. Pedersen, T. Hansen, and T. Kilpelinen. Obesity, unfavourable lifestyle and genetic risk of type 2 diabetes: a case-cohort study. Diabetologia, 63:1324–1332, 2020.

I left a HN comment that they got the names wrong for Hermina Jakupović, Germán D Carrasquilla, Lars Ängquist, Thorkild Sørensen, Anne Tjønneland, and Tuomas O Kilpeläinen. They thanked me for my "thorough" review (read: I glanced over it for giggles at like 2 AM).

Holy smokes this guys twitter is bursting at the seams with movie-clips and memes.

I saw: Snatch, Peaky Blinders, Pirates of the Caribbean, Men In Black, Tombstone, The Good the Bad & the Ugly, Marvel, Sherlock, Fast & Furious, Gangs of New York, V for Vendetta, Ready Player One, Game of Thrones, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Breaking Bad, The Matrix, and X-Men.

Each impeccably captioned with large text, set to music, and carefully edited / mixed together. In the span of like 9 hours

These tweets were chosen for maximum superstonk hype, and had a lot of effort put into them. He chose themes of vengeance and male action-movie anti-heroes, He knows exactly what his audience will lap up.

It's so gross, but like in a kind of impressive way.