skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of an optimizing compiler is to find optimizations which, crucially, are semantics-preserving. This is the contract that we have with compilers, is the reason that we trust them to transform our code, and is the reason why people get up in arms every time some C compiler starts leveraging undefined behavior in new and exciting ways.

We have no such contract with LLMs. The comparison to compilers is highly mistaken, and feels like how the cryptocurrency folks used to compare cryptocurrency to gestures vaguely "the internet" in an attempt to appropriate legitimacy.
Any code that does divisions and modulos with non-constants that are known to be powers of 2 should do the optimization manually.

Even for non-powers-of-two there are also techniques to speed up divisions if the same divisor is used repeatedly.
Which would be relevant if either side respected it.

In practice, compilers frequently have bugs and programmers even more frequently make use of "what the compiler actually does" rather than adhering to the language specification -- to the point where the de facto spec for many languages is "what the canonical implementation does".

And the specifications change over time.
It’s funny on how we can be on a site where people spend all day working on how to account for things like dynamic conditionals, but immediately become absurdly reductive and incapable of applying the same logic to anything outside software. Real life also has a lot of if statements!
I think AI art is actually an interesting example. It’s mostly run of the mill schlock to replace clip art / stock images.

Adequate but not enjoyable. Lorem ipsum of visual art. Probably kills some basic graphic design jobs at the margin working on low budget projects.

Meanwhile big brands using big agencies will just incorporate it into their design process. McD Japan is a recent example. You still need a human with an eye and taste to be the editor.

But no one is reading or viewing AI art for pleasure. It’s all “that’s neat” (continues scrolling).
… client wants you to abet their criminal behavior, then you are expected to drop the client and potentially notify law enforcement.

When would a lawyer be allowed to snitch on their client?
You are precisely right but practically wrong here
English, and other languages, are vague and imprecise. I've never understood why folks think they can write code "more efficiently" with a prompt rather than code? Are people willing to give up control? Let the LLM decide what is best? The same is true for generative art -- you get something, but you only have marginal control over what. I think this will always be something that is useful for the simplest things, simplest apps, simplest art, etc.. A race to the bottom for the bottom of the complexity stack. As problems become more complicated, it would take a great deal more prompt language to specify the behavior than code.
>Compilers are deterministic

They seem that way, until you're tasked with getting a repeatable, idempotent build out of a non-trivial build system.
We don't spend 50% of state budgets on primary/secondary education.
I didn't know, nonenforcement is a term. I thought it might be just negligence.

Should've left the "I am not a lawyer" disclaimer.

Thanks for the clarification.
I feel like most companies would have a discussion about “what’s the new user experience? How do we make a cold start enticing so people want to give us more time and data?”

The Facebook experience when you have no connections is so horrid that I’m guessing they don’t put much thought into new users anymore. They already have everyone
Interesting that of the cases cited, only one is claimed to be exclusively cannabis impaired, and the story simply said "police believe" without a source.

The other incidents mentioned in the story include drivers impaired by prescription drugs and good ol' perfectly legal alcohol.
Reminds me of “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_power_grows_out_of...
That was precisely the goal of many high level languages.
They’re extremely different. But you can certainly use them together. Thus, new tools:

https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/meta-large-languag...
I feel the same. I understand why others think ai is just another tool like intellisense, but for me intellisense and any other automatic refactor is a fixed algorithm that I understand and that I know exactly what it is doing, and I know that it is correct.

With ai I need to review the output but not because there may be some issues I didn't noticed, but because that may be issues the tool itself didn't noticed, so it's less of an "apply this specific change" but more of an "apply some change"
Any update three years later? Are you using it less?
“ Thirty-six states have laws requesting or requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls. The remaining 14 states and Washington, D.C., use other methods to verify the identity of voters. Most frequently, other identifying information provided at the polling place, such as a signature, is checked against information on file.”

[1] https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id
yeah, thats what i just did
Per Wikipedia, early ST's floppies were 360K even though it came out a year after the Macintosh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST#Floppy_drive

Hardware got better really quickly in the 1980's and 90's, including floppy disks. By the end of the 20th century, there were 120MB floppies. Basically Moore's Law seemed to apply to spinning rust for awhile.
LLMs are deterministic if you force a seed or disable sampling. They however do not guarantee that small input changes will cause small output changes.
Lots of people I know use llms for different reasons and more importantly in different ways.

