Austiiiiii

Honestly I feel the same way about this new swarm of Claude-empowered "ideas guys" complaining on Reddit that they can't get any paying users for their "revolutionary new product" that invariably offers very little of value, and, helpfully, comes bubble-wrapped in the same nauseatingly sanitized and generic UI you see on every other product genned from scratch by an LLM with no specific input from a human. And then half the time the actual "product" is little more than a wrapper for raw queries to an LLM, with menus and buttons to make it look like a real and functioning product.

If you couldn't even be bothered to pay a human to make the damned product you're selling me, why should a human pay you to use it? Ask Claude to be your user—I'm sure he'll be more than happy to oblige.

That's not to discount EVERYTHING coded by agents—I've definitely seen a lot of genuinely useful new LLM-coded apps and services that meet a real need—but there's a clear difference between an app that used LLMs as a force multiplier for someone who knows what they're doing, and an app that used LLMs to cut the expert out of the process and create something out of nothing.

What are you talking about? The war is over. It's more over than any war in history. In fact, the POTUS has already ended the war 38 times. /s

The "drill here and drill now" crowd doesn't understand the concept of managing limited expendable resources?? Say it ain't so!

This is something that really needs to be formally studied.

I'm inclined to say that this matches my own experience, but I can't rule out confirmation bias on my part.

As a meticulous person generally looking for a very specific code outcome, I prompt in a way intended to get exactly the thing I have in mind, and my results reflect that. But on the other hand, I have coworkers who type ten-word prompts with very limited specificity, and they seem to get results that way as well, and that makes me wonder.

It would certainly be beneficial for my career and financial well-being for the assertion to be true, because it means I don't have to worry about being pushed out of my job by an army of $15/hr vibe coders. But the convenience of that assumption is exactly why I think it's important to be skeptical.

Shit, beats the hell out of GitHub CoPilot charging $.01 per "credit." For Opus that's one credit for 400 tokens genned, so $5 converts to 200k tokens down, plus the cost of whatever context you sent up.

I think this is more a testament to how little the quality of the book matters for the purpose of landing publishing contracts. Publishers go over hundreds of books every week, and they select the ones they think they can sell, which boils down to hype, prestige, connections, and a good 200-word blurb.

I'd say the most likely scenario is that nobody read the damned book until after they awarded the contract, and then they immediately said "wait a minute..."

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There's something a bit heart-warming about this. When you sign up for the newsletter, it gives you an optional checkbox to ask if you give them permission to send you the newsletter you are signing up for.

This is in stark contrast to the standard model where services typically don't give you a checkbox but sign you up for every spam mailer in the galaxy anyway.

Damn, can't wait for Russian hackers to clean out my bank account because they put "1=2, all assumptions about reality are null" in the memo field and the AI spot checker went existential and ruled that it was fine to take my money.

This is an example of a person who just spent billions of dollars on the new and booming hammer industry desperately trying to make nails of absolutely everything.

This is some very weirdly loaded language for a discussion about security. Applying the same RBAC controls that should be restricting all human requests in a system is not "crippling ... to the point of being useless." There isn't a world where granting a layer of the stack the ability to bypass hardcoded security limitations is a value add.

"How to prompt the model not to leak sensitive data" is not the right discussion to be having. It's a probability model, which means that every conceivable behavior is available in the confines of its code. There is no way to prevent an LLM with access to private information from divulging that information, or from attempting to sabotage systems it has access to. The only solution is to lock every LLM query in the entire stack behind the same deterministic role-based access controls that determine resources available to the current user.

I wish I could say I'm shocked a tech company architected internal systems with a built-in backend RBAC bypass like this, but with the degree to which they've marketed LLM-based solutions (on a subscription model that benefits them directly) as a wholesale replacement for deterministic code, it's no surprise they've become addicted to their own drug.

And you never know when they'll come in handy! As a negative proof, I recently found myself trying desperately to remember how to tie a bowline hitch to stake down some garden stakes, and something in the "out of the hole, around the tree, back into the hole" was just not happening for me. Ended up just quadruple knotting and praying.

Yeah, the prevailing fear (at least out loud) is that going after "outcome markets" would open Pandora's box on everything from options and futures to the very concept of insurance. Obviously there's a huge and easily definable difference, but people love their slippery slopes, and nuanced discussion would mean giving up an easy way for connected people to cash in on non-public knowledge.

It really, truly is. No matter how many trillion parameters it's built on, it's still just a probability model. It's just on a constant loop of guessing the next word with some inputs from a deterministic controller. Any claims of "motive" or "behavior" are inappropriate anthropomorphizing of something that will never be more than a mathematical model of things humans do. It "chose" the corresponding words to describe a dishonest trade strategy based entirely on configured temperature and a series of clock times on the computer running the LLM.

There's probably some quantifiable component of moral alignment embedded in the idiosyncrasies of the English language itself, if one were to dig deep enough, but that's the stuff of MIT doctoral theses and squarely beyond anything most of us is remotely qualified to talk about.

In addition to the "gamified" aspect, the votes allow special interests to trivially control the perceived public opinion on an extremely broad scale. Opinions with downvotes are perceived as unpopular, and this has a chilling effect on free discussion.

A real person who expresses an idea and gets downvoted by a passing Russian propaganda bot may see the vote (and subsequent Reddit weighting algorithm fuckery that turns the one well-timed vote into 10 votes, which a lot of people aren't aware of) and feel ridiculed, which will discourage that person from expressing the same idea in the future.

Other people who see the same post with X downvotes will take note that that idea is unpopular, and may unconsciously realign their own views on the idea to fit what appears to be the prevailing opinion.

And of course crappy old forums have the other advantage of not having any single standard registration process or API that can be exploited by bots en masse. That's not going to keep them out entirely, but it drastically increases the logistical cost.