latchup

> If employment is violence, we should end it. But then almost everybody would die.

You need to try out for the jumping to conclusions olympics team, that was an impressive leap there!

Jokes aside, we can absolutely reject the basis of our current economic system on the basis that it is cruel and violent and replace it with something better, and it would be far from the first time we did that. By your logic, the end of feudalism or the abolishment of slavery should have killed entire countries...

And I doubt you are about to explain to us that slavery is not violence (that's one of those ultra-libertarian thoughts of yours you probably shouldn't randomly blurt out).

It has very little to do with trust and a lot to do with the realities of hardware implementation. Every interconnect has a minimum linear transfer granularity that properly utilizes its hardware links, dictated primarily by its physical link width and minimum efficient burst length. The larger this minimum granularity, the faster and more efficient moving data becomes. However, below this granularity, bandwidth and energy efficiency crater. Hence, reducing access granularity below this limit has disastrous consequences.

In fact, virtual memory is already a limiting factor to increasing minimum transfer size, as pages must be an efficient unit of exchange. Traditional 4 KiB pages are already smaller than what would be a good minimum transfer size; this is exactly why hardware designers push for larger pages (with Apple silicon forgoing 4 KiB page support entirely).

I cannot help but feel that many of these discussions are led astray by the misconceptions of people with an insufficient understanding of modern computer architecture.

> Bubbles bursting aren't bad unless you were overinvested in the bubble.

That's what I am trying to say: every big technology player, every industry, every government is all in on AI. That means you and I are along for the ride, whether we like it or not.

> Consider that you'll be wiping your ass with DIMMs once this one bursts; I can always put more memory to good use.

Except you can't, because DRAM makers have almost entirely pivoted from making (G)DDR chips to making HBM instead. HBM must be co-integrated at the interposer level and 3D-stacked, resulting in terrible yield. This makes it extremely pricy and impossible to package separately (no DIMMs).

So when I say the world is all in on this, I mean it. With every passing minute, there is less and less we can salvage once this is over; for consumer DRAM, it's already too late.

Games tend to avoid FP64 compute as Nvidia has always gimped it in consumer GPUs, so you are somewhat lucky there. "Lucky" as in, you get to enjoy the broken-ass, glitchy FP32 physics that we've all grown to love so much.

However, if you actually need the much higher precision of FP64 for scientific computing (like most non-AI data center users do) and extremely slow emulation is not an option, consider yourself fucked.

I don't think anyone seriously believes AI will disappear without a trace. At the very least, LLMs will remain as the state of the art in high-level language processing (editing, translation, chat interfaces, etc.)

The real problem is the massive over-promises of transforming every industry, replacing most human labor, and eventually reaching super-intelligence based on current models.

I hope we can agree that these are all wholly unattainable, even from a purely technological perspective. However, we are investing as if there were no tomorrow without these outcomes, building massive data-centers filled with "GPUs" that, contrary to investor copium, will quickly become obsolete and are increasingly useless for general-purpose datacenter applications (Blackwell Ultra has NO FP64 hardware, for crying out loud...).

We can agree that the bubble deflating, one way or another, is the best outcome long term. That said, the longer we fuel these delusions, the worse the fallout will be when it does. And what I fear is that one day, a bubble (perhaps this one, perhaps another) will grow so large that it wipes out globalized free-market trade as we know it.

Well unfortunately for you, it has a precisely defined and well-understood meaning for all those not covering their eyes and ears in denial. Quoting Merriam-Webster:

> Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.

Chosen by the editors as word of the year, by the way.

It also works for Open Sans, on my Linux system at least. Probably only works for fonts that are installed and/or can be licensed for this.

Well, there are big differences in how aggressively things are patched. Arch Linux makes a point to strictly minimize patches and avoid them entirely whenever possible. That's a good thing, because otherwise, nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages for mutilating their work and/or forcing old and buggy versions on unsuspecting users.

"Our" politicians? What makes you think I am American? Of course Switzerland is less dysfunctional than the US, that wasn't the point of discussion at all (and an extremely low bar to begin with). It was to show that direct democracy has lead to undesirable outcomes.

> Calling people too dumb to handle democracy sounds a tad facist.

Well, it's good thing I did not do that. I said the average person cannot begin to comprehend every facet of the modern world they live in. Your limited reading comprehension is not making a very compelling counterpoint here.

In my many years of living here, I have never seen a Swiss person treat their own illnesses, design their own trains, hunt their own meat, and do their own plumbing all at once – they delegate tasks they understand themselves to be incompetent in to specialists. Yet somehow, at the ballot box, their otherwise healthy and productive understanding of their own limited competence makes way for a strange form of celebratory group hubris, landing them in a constitutional crisis like a drunk driver in a ditch.

