crabmusket

POSIWID is dumb, but also, why are you ignoring that it reads posts from multiple networks? Why isn't that its purpose?

Actually if we take the phrase to refer to Cal Newport's book, no. What you're describing is digital abstinence. From the article,

> Explore ways of greatly decreasing or scoping your social media use ... Get the information benefits of the platform without getting sucked in to the vortex

This is more or less what Newport is recommending. Find ways to get the benefit of digital technology while refusing the manipulative aspects and other downsides.

EDIT: oops, TFA doesn't actually mention the book, I thought it did. I think this point still stands: "minimal" does not mean "none".

What did you find unreasonable about the footer?

> because git is an interface that agents are experts at using

I'd actually argue that this is the wrong way around. Being able to git diff legislation is very good, but mainly for humans, who need tools to make work tractable.

An agent will use whatever interface is available, including no interference, won't give up due to the task being too onerous, and can be scaled by paying for more tokens. It could simply brute force diff the raw text, writing bespoke Python and regexes, etc.

LLMs make brute forcing intellect possible. It's humans who need finely crafted tools.

Does this imply a forthcoming wet lab boom comparable to the data centre boom?

> Life throws obstacles at everyone.

This is sensible and pragmatic, but I think you're talking past the other commenter.

Obstacles presented by, for example, your boss, or your company's competitors, or your political system, are not the same as obstacles like heartbreak, natural disasters, emotions, illnesses we cannot yet cure.

> Learning how to dodge and weave is essential to survival.

A lot of people perceive that elites are throwing dodgeballs at them in order to increase their own profits. Saying "them's the breaks, it's just the way it is" appears to be deflecting criticism from those elites and that system.

It probably depends on whether you think we could actually feed everyone, today, if we chose to, or if you think e.g. human nature prevents that from being possible.

Would you reject the characterisation of model weights as a black box then?

I suppose if LLVM's source code has a similar size in bytes then it would be similarly difficult to work with. However, it would still remain source code readable by a human, not binary data with no semantic content when examined plainly.

I mean debugging within the model, not the harness. Harnesses are software like any other.

The model itself is more or less a black box - if tokens come out that you don't like, it seems like there's no equivalent to "this LLVM release fixed a code generation issue on platform X relating to situation Y".

I'm not sure why people are so motivated to say these are the same thing when they are clearly not.

And yes, rigorous approaches can be taken to systems built on and with LLMs, as you say. That doesn't make them the same as compilers.

Could you go into more detail about how you'd debug LLM output?

I don't really care about what "most engineers" do. I did phrase it lazily but I am trying to point out something fundamental about LLMs and compilers.

You can debug a compiler. If an LLM writes code you don't like, how would you debug that? You wouldn't. You'd just ask again and hope it does a better job.

> Deno 1.0 shipped in 2020 on the original terms, & then spent the next four years walking them back one piece at a time. First the deps.ts convention, one file that re-exported every URL: a manifest in all but name. Then lock.json, an integrity hash per URL: a lockfile. Then import maps, so you could write bare specifiers again.

I object to two of these categorisations.

deps.ts was a convention, not a built-in runtime feature. If you want to follow the convention, that's fine. It's just a regular old typescript file!

Import maps were not Deno walking back, but implementing a web platform feature. Parity with browser JS was a standout feature of Deno from the beginning. This was walking forwards if anything.

However, broadly, the story is indeed one of Deno moving away from its opinionated roots towards pragmatism (drop-in replacement for Node).

> who am I to say if someone else is willing to pay for it?

You are a moral actor capable of rational thought. The very image of God themself, if you like. Don't shrug off your own agency.

Something that comes up frequently on their podcast - often in passing, I'm not sure I remember a specific episode to refer you to - is the woes of trying to support/debug commodity hardware. Think waiting for Dell to get back to your support ticket about a BIOS issue. Or being told "well you're the only person with this problem, so it must be your fault sorry!" This seems to come especially from Bryan's experience at Joyent. The way they describe "Oxide value" is being able to own as much of the stack as possible so that they can debug things down to the lowest level possible.

> Nothing in Blindsight says "there can't be a God"

I feel this is missing the point that OP is trying to get at. I wish I could cite Blindsight more accurately, but it's been a long time since I read it.

I don't think OP is suggesting the characters in the book sit down and reminisce about the time scientists proved there's no god after all, ha ha weren't all those believers silly all those years.

But Blindsight I found to be deeply nihilistic about the place of "humans as we know them". Whereas religions affirm that humans as we know them are somehow cosmically special due to their relationship with God, Blindsight posits they're just a weird blip of biology destined to be outcompeted.

I wouldn't necessarily call it atheistic so much as ahumanistic. It seems to focus on survival, power and force, and feels like it denies, rather than affirms, any sense of our own worth.

I may be overstating the case; again it's been a long time since I read it. I remember having, as some other posters have a said, quite a depressed feeling after having finished it. I didn't hate the book, but I didn't feel like I'd learned anything that would improve my life. Other than having had the chance to grapple with challenging ideas- which is better than having read something with no intellectual stimulus!