zogwarg @ zogwarg @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

“Once we get AGI, we’ll turn the crank one more time—or two or three more times—and AI systems will become superhuman—vastly superhuman. They will become qualitatively smarter than you or I, much smarter, perhaps similar to how you or I are qualitatively smarter than an elementary schooler. “

Also this doesn't give enough credit to gradeschoolers. I certainly don't think I am much smarter (if at all) than when I was a kid. Don't these people remember being children? Do they think intelligence is limited to speaking fancy, and/or having the tools to solve specific problems? I'm not sure if it's me being the weird one, to me growing up is not about becoming smarter, it's more about gaining perspective, that is vital, but actual intelligence/personhood is a pre-requisite for perspective.

From a brief glance at the CTMU it fits into:

• not even wrong
• not that deep
• cloaked in really unecessary jargon

It's fascinating to see people re-invent the same bad eschatology, it's like there's crazed compulsive shaped hole in the heart of man or something.

But he didn’t include punctuation! This must mean it’s a joke and that obviously he’s a cult leader. The funny hat (very patriarch like thing to have) thief should only count himself lucky that EY is too humble to send the inquisition after him.

Bless him, he didn’t even get angry.

Sed Quis custodiet ipsos custodes = But who will control the controllers?

Which in a beautiful twist of irony is thought to be an interpolation in the texts of Juvenal (in manuscript speak, an insert added by later scribes)

Also according to my freelance interpreter parents:

Compared to other major tools, was also one of the few not too janky solutions for setting up simultaneous interpreting with a separate audio track for the interpreters output.

Other tools would require big kludges (separate meeting rooms, etc…), unlikely in to be working for all participants across organizations, or require clunky consecutive translation.

I'm afraid my thoughts on the matter aren't that deep or well informed ^^.

In no particular order:

• I grew up in France, and my (probably biased) view, it tends a bit more towards teaching "Literary" subjects, including for engineering students. I think in general this does indeed develop literacy and critical thinking.
• France has "Professors Documentalist" and we call our school libraries "Center for Documentation and Information" from middle school up, with a few (very) introductory courses on using Thesaurus, Bibliography and digital index cards tools (this may of become enshittified by the availability of google since my time there)
• I have a small Lexicography hobby.
• I have a small reading old sources hobby.
• I think more "Traditional" digital search is still incredibly valuable
• I think principles predating the digital age are still incredibly valuable
• The way STEM fields are taught is often focused on "one correct answer", and i don't remember that much focus being put on where the sources come from, comparing differing sources, or even any emphasis on how can be certain a given source has been accurately transmitted to the present age in history.
• I think information retrieval is a vital skill (especially with the enshitification of google) that all fields when benefit practitionners from being more comfortable with (though of course it's still its own job).
• I think software engineers in particular, during their education, would be well served by practical examples of reconciling conflicting or uncertain sources, and I think history is a good lens (less abstract vs software).

I'd be interested in your perspective!

If you keep in the mind the original angst of the students “I have to learn how to use LLMs or I’ll get left behind” they themselves have a vocational understanding of their degree. And it is sensible to address those concerns practically (though as stated in another comment, I don’t believe in accepting the default use of generative tools).

On a more philosophical note I think STEM fields (and any really general well-rounded education) would benefit from delving (!) deeper in library science/archival science/philosophy and their application to history, and that coincidentally that would make a lot of people better at troubleshooting and legacy code untangling.

The artlicle certainly feels blasé ^^, I think the most objectional part is:

Large language models shift even more of that time into investigation, because the moment the team gets a chance to build, they turn around and ask ChatGPT (or Copilot, or Devin, or Gemini) to do it. When we learn that we need to integrate with google cloud storage, or spaCy, or SQS Queue, or Firebase? Same thing: turn around and ask the LLM to draft the integration.

Now clearly (to me) the author isn't happy about this, but I think they are giving hope on the direction of the profession too soon. There are still plenty of people happy enough to implement things themselves.

I wish it were always that easy, few things in legacy code maintenance brings me more joy than deleting a single line of code, the solution is sadly often more involved.

The reality is sometimes more like fighting a hydra spaghetti ball, where felling one bug, uncovers/spawns two more.

Unsigned integers are larger because… Because the containing variables don’t have a signature that crypto-statically constrains it to the lower set! (Yes that must be it)

Was it not always moot to enlighten the meaning of the word. ^^

Merriam-Webster also has a good page explaining the expression, and the predominance of the natural meaning: https://web.archive.org/web/20240522073251/https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/beg-the-question

Hi, I'm going to be that OTHER guy:

Thank god not all dictionaries are prescriptivists and simply reflect the natural usage: Cambridge dictionary: Beg the question

On a side rant "begging the question" is a terrible name for this bias, and the very wikipedia page you've been so kind to offer provides the much more transparent "assuming the conclusion".

If you absolutely wanted to translate from the original latin/greek (petitio principii/τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι): "beginning with an ask", where ask = assumption of the premise. [Which happens to also be more transparent]

Just because we've inherited terrible translations does not mean we should seek to perpetuate them though sheer cultural inertia, and much less chastise others when using the much more natural meaning of the words "beg the question". [I have to wonder if begging here is somehow a corruption of "begin" but I can't find sources to back this up, and don't want to waste too much time looking]

I feel mildly better, thanks.

Noooooooooooooo! Argh, I'll have to seriously consider using the fork FML.

EDIT: Not strictly required since apparently you have to provide an API key for it to be enabled, still it's not encouraging that the main developer thought this would be a good idea.

You've got to love the prompt jank: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commit/755dc2ed881d853f495ffaea2498452915e5e8cd?diff=split&w=0

EDIT 2: Given direct access to bad AI code to a dev workstation is bad enough, but given that the console is a primary way to connect to servers, where more havoc could be wrought, this is terrifying, I mean sure devs were already capable of bricking enviromnents, but supercharging "knowing just enough to be dangerous" is NOT a good idea.

Meanwhile some of the comments are downright terrifying, also the whole "research" output is overly-detailed yet lacking any substance, and deeply deeply in fantasy land, but all the comments a debating in favour of or against what is perceived as "real work", and in terms of presentation "vibes".

I mean my parents always said that fascist/cultish movements have issues distinguishing signified and signifier, but good grief. (Yes too much Lacan in the household)

And yet they can spit out copyrighted material verbatim, or near-verbatim, how strange and peculiar.

First efforts at bible digitization seems incredibly poorly documented online, and from a casual inspection in google scholar, not very well referenced. It's a pity it sounds like a fascinating topic, though 7 bits is likely for the first english versions yes (And according to this there are horrid 7-bits encodings for the ancient greek)

I read this as The Fifth Element, but it also (almost) works!

"I can predict the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules"

I like the beautiful tangents into linguistics and arguing about how many present tenses English has, and of the dubious merit of distinguishing definiteness in articles.

Trying to invoke LLMs as a tool to pierce these supposedly pointless elements of the English language, for the benefit of non-native (or maybe non-confident native) speakers.

Where really this is exactly the sort of mistakes that LLMs can bring, it’s not just choosing between a non-standard and a standard spelling of a word (like for basic autocorrect) it’s choosing between valid forms depending on context and Intent, which no machine can divine.