Maybe instead of trying make decisions they have no hope of truly understanding in an incredibly slow and inefficient process, they can just elect people they trust to be specialists in narrow fields to make these decisions for them for a fixed time span? Wow, exciting, we just fixed a flaw in democracy the Greeks knew about 3000 years ago by resorting to the same god damn system everyone else already uses: representative democracy. Which also sucks in its own, different ways, but at least it is much less likely to set the entire f-cking country on fire over night. That's kinda neat.

How about that time in 2020 the Swiss voted in favor of an immigration restriction proposal that was so fundamentally incompatible with existing EU treaties, the government was forced to bullshit their way out of implementing entirely because doing so would have basically ended Switzerland as a nation? This is the kinda thing that really cannot happen in a working system. The only reason the government is not sued into following through is because the courts have conspired with other branches to shut down any attempt at doing so. Real democratic.

Generally speaking, people are stupid. Really REALLY f-cking stupid. Giving the average Joe this kind of unmoderated power in a modern world that almost entirely eludes his understanding is no different from handing him a loaded gun; eventually, someone will get hurt real bad. As someone living in Switzerland, the main reason things are as stable as they are is because:

* Changing anything significant requires a referendum, which is a huge pain in the ass. So politicians just kinda avoid important changes that require referenda, finding other ways to enrich themselves and leaving society stagnating. This means that actually important changes come about very slowly or not at all. Read up on how long it took for women's suffrage to become universal – and the outright threats of internal military action the federal government resorted to...

* Whether the Swiss like it or not, Switzerland is mostly a loud, spoilt economic annex of the EU. It will remain stable for as long as the EU is, and well off for as long as the EU wants to be seen as a peaceful and magnanimous partner in international relations. After all, "bullying" tiny and surrounded Switzerland into agreeing to anything – which the Swiss will cry about at any opportunity you give them – is a bad look.

So yeah, Swiss direct democracy is not all it's made out to be, and really not all that great up close. Admirers remind me a lot of Weaboos, strangely shortsighted in their admiration of a system they know little about.

I am going to assume your question is genuine and not rethorical hyperbole.

Every sovereign nation has legal supremacy over its own territory. Any company doing business in the EU, no matter its origin, must follow EU laws inside the EU. However, these laws do not apply anywhere else (unless specified by some sort of treaty), so they are not forced to comply with them in the US when dealing with US customers.

If they still abide by EU law elsewhere, that is their choice, just like you can just choose to abide by Chinese law in the US — so long as it does not conflict with US law. If these rules do conflict with the first amendment, enforcing them in the US is simply not legal, and it's up to the company to figure out how to resolve this. In the worst case, they will have to give up business in the EU, or in this case, prohibit chat between US and EU customers, segregating their platform.

That's a downright insane comparison. The whole problem with generative AI is how extremely unreliable it is. You cannot really trust it with anything because irrespective of its average performance, it has absolutely zero guarantees on its worst-case behavior.

Aviation autopilot systems are the complete opposite. They are arguably the most reliable computer-based systems ever created. While they cannot fly a plane alone, pilots can trust them blindly to do specific, known tasks consistently well in over 99.99999% of cases, and provide clear diagnostics in case they cannot.

If gen AI agents were this consistently good at anything, this discussion would not be happening.

> So what about all these huge codebases you are expected to understand but you have not written?

You do not need to fully understand large codebases to use them; this is what APIs are for. If you are adventurous, you might hunt a bug in some part of a large codebase, which usually leads you from the manifestation to the source of the bug on a fairly narrow path. None of this requires "understanding all these huge codebases". Your statement implies a significant lack of experience on your part, which makes your use of LLMs for code generation a bit alarming, to be honest.

The only people expected to truly understand huge codebases are those who maintain them. And that is exactly why AI PRs are so insulting: you are asking a maintainer to vet code you did not properly vet yourself. Because no, you do not understand the generated code as well as if you wrote it yourself. By PRing code you have a subpar understanding of, you come across as entitled and disrespectful, even with the best of intentions.

> That is just an opinion.

As opposed to yours? If you don't want to engage meaningfully with a comment, then there is no need to reply.

> I have projects I wrote with some help from the LLMs, and I understand ALL parts of it. In fact, it is written the way it is because I wanted it to be that way.

See, I could hit you with "That is just an opinion" here, especially as your statement is entirely anecdotal But I won't, because that would be lame and cowardly.

When you say "because I wanted it to be that way", what exactly does that mean? You told an extremely complex, probabilistic, and uninterpretable automaton what you want to write, and it wrote it not approximately, but exactly as you wanted it? I don't think this is possible from a mathematical point of view.

You further insist that you "understand ALL parts" of the output. This actually is possible, but seems way too time-inefficient to be plausible. It is very hard to exhaustively analyze all possible failure modes of code, whether you wrote it yourself or not. There is a reason why certifying safety-critical embedded code is hell, and why investigating isolated autopilot malfunctions in aircraft takes experts years. That is before we consider that those systems are carefully designed to be highly predictable, unlike an LLM.