customguy

> it allows the app to ensure the code comes from a correct Signal phone number and not from a third party actor.

But if they sent you the code, even if a third party actor could somehow see it and hand it to you instead -- so what? What's the difference?

> You can always know more

But the direction is reversed.

I figure out how to do something, wrap it in a bunch of functions, and then kinda just use it. If it just keeps doing what it should, I may kinda forget how it works. But I don't forget that I made it, and that I understood it, that will never not have happened. So in a way, I am able to "forget" some things because I still know I knew them. And I trust that programmers who write programs that I dream about writing also know what they're doing.

With LLM, you accumulate stuff with from knows where, ultimately fished from a vast ocean named question mark, by whatever turns of phrase you and involved agents happened to use, and what the temperature was at that moment. Which is of course where all the harnessing and looping and running code on the output comes in, but still, ultimately you have no idea. Which is fine for prototypes, but long term? Good luck.

> It can be used to make existing products better and more secure. You just won't naturally hear about that.

Why? I keep asking for examples of LLM being used to make code more simple and elegant (which I would say is adjacent to making software better, if not more secure), and never get a reply, not a single one. I'm not claiming it doesn't exist, I know it must exist. If only via a lots of careful massaging of system prompts and harnesses, even if it takes too much effort to be worth it, I would like to see it.

Of course people can't share internal examples, but this is all over the world for many months now, where are the open source examples? Not "something new someone couldn't have done before", but someone making their precious even neater (while also adding things to it, but not primarily). Put differently, can LLM delete code, can they curate it well, can they not write weird comments nobody wants or needs, that sound like echoes of the user prompts and responses to them, but just explain tricky parts of the code, like a human would?

Also, IMO a VERY useful thing to learn about a tool or a chemical or whatever is, "what happens if I keep applying it to the same small thing over and over?" -- because that's the level of scientist I never evolved past, the kind of stuff you do as a kid -- , whereas a lot of this seems to be more about how it feels to apply it here and there until it looks good, and then move on and never look back. Which really isn't much at all, especially given we're such a short time in. I mean, how useful were mugs made of lead? Are people aware of the (in hindsight) insane things that were done with x-rays as those were invented, before the potential for harm was known? I bet they had a great time playing with that stuff, for a while.

What if in 5 years it turns out that a few years ago, LLM got into this habit of implementing certain things in a certain way because it seemed the best to "them" (the training, whatever), but there's a security issue with that -- what do you do? You can only let more agents loose, and hope they don't miss anything, because you cannot even do something like "patch PHP" (which is not my thought, Casey Muratori mentioned that in on of those podcast things).

Fully leaning into LLM doing as much of the coding and understanding as can be handed off to them seems insane to me, I don't mean this to offend though. It just does, like suggesting we go to Mars, because everything is better there, and to do that, we have to blow up Earth. Or saying to magically be able to fly from now on, we need to saw off the branch we're sitting on. Even if I thought life on Mars was the future or that we could fly, if we just thought of it the right way, this isn't a way forward IMO.

Not even that Proton CEO claimed that. This is another one of those "no u" knee-jerk reactions littered all over this site, and I wonder when we'll first see stuff like "but humans also sometimes fail to load because of network issues", because there is no real distance between "humans hallucinate even more" and something like that.

For me programming is about reducing complexity, in one way or another. By reducing needless CPU cycles or RAM, or by reducing the complexity of the code when I read it, making it "more logical", which is of course in tension with what would be the absolute most optimal (e.g. perfectly optimized assembly for everything). You make low-level things to turn into higher-level functions to do even higher level things with, and how joyful that is to navigate and use has a lot, if not everything, to do with how things are named.

LLM are great at creating code, obviously, but what is your (or anyone's) experience with them making code "better" in that way? Finding patterns in messy things and making it more "tidy", renaming things to be less verbose yet still descriptive, or even more descriptive, that sort of thing? Where you can "apply" agents to a codebase and have it come out more accessible to LLM and humans, because it's better code and less of it, if you will. I know rewriting things is more enticing and often more practically useful, but are there efforts/experiment in that direction? With actual code I can look at, comparing before and after?

