This seems like another instance of a problem I see so, so often in regard to LLMs: people observe the fact that LLMs are fundamentally nondeterministic, in ways that are not possible to truly predict or learn in any long-term way...and they equate that, mistakenly, to the fact that humans, other software, what have you sometimes make mistakes. In ways that are generally understandable, predictable, and remediable.

Just because I don't know what's in every piece of software I'm running doesn't mean it's all equally unreliable, nor that it's unreliable in the same way that LLM output is.

That's like saying just because the weather forecast sometimes gets it wrong, meteorologists are complete bullshit and there's no use in looking at the forecast at all.

Are you really not seeing that GP is saying exactly this about LLMs?

What you want for this to be practical is verification and low enough error rate. Same as in any human-driven development process.

Yes, they are; through the lens the person above offered that is.

In practice, all we ever get to deal with is empirical/statistical, and the person above was making an argument where they singled out LLMs for being statistical. You may reject me taking an issue with this on principled grounds, because regular programs are just structured logic, but they cease to be just that once you actually run them. Real hardware runs them. Even fully verified, machine-checked, correctly designed/specified software, only interacting with other such software, can enter into an inconsistent state through no fault of its own. Theory stops being theory once you put it in practice. And the utmost majority of programs fail the aforementioned criteria to begin with.

> people observe the fact that LLMs are fundamentally nondeterministic

LLMs are not "non-deterministic", let alone fundamentally so. If I launch a model locally, pin the seed, and ask the exact same question 10x, I'll get the same answer every single time down to the very byte. Provided you select your hardware and inference engine correctly, the output remains reproducible even across different machines. They're not even stateful! You literally send along the entire state (context window) every single time.

Now obviously, you might instead mean a more "practical" version of this, their general semantic unpredictability. But even then, every now and then I do ask the "same" question to LLMs, and they keep giving essentially the "same" response. They're pretty darn semantically stable.

> In ways that are generally understandable, predictable, and remediable.

You could say the same thing about the issue in the OP. You have a very easy to understand issue that behaves super predictably, and will be (imo) remediable just fine by the various service providers.

Now think of all the hard to impossible to reproduce bugs people just end up working around. The never ending list of vulnerabilities and vulnerability categories. The inexplicable errors that arise due to real world hardware issues. Yes, LLMs are statistical in nature, not artisanally hardwired. But in the end, they're operated in the same empirical way, along the same lines of concerns, and with surprisingly similar outcomes and consequences at times.

You're not going to understand the millions (or really, tens or hundreds of millions) of lines of code running on a typical machine. You'll never be able to exhaustively predict their behavior (especially how they interact with terabytes of data or more over time) and the defects contained within. You'll never remediate those defects fully. Hell, even for classes of problems where such a thing would be possible to achieve structurally, people are resisting the change.

If they want to take an issue with LLMs, a plain gesturing at their statistical nature is just not particularly convincing. Not in a categorical, drop the mic way at least, that's for sure.

Small site operators like us know very well that the utility they can get by scraping us is marginal at best. Based on their patterns of behavior, though, my best guess is that they've simply configured their bots to scrape absolutely everything, all the time, forever, as aggressively as possible, and treat any attempt to indicate "hey, this data isn't useful to you" as an adversarial signal that the site operator is trying to hide things from them that are their God-given right.

But it is not necessary to see the results that are being described.

If sites like my tiny little browser game, with roughly 120 weekly unique users, are getting absolutely hammered by the scraper-bots (it was, last year, until I put the Wiki behind a login wall; now I still get a significant amount of bot traffic, it's just no longer enough to actually crash the game), then sites that people actually know and consider important like acme.com are very likely to be getting massive deluges of traffic purely from first-order hits.

Have you not been paying attention to the news for the past few years?

No, there isn't. If there were, Trump would be in prison, not the Oval Office. And he and the Republican Party have deliberately fostered this environment of corruption and rule-by-wealth so that they can gain more power and even more wealth.

And now they are also backing the AI zealots, and techbros more generally, to ensure that they can do whatever the hell they want, damn the consequences to the rest of the world.

Not just that: how do you even define "the collapse of American society"?

What, exactly, do people think that would look like?

The Purge?

Complete anarchy? Riots in the streets?

The classic image of a burning metal garbage can in the street?

To the extent that a modern society like that of the US can "collapse", it's going to be a very, very slow and uneven thing. Most likely what it would look like is a Balkanization of the country—either de-facto, or full legal (or illegal) secession of groups of states, over the course of a number of years.

Then two paths: he's either successful, forming the sort of "managed democracy" you see in Russia etc.

Or he's unsuccessful, and we see what happens. ICE are a militia beholden to the regime. Could get spicy.

