2
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rurp
Joined 8,773 karma
- rurpIt sounds like you're building a lot of prototypes or small projects, which yes LLMs can be amazingly helpful at. But that is very much not what many/most professional engineers spend their time on, and generalizing from that former case often doesn't hold up in my experience.
- The chances of your kid being abducted by a stranger because you let them walk home from school are so many orders of magnitude lower than 0.5% that the analogy doesn't make any sense. You're probably more likely to kill them by handing them a plate of food or some other benign every day factor that isn't nearly as dramatic as anything the national news covers.
- Everything except the bed size has grown enormously on modern consumer trucks. Nowadays truck beds look proportionally tiny compared to trucks from 20-30 years ago when the bed made up a much larger percent of the vehicle.
Ford knows their market. Most F-150 buyers aren't looking for a functional truck, they want a comfortable commuter car that looks like a cool truck.
- Even that might be changing. I follow some defense industry folks and I've never seen a time when they were less pro-republican. The gross incompetence and maliciousness by this administration is deeply concerning to most people in the industry. The idiocy we're seeing regarding Venezuela, Russia/Ukraine, alienating every single ally, fumbling on China, and more are putting the US in a much much weaker position going forward. Everyone who's paying attention and not happily in on some graft knows to be worried.
- Wait, so you've literally experienced these tools going conpletely off the rails but you can't imagine anyone using them recklessly? Not to be overly snarky but have you worked with people before? I fully expect that most people will be careful to not run into this sort of mess, but I'm equally sure that some subset users will be absolutely asking for it.
- I literally couldn't load their website with my previous Pixel phone. The performance was so terrible it would grind to a halt and freeze or crash.
- A few years ago I had the head of a devops team at a large company say that the project I was working on should switch from postgres to a "real" enterprise database like oracle. This happened while we were having zero issues with postgres, it was a perfect fit for our case, and it wasn't even relevant to the conversation. He just saw that's what we were using and reflexively thought that of course we should use Oracle.
It blew my mind at the time. Oracle is so widely hated among developers, entirely justifiably, that this guy's take really shocked me. I've literally never heard another glowing recommendation for that company before or since.
- I don't think this is the scenario most people are worried about. Having basic needs met while also having a lot of freedom and time probably sounds great to the majority of people. But there's roughly 0% chance we end up in that kind of world if current AI leads to massive job elimination.
Just look at who is building, funding, and promoting these models! I can't think of a group of people less interested in helping millions of plebs lead higher quality lives if it costs them a penny to do it.
- Reminds me of the anti gay marriage folks who claim they aren't discriminating because any man can marry any woman of their choice and vice versa.
- Many people did choose to live as hunter gatherers all over the world, until they were universally slaughtered and subjugated. We don't really know if industrial societies lead to more fullfilling lives or not, because they clearly lead to better and more expansive armies that quickly destroy anyone trying to live outside of that.
- I'm unsure how someone could use LLMs regularly and not encounter significant mistakes. I use them a lot less than some devs and still run into basic errors pretty often, to the point that I rarely bother using them for niche or complicated problems even though they are pretty helpful in other cases. Just in the past few days I've had Claude trip all over itself on multiple basic tasks.
One case was asking how to do a straightforward thing with a popular open source JavaScript library, right in the sweet spot of what models should excel at. Claude's whole approach was completely broken because it relied on a hallucinated library parameter that didn't exist and didn't have an equivalent. It invented a keyword that doesn't appear in the entire open source library repo, to control functionality the library doesn't have.
- HBO became an incredibly valuable brand because of a well deserved reputation for quality. Any one great show or highly visible screwup will only move that needle so much, but they do compound over time. I still remember the leaked audio from some years ago when the new HBO ownership explicitly said they wanted to take a more quantity over quality approach. This latest case certainly reinforces my mental model that HBO isn't what it used to be and probably isn't worth combing back to any time soon, given that there are better streaming options out there.
- Hah, that's great.
My dentist has overhead TVs in all of the rooms. Before a longer appointment I asked if I could bring some over-ear headphones to connect to the TV. Surprisingly nobody had asked that before but they were fine with it. The headphones drowned out the drilling and other noises and helped me zone out into some shows.
- We better get rid of database constraints at the same time, since people were constrained on those same ships. I don't see how we can move forward as an industry until these grievous harms have been addressed.
- I used to feel that way up until about a year ago. At worst I would roll my eyes at the silliness and then move on, because this stuff rarely matters much one way or another.
But then the 2024 elections happened, along with a bunch of exit polls, voter interviews, and other data showing that a surprising (to me anyway) number of people hate this kind of virtue signalling to the point that it can sway their vote. It's very possible those swung votes have ushered in a host of harmful changes that I think do matter a great deal. So now I'm sick of this stuff, it's not only a waste of time it's actively harmful.
- This is a huge issue in my experience. I've done some work as a government contractor and often the govt offices have been so heavily outsourced there's nobody left with any technical knowledge at all to oversee the projects. Like the most technical person literally doesn't know what a git repo is.
Even if you hire good contractors who work in good faith, the inability to have remotely technical discussions leads to all kinds of miscommunication and mismatched expectations.
Building and maintaining more in-house developers would be vastly more efficient for the govt, but so many people have a religious level hatred of public employees and glowing respect for private ones. So we not only end up in the current situation, it's actively being made worse in the US by the current administration.
- Yes exactly. In a decade or two people will wistfully look back on 2025 era GenAI similar to how people currently remember when Google Search was great 10+ years ago. The AI enshittification will probably be even more dramatic though, in part because of the immense cost. Despite getting more abusive every year, Google ads are at least still identifiable if you know to look for them. Once AI training weights start getting heavily manipulated for corporate and political reasons things could get pretty ugly.
- Tenant laws vary dramatically by location. Some cities are like you describe but in others an eviction can happen within a few weeks with minimal trouble. California cities are some of the most stringent, so plenty of people in tech will have seen that extreme end of things.
It's honestly a tricky problem. Many of these tenant laws do cause a lot of harm and ultimately hurt renters more than they help. But at the same time there is an endless well of landlords abusing people who have very few avenues to defend themselves.