malloryerik

Are banks safe?

Sometimes writing to an LLM seems to make me lazy. "It'll understand," I think and then just leave a thought sloppy, inchoate, even reasoning to myself that it's better to write that way to see what'll be triggered in the LLM. Then I think... uh oh I'm strolling down the primrose path.

Never saw Game of Thrones? Which maybe should have ended with everyone dying?

Putin keeps talking about living forever, which makes his nuclear threats a bit less worrisome.

Can you imagine an (Android) app store model? You know when you buy packaging that it's verified. Complies with regulations. Companies submit packaging for review that's cheap, fast, tax-supported, and EU-wide. Doesn't have to be like the FDA. So that reusables could become a thing, I'd be fine honestly with extra charges for most branded packaging. This butts up against freedom of expression I suppose but come on the single-use plastics problem is real. But as described what sounds exactly backwards is the EU model. Radiohead sang, "If I were king you'd be backed up against the wall" but I'd sing, "Send your goods in any verified packaging!"

Instantly couldn't resist clicking on some unknown thing called "the Ploopy A+".

Oh I agree the LLM not reasoning at the AST level, and was trying to say I believed this even more strongly than the person I was replying to, but that it didn't matter if you coded or had the LLM code in an appropriate style for a lisp. And then I made a tried to hint at a further claim that the base LLM is not reasoning at all beyond its attention heads I think. As I understand it the corpus space itself -- meaning the relations between tokens and lexemes and so on -- contains the shape of what we call reasoning, so that the language itself + weighting , attention heads, is doing any "reasoning" at all unless the LLM directly starts a chain-of-reasoning where it talks to itself, and if it's doing that just for one's delimiters then one probably hasn't used the lisp very well. I was probably unclear and sounding like I thought the LLM was fundamentally a reasoning device. As far as I understand, "reasoning" or an internal model other than the the language (training corpus corpus) + weights only exists when an LLM does "self talk" either as sub turns, a strong but expensive hack, or as a result of multiple turns layering up context. My claim is that the model can get delimiters right despite not reasoning about them, but deeply nested. My sense is that the model doesn't need to reason to track until attention heads are overwhelmed by nested delimiters; does those sound right? Anyway super interesting conversation, and I do think I was giving less credit to LLM reasoning, as seems to me an LLM trained on AST might still get it wrong a lot. So I don't tend to think AST is something that in and of itself makes languages with ASTs any better. But... immutability, which is practical thanks to AST, is another story. And if I'm wrong about anything here please let me know; I'm not an expert!

Paren issues with Clojure probably mean your functions are too long? I like to keep mine down to 8-10 lines or less when possible, keep them flat and composable, use threading macro and then transducers for performance. At least that's how I read it. AST might not matter much either way, or in a stranger way, because the LLM's corpus and progression through code will give it a kind of shadow or grooves of an ast, but it isn't making or receiving any ