great many things from the past 10 years would've been fan fiction, conspiracy theories, and slippery slope fallacies 20 years ago. for better or worse, this boring dystopia is not yet the end of history.
>billion dollar companies can't ramp up production?
you're a semiconductor manufacturer who wants to take advantage of the current boom. your options are:
A) invest a hundred cubic meters of money into doubling your manufacturing capacity
B) raise prices by 100%
I can't really blame them for going with B. the blame lies entirely with America's ability to invest billions of its infinite money into companies that make no profit now and have no plausible path to profitability in the future.
it takes very little effort from those who control the media to turn terminally online cattle for/against anything, because they are almost completely uncritical of their side of the establishment. pander to them 95% of the time, and you can use the remaining 5% to push whatever agenda you like.
among the least controversial things I can give as an example without getting silently downvoted and flagged, would you have ever imagined that particular demographic demanding draconian copyright laws? yet, here we are, copyright is good now.
that kinda worked in llama 1/2 era, not between different models but between finetunes of the same model. the briefly legendary Mythomax was IIRC a merge of 5+ tunes, some of which were merges themselves.
first of all, LLM-assisted coding is less than 3 years old. 3 years ago all we had was GPT-4 with 8192 token context, which wasn't enough for most things.
and second of all...
>Any shared sense of rigour is just completely torpedoed by the LLM world, particularly the cloud LLM world it seems, and we are reduced to cargo culting. Nobody is any more right or wrong than anyone else.
what "sense of rigour"? it's way too soon to put those rose-tinted glasses on.
>what "sense of rigour"? it's way too soon to put those rose-tinted glasses on.
I don't think OP is claiming that prior to LLM coding everything in the software development world was super rigorous (I assume that's effectively what you mean with the "rose-tinted glasses" comment). But rigor was actually possible and in a deterministic way too, which is fundamentally impossible with LLMs. You can build all kinds of guardrails and processes around LLMs that make it somewhat approach rigor again, but it's still fundamentally based on a bunch of statistical probabilities instead of deterministic, repeatable results.
All of the methods I see to mitigate the fundamental and inherent issues of LLMs seem roughly equivalent to the kind of crap you see in astrology groups or palm reading etc. You need Venus and Mercury to be in alignment while Mars is retrograde if you want to be able to get the right results from your token predictor.
Sure, but LLMs are non-deterministic in ways that no sane human ever would be. See the "Is it better to drive or walk to the carwash" scenario from a few months ago as one of many, many examples. Or a personal example I encountered just a week ago: I asked Claude (Opus 4.8 in case any of the "you aren't using the latest model that totally fixes that issue" types are interested) to convert a bunch of DB calls that currently use raw ADO.NET calls to use Dapper instead.
The projects in this repo were on .NET 4.8.1 and were still using the older format for the .csproj file instead of the newer (and far better) "SDK-style" format that Microsoft introduced a few years ago. It tried to use the dotnet CLI to add references to Dapper, even though the older format of .csproj doesn't work with that. The dotnet CLI returned errors about trying to add the package references for Dapper, which Claude completely ignored while continuing to try and convert the ADO.NET calls to Dapper. And at the end it tried building the project, which of course failed, and then it confidently informed me that the conversion had been completed successfully and that the build completed successfully and all tests were passing successfully, even though the output from the build it had done immediately prior clearly told the LLM otherwise.
A real human, despite being non-deterministic, would have caught the issue at multiple stages. They would have seen the error when trying to add the reference. If they ignored that then they would have seen the red squiggly lines all over the (deterministic) IDE telling them there was something wrong, along with autocomplete for Dapper calls not working. And if they continued to ignore those and managed to keep going anyways, they would have clearly seen that the build failed, with tons of errors specifically about references to Dapper failing to resolve. An LLM keeps going on its merry way in ways that effectively 0 humans would.
it does something, sometimes. it pushes the required fabrication timeline back.
if it is mandated that every photo or video taken for the possible use in evidence is notarized at the time of acquisition, any fabrication would necessitate total premeditation. that is, the fabricators would need to know ahead of time what they were pursuing and what evidence they would need. this seems like a very costly barrier.
for example, altering security footage would require some fantastical elements: a real-time system of ingesting real footage and altering it in real-time to slip it into the notarization pipeline within the error margins.
requiring that any equipment that produces acceptable evidence stream commitment hashes in real-time to public append-only repositories would be an enormous step forward.
Is it? Would bioweapon instruction restrictions be equivalent to disallowing reporting on whether the government is massacring large numbers of citizens in your city? Both are ‘censorship’ but don’t seem remotely equivalent to me.
>> Would bioweapon instruction restrictions be equivalent to disallowing reporting on whether the government is massacring large numbers of citizens in your city?
> If you believe censorship is wrong, then it is equally wrong no matter what the topic is.
Are you agreeing with that view, or merely saying it’s a theoretical view but you think such believers are wrong?
Do you believe it’s only censorship where context shouldn’t be applied? Like if someone had a principled view "violence is wrong", would non-lethal violence in a clear case of self-defense be “equally wrong” as the guy who personally killed tens of thousands of captured POWs (Blokhin)? As “violence is violence”?
I should think learning about history should lead to a desire for citizens to be able to quietly make weapons at home given the many documented cases of governments across the world mass murdering their own citizens (or foreign governments invading and genociding). What's the point of telling people the wrongs of their oppressors while simultaneously disempowering them from doing anything about it or preparing to defend themselves in the future?
So yes they're not just comparable, but two sides of the same coin.
The idea that Chinese citizens could’ve prevented the Tiananmen massacre with a bunch of home printed AK-47s is silly. The government had tanks. The same applies in the US.
Police or military. Whoever is doing the oppressing. It could also be their families at home or school. It makes them aware that joining an oppressive force is likely to lead to retaliation and makes them reconsider. When almost half the population is armed, as in the US, they'd have to always be paranoid about being shot by any random person. Or if they're mass murdering their citizens and you think you might be one of their victims, you can at least take some of them with you first.
The point is if you're e.g. the victim of a genocide or other mass killing, you don't just lie down and hope it stops. You recognise that you're in a war. Denial isn't going to help.
