metalspot

278 karmajoined 4 года назад

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10 часов назадdiscuss

I don't disagree but something less bad is better than something more bad if those are the only two options. I only said Duolingo was better than Youtube. Duolingo is nuts. I get my children's spam from them and it is this crazy emotionally abusive manipulative therapy talk nonsense trying to get them to use the app. I hope they are using AI to write that. LOL. I can't imagine the actual human who would do that for a job.

11 часов назадdiscuss

"broad anecdotal consensus" very scientific. i don't disagree, but is it better than youtube? tiktok? instagram? (cocaine? meth? fentanyl?)

12 часов назадdiscuss

Can you point to any serious studies that show the opposite? No. They don't exist. There cannot be any serious studies until there is a generational cohort that can be evaluated for long term impact.

But on a personal level I would vastly prefer my children use even a crappy AI chat app like Deepseek than watch Youtube. If you have young children and pay attention it would be almost impossible to come to a different conclusion.

12 часов назадdiscuss

literacy causes profound brain structure changes and psychological effects, and mass literacy results in profound social transformation. which is why people have be trying to prevent the spread of literacy for thousands of years, to this very day.

an LLM is a next token prediction function. of course it matters how you use it, and if you want to use it for an educational purpose, that has to be intentional, so i agree with you on that.

chatgpt and all the other ai powered scams and attention monetization apps are horrible, because they are just using improved technology to accelerate the exploitation of consumers (both adults and children) of media and app platforms.

the solution here is not to say the technology is bad but to use it to create competitive products that are actually beneficial.

12 часов назадdiscuss

code review is a dead end. the only way building with AI makes sense is in secure systems that can run unaudited code.

code review has always been a liability fig leaf. it is much harder to understand a system from reading the code than writing the code. if AI can write code 100X faster than humans it is simply impossible for humans to do real code review. effectively it is just pretending to do code review, and then running unaudited code without the proper systemic security guardrails in place.

12 часов назадdiscuss

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18 часов назадdiscuss

Moving module by module is definitely the safer way to do it, but at the module level you do the same thing. You have to have it feature exact so that you can replay test against the same interface and do progressive roll out. The difference with AI is that the module size you can one-shot goes way up compared to traditional human rewrite.

> same mess as before, just re-written

The likely path here is probably rewriting from node.js/ruby/python/etc to go/rust/c#/etc so a feature exact rewrite that passes all tests and can return identical responses for replayed production requests is not the same mess at all. You can do all sorts of refactoring, bug fixing, etc, while maintaining exact feature compatibility. The other major thing is back-filling exhaustive test coverage with AI, which then makes agentic coding much more accurate, because the feedback loop from failing tests provides the context for AI to self correct.

A test suite and code are two complimentary representations of the same logic, so using AI to grind test coverage to really high levels (90-95+) gives you two independent inference paths through a model, then the feedback signal from test failures gives you the mechanism to drive these two distinct generation paths to convergence.

вчераdiscuss

Rewriting while changing features is the worst idea ever, which almost always leads to failure, and is the reason why "don't do rewrites" is a widespread rule.

Whether it is humans or AI, the correct way to do it is always a feature exact rewrite, so you can do comparative testing on both systems, and progressive rollout, and then you start adapting features.

вчераdiscuss

An LLM can do this easily if you have a good test harness

позавчераdiscuss

How would you know? Are you an expert in the language and culture that its texts were originally written in? Even an expert would qualify their interpretation by saying that it is only an educated guess. Look at how easy it is for humans to misunderstand each other, even in direct verbal communication, then extend that to the level of misunderstanding in email and text messages. Now tell me how well you think modern people actually understand the meaning of something written thousands of years ago.

позавчераdiscuss

Every single SaaS app will be completely rewritten in the next couple years. Fair warning. If you aren't on that train you won't have a job.

позавчераdiscuss

Exactly. AI opens up a massive development frontier of projects that were simply impossible before. It does differentiate though. In the old world most "software engineering" work had nothing to do with software engineering so being highly skilled, educated, and experienced in software engineering made very little difference in compensation, position, promotion, etc. "software engineer" isn't a real thing anyway. coding is a secretarial job. you have to move beyond the mindset that coding is doing something useful. it's not. it is a means to an end and now better means exist. if you want to be an engineer you have to think in terms of systems engineering and building systems that deliver defined externally testable capabilities. in a few more years the idea of reading and writing source code will seem as absurd as reading and writing asm seems today.

3 дня назадdiscuss

this is a modernist misconception. ancient religions are philosophical frameworks and the texts are internally coherent arguments for those frameworks. They are just expressed in language that modern audiences without formal training don't understand.

10 дней назадdiscuss

priming obviously works. it is inherent in the physical structure of the brain. nerve endings from various all over the body terminate in different physical locations in the brain, and then these are interlinked in an adaptive biological mesh network. nerve responses are triggered by cascades of correlated impulses across different nerve endings, so at a physical level a strongly correlated signal from any two major nerve groups will trigger a sympathetic response when one of them fires independently. the experiments that social scientists come up with may be flawed, but this is definitely how my brain works, so i don't need a study to prove it.

19 дней назадdiscuss

No. Google and Apple are already rolling out the infrastructure. FCC is requiring IDs for phones. It will be opt-in for a while but the acceleration of AI risks will inevitably lead to an infrastructure level lock down of the entire internet. 99% of the population will accept it without hesitation because it is no different than what they do already. Everything you do online is already logged and tracked. The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity.

19 дней назадdiscuss

The entire internet will be real id verified soon. You won't even be able to send packets without a hardware digital signature linked to a real id. Might as well get used to it.

19 дней назадdiscuss

[dead]

19 дней назадdiscuss

AI and remote interviewing have definitely exacerbated the problems that existed before though.

Leetcode was always weak, but now that it is easy to cheat on it is a negative selector, because the cheaters do best. Leetcode was originally supposed to be done in-person on a whiteboard to assess a candidate's collaborative problem solving skills, but with remote interviewing it has evolved into writing passing code with minimal or no feedback.

The real problem is that engineering departments are now filled with leetcode grinders and cheaters, who all live in permanent fear of being replaced by AI, and so any candidate who doesn't fit that paradigm is a threat that must be eliminated at all costs.

20 дней назадdiscuss

The chart at the top of the article makes it clear that the entire thing is pure fantasy

21 день назадdiscuss

hallucination is good for tasks that have an external oracle like computer programming