For me it feels like it enables me to express myself even better. I use 1 for basically a super charged intellisense or clever auto complete. Finishing lines as I am typing them. Exactly the way I was going to write them.

It saves time on the more boiler plate glue code and allows me to maintain a better flow and momentum on more expressive areas.

I don't see it taking away anything but only enabling me to do more, faster, and better. I'm not telling it to write full apps because it can't.
The original rationale for criminalizing the possession of child porn was that a crime was inherently committed in its creation, and possession is participation in that crime. I think this is a correct conclusion.

I can't see this rationale extending to generated imagery (deepfakes aside). No victim exists.

Vaguely gesturing at social harm is not principled enough, in my opinion. One can point to actual crime and actual harm for filmed and photographed child pornography. For generated imagery, one can only point to one's own personal revulsion as "harm".
What makes you say this person is a best engineer?
I've no idea, I just know dart has a built in JIT and AOT complier, and hot reload is, for me, a killer feature.
Storygraph[1] does this with their Buddy Read feature. My wife and I use it to read books together and leave messages about different happenings, which only get unlocked when you mark that you've read up to that page in the book. It's a great feature, and we really enjoy it.

[1] https://www.thestorygraph.com/
Pedophilia seems, to a large degree, to be under-researched. Mostly because of the taboo, but even questions like "what portion of the general population are sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children" do not have good data.
I'll take bad grammar and spelling over hallucinations, bugs, and poor design any day.
Here's the secret ingredients for successful robotics products:

1. Does it do something useful? Useful enough to pay for?
2. If it's solving something hard, are you going to invest enough to solve the problem?

The article is like a perfect clock. In 3-5 years you'll read the headline "Apple cancels robotics projects," and be totally unsurprised.
Your house is probably not going to burn down, but if it does the financial impact would ruinous. So we pay a little bit each month to insure against this rare outcome.

Some of health insurance looks like this, but many parts of it don’t.
I get the point that they are in different magnitudes of unknown but the analogy is still pretty good when it comes to the median programmer, who has no idea what goes on within either one. And if you argue that compilers are ultimately deterministic, that same argument technically holds for an LLM as well.

The biggest difference to me is that we have humans that claim they can explain why compilers work the way they do. But I might as well trust someone who says the same about LLMs, because honestly I have no way to verify if they speak the truth. So I am already offloading a lot of burden of proof about the systems I work on to others. And why does this ”other” need to be a human.
leaves the question: how much authority do these models posess, see also: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
>Or does this give pedophiles a way to satiate their desires indefinitely with only AI-based content, and lead to a lower portion abusing actual kids?

By that logic, if I see regular porn I would not be interested in having sex.

I assure you this is not the case, and your premise is flawed.
How were european regulations to blame for the crowdstrike incident?
To be fair, we're almost 2 years from the release of ChatGPT and the "demise of the programmer".

We've already did the speedrun from people styling themselves "prompt engineers" to people openly mocking people styling themselves "prompt engineers".

And now it seems we're going to be "6 months to a year away from replacing programmers" for as long as it generates more funding.
Another interesting thing is why my post was so heavily downvoted. Did I touch a taboo subject?
> You dont have to roll all the pods at the same time

That's not really the problem — if, say, one of your nodes drops dead (or just drops off the network), the clients' connections also drop, and they all try to reconnect. That just happens and there is not much you can do to prepare for it except by having some idle capacity already available.

Unless you're talking about rolling out strategies for deployment updates, and to be fair I don't remember the controls for that being all that useful but that was 2 years ago, so perhaps things are better now.
This is a post that just reads as if the author is still in the “honeymoon” stage of their career where programming is seen as this extremely liberating and highly creative endeavour that no other mortal can comprehend.
I get the feeling and I was there too, but, writing code has always been a means to an end which is to deliver business value. Painting it as this almost abstract creative process is just… not true. While there are many ways to attack a given problem, the truth is once you factor in efficiency, correctness, requirements and the patterns your team uses then the search space of acceptable implementations reduces a lot.
Learn a couple of design patterns, read a couple of blogs and chat with your team and that’s all you need.
Letting an LLM write down the correct and specific ideas you tell it to based on what I wrote earlier means your free time to do code reviews, attend important meetings, align on high level aspects and help your team members all which multiply the value you deliver only through code.
Let LLMs automate the code writing so I can finally program in peace, I say!
This is wrong. Fair Source licensing is the best thing to happen to closed source.

Zero codebases choose between FOSS or Fair Source. The choice is always between Fair Source and completely closed.