shadowgovt

3 ms·

1.
by shadowgovt 8d ago
They've added a new library to a language and stdlib so crammed full of features that its specification exceeds the size of the King James Bible by wordcount. That's what I mean about "discoverability crisis." This post
2.
by shadowgovt 8d ago
I don't doubt using an LLM is deskilling. The question is whether it's the kind of deskilling where you can't farm if you don't know how crops work or the kind of deskilling where you can drive without knowing how to mai
3.
by shadowgovt 8d ago
It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree. Here's the thing I'm finding - LLMs allow me to do more coding when my brain isn't firing on all six cylinders. It means I get more code written because I don't h
4.
by shadowgovt 10d ago
Barely, and rarely for C++ specifically. I think software engineering in general is in a bit of a discoverability crisis. So many problems actually have solutions implemented... Somewhere. If you know about them. And are speaking the same v
5.
by shadowgovt 11d ago
This is an aspect of LLMs that probably shouldn't be understated. I'm working on a validation tool with a coworker right now. We are meat-proxying it into existence, using less than two exchanges per day of his LLM validator and m
6.
by shadowgovt 18d ago
One of the wild things about how these models work is how often things that aren't sampled directly end up a variable in the model via secondary signal. They aren't keying queries by phase of the moon. But if, for example, more pe
7.
by shadowgovt 18d ago
It is, perhaps worth considering that the reputational community might not care about the difficulty for the AI builder to verify pedigree. If OpenAI's answer to this problem is "We can't know," then the rational conclus
8.
by shadowgovt 22d ago
I'd put good money on him thinking the odds of him getting caught were negligible.
9.
by shadowgovt 22d ago
That's a very dedicated kid. Backdoored dad's work computer, how diabolical. ;)
10.
by shadowgovt 22d ago
That is interesting. The next question I'd ask is what the quality / reliability signal looks like. It is entirely possible that the results differ, but the organic search results are SEO'd garbage that lead to knock-offs, fe
11.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
Yeah. I want to be optimistic, but this feels a lot like how there used to be multiple video hosting sites and now there's just YouTube (and its copyright filters).
12.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
Recommendation: if you're trained under a boulder, use the device you're running an XMPP chat client on to call 911.
13.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
When Michael Jackson died, reaction online was so sudden it made Google search backend stumble... They didn't have a solution to auto-hotspot-protect half the planet searching his name suddenly. I'll be interested to see if the mi
14.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
Unfortunately, some of the features that can degrade are things like "the chat is actually secure."
15.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
"Oh, I'm sorry, did you want it to work? You should have installed the 'it actually works' modules." Working with XMPP gave me a whole new appreciation for why people keep inventing their own chat protocols. I don&#
16.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
It's because the xmpp standard is absolutely brutal. I've tried to stand up a server and the amount of configuration I had to do just to get off the ground was absolute nonsense. It's sort of the Apache of chat protocols and
17.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
As it stands today, probably. Whether that actually has negative consequences is the more interesting question I think. Higher level languages collapsed understanding of CPU architecture and assembly level programming. But as a result, we a
18.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
Did you know Google has a PAC? The thing is, who it donates to is controlled by the company not the employees. So I would counter argue that it is not just the employees who want that... But one of the parties in this story has the resource
19.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
I think that's why it's a bit of a shock to many to see leadership tilt so hard towards fascism. Personally, I think the gap is between the leadership and the rank and file software engineers - the heady days of the post dotcom bo
20.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
Increasingly, I find myself thinking that the right path is not to build software... It's to be good at software and then find a concrete problem and use the fact that you know software to attack it. ... But I'll admit that what t
21.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
It's not even the first time we've seen this pattern emerge. The Business Plot of the early 20th century is really something that we should be teaching in high school and we just don't. Powerful corporations in American histo
22.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
I believe it and I'll tell you why. Nearly a decade ago I was in in all hands at Google. There was a scandal. I can't remember which one because there were about three of them back to back in a relatively short period of time. And
23.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
Worth noting: this website is not one such alternative.
24.
by shadowgovt 1mo ago
And, I feel like people really gloss over, perhaps because it is uncomfortable to think about... He took his own life. There is no doubt the government put him in an uncomfortable position, but his story is a gross and tragic outlier. It&#x
25.
by shadowgovt 4mo ago
> But to do so would leave you alone and a lunatic. Here's the thing though, I know quite a few people who have done this. It's not particularly easy (after all, most of the complexity of the modern world is a fabric that enabl
26.
by shadowgovt 5mo ago
Oof. There are two pieces to this story. One is great and one his heartbreaking. The fact that modern tech has disintermediated people with problems to solve from the need for a "priest class" to commune with the machine to solve
27.
by shadowgovt 5mo ago
Places that aren't the United States aren't obliged to treat their history of speech the way the US does. The US's protections are rooted in observations of local authority (and Crown-backed authority) trying to disrupt what
28.
by shadowgovt 5mo ago
You are both correct, but rayiner's comment goes to the up-thread rhetorical question: > Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws ... the answer
29.
by shadowgovt 5mo ago
There's a rhetorical dodge in this argument where it transitioned from talking about property destruction to talking about harming people. One can cause the other, but the burden of proof is on the claimant that wrecking a mass-produ
30.
by shadowgovt 5mo ago
It is a (possibly flawed) feature of the US Constitutional form of government that there is a proper channel for adjusting the enumerated rights in it, and that process is via amendment. I'd like it to be otherwise, but this Court has

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