Constitutionally, I think the framework that's supposed to check executive power is already shredded, or at least revealed for what it's been all along: pretty much norms.

Good luck.

Once you get down to the level of property rights, the only alternative left is total might-makes-right anarchy.

Property rights are some of the earliest and most basic things protected by governments—indeed, to a large extent they precede governments, being protected with force by the people who wish to assert them.

Wipe out all regulations, all laws, all property rights, and try to run fiber across someone's property without their permission, and they're likely to come out with a shotgun and start shooting everyone digging. Follow the steps logically from that point, and you'll fairly quickly start reinventing governments and regulations.

No, it's not.

A boundary is something you're saying about your behavior. "If you use racist language at me, I will have to end this conversation."

And much, much worse than someone with "a minefield full of unnecessary boundaries" is someone who has boundaries they don't tell you about.

You should only set boundaries that are real boundaries for you, not just whims or arbitrary decisions. But if you do have boundaries—and everyone does; if you think you don't, then you just haven't had someone cross them (or haven't realized that's what happened when they did)—you must communicate them in contexts where there's a real chance of them being crossed.

To do otherwise is unfair to everyone else and to yourself.

I think this falls under de-escalation, and there's lots of approaches.

Communicating boundaries, or stating if-thens, can be an escalation in some situations.

Steering the conversation/situation away works in some situations.

Non-verbal communication can work, and be more tactful: it allows an accidentally-offensive person to recognise, pull back and show support. This smoothes out conversations, and is common enough that it's expected for many.

For groups of people that use non-verbal communication less, then perhaps explicitly stating things is the only option.

But don't be surprised if non-verbal communicators interpret it as combative!

"Wow, Foo got upset quickly at me, and in front of others. [Why didn't Foo make it clearer that they were getting uncomfortable [using non-verbal methods]]".

An ultimatum says “you must do X or else I will do Y”

A boundary says “you must refrain from X or else I will do Y”.

You make a distinction without a difference. In either case, without providing for compromise or alternative mutual understanding, it is likely confounding and demanding.

Additionally, an ultimatum comes with a deadline; a boundary is indefinite (until stated otherwise).

In a sexual relationship context, that distinction could be better illustrated by:

"Don't touch me like that again without asking first, or I will break up with you"

vs

"If you don't have sex with me by the end of the week, I'll break up with you".

An ultimatum is, to most people, inherently damaging to psychological safety. A boundary is not automatically better - it can be unreasonable, unhealthy, or incompatible with the other persons needs - but unlike an ultimatum, it's not _inherently_ harmful to the relationship.

I mean...I'm a pretty easygoing guy overall. My boundaries are things like, "If you come up and scream in my face, I'll tell you to sod off." "If you punch me, I'll probably shove you back." Reasonable boundaries for other people might be "if you grab my butt, I will report you to HR", or "if you ask me to work unpaid overtime, I will refuse (and report you to HR/the NLRB)".

It seems like you think "people setting boundaries" looks like telling your coworkers things like "never ever speak to me in anything but the most respectful tones" or "if you ask me about my personal life, even the tiniest bit, I will call the police". Except in extremely unusual circumstances, "boundaries" like that are actually people being abusive of their coworkers.

Over the whole industry? No; they can never, ever stop training, or they'll cease to be useful at all very soon.

Training is what keeps the models up-to-date on current events, which includes new programming languages, frameworks, and techniques. It's already been observed that using LLM assistance on some types of programming is much more effective than others, based on how well-represented they are in the training data: if everyone stopped training tomorrow, and next month a new programming language came out, none of them would ever be able to help you program in that new language.

This can be extended to other aspects of programming, too. If training stopped, coding assistants would gradually start giving you wrong answers on how to implement code for APIs, frameworks, and languages that continued to evolve, as they will always do, in much subtler (and likely harder-to-debug) ways than how they'd deal with a new language whose existence they don't even know about.

They're a multibillion-dollar international monopoly with absolutely staggering amounts of money and power, actively engaging in a wide variety of activities directly aimed at making the lives of every normal person on the planet worse so that they can have more power, more control, and more money. Me blocking ads on YouTube not only costs them effectively nothing, it's also the act of a flea against a polar bear.

If Alphabet showed any signs of actually wanting to create a sustainable alternative to the surveillance economy, I might have some sympathy for them. But not only do they not do this, they are the ones who created it in the first place.

I'm boycotting them. After all, every cent that goes their way supports surveillance advertising (among other unsavory things).

I have other subscriptions that support ad-free creators.

If they choose to misconstrue my refusal to support them with either money or ad views, that's also their problem. (Also, that's patently never going to happen, because my signal vanishes instantly into the noise.)