Without the "detail" of "Minecraft" you don't even know what "the data" is.

> I don't know the scale Denmark

What does that refer to? Both say "1:1 scale". Are you just trying to pad the list so you can "details" instead of "detail"?

"Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata"

Without the context of what this even is, that the description does not provide, that might as well be someone who is bad at English trying to say something like"swisstopo’s offers open geodata about terrains, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams of Switzerland". Except if they struggled with the language they wouldn't needlessly bloat that list, either.

They didn't read it, the people rushing to its defense apparently aren't parsing it either, but I'm sure they make sure payment processing works, so at least there's that.

It's everywhere though. Not to detract from the massive problem of mass surveillance, but just recently when that data center in Russia got, and those derpy images of "stats about Russian" bots were circulated, I saw a lot of "the right-wing support is not organic" stuff.

Something is driving people into bubbles so they only talk about the other, never with. And both agree that "centrists", "normies", etc. are the most despicable of all. Seems like a recipe for something.

> I'm questioning whether that degree of separating is consistent with the medical literature, not whether we should "do something bad because we've always done something bad"

But that's the whole argument. It's silly because many are used to it, it's too extreme a change for people who are used to it.

If the majority of people somewhere did indeed use "Password123" everywhere and had been for decades, they'd find excuses too, one of them that it's not so bad as "Password". They might have a whole process around dealing with while not seeing the fallout.

> the investment and energy requirement of creating completely TV-free spaces for children.

Huh? You simply don't turn on the TV when the kid is there. If you want to save even more money and energy, don't get a TV.

I said most. Fine, add women who don't notice or mind that to it, same difference. What is not just a disrespect of boundaries, but an inability to even perceive them, to acknowledge them at all, is sticking out so glaringly in all these discussions. That people don't want to consume gen-AI stuff doesn't matter, it cannot be accepted anyway, so let's talk about how stupid they are and how that makes their choice invalid. Consent? What is consent?

> It's not self-evident that pointing out hypocrisy isn't a valid refutation

If I say drinking tons of sugary soda every day is bad for you, when I drink nothing but myself, how would my hypocrisy have a bearing on the effects of drinking soda? Yes, it's self-evident. It shouldn't even need saying because nobody should be so dishonest to even attempt it as an argument. It's the kind of dumb shit people say about other people, never to them.

> Do keep in mind that the vast majority of people posting in this thread of grown up with TVs in the background. The 0-3 year rule is a little silly.

Most people use password123 as password, and like using the same password on every site, so saying that's bad is a bit silly?

What kind of logic is that?

> benefits of that are not clear other than expressing the parents' own maniacal anxiety which (in of itself)

The coupling of the benefits being supposedly "not clear" while "maniacal anxiety" being absolutely certain is just classic.

If you say you want to go and get some milk, but then on the way to the shop waste 3 seconds to avoid an old lady instead of plowing right through her, even though it's the middle of the night and there are no witnesses, the result of your milk getting is suboptimal, and you cannot claim to primarily have been getting milk, but something else.

Also, the woman who has an AI child with Gemini said not to support artists who hate on AI, and I agree. We must crush the haters before it's too late, for they are irrational and will be left behind as we go vertical any second now.

seriously though: nothing will stop the sky from being blue, anytime soon. How I know this? Because we don't constantly talk about how the sky will always be blue. If you got the goods, you don't need the sales pitch.

You'd be very wrong, and you can simply go to Google maps and drop the little dude somewhere to confirm that.

"people can debate" but never actually weigh the evidence and come to a conclusion? Yeah that would be great, wouldn't it?

I wouldn't waste so many resources and time by every remotely interesting thing (down to whatever someone may remember their older brother playing when they were young) being "made" from scratch by 50 different people, who usually don't communicate with and often don't even reference each other. "Oh hi guys, so I happened to have made this thing..." is kinda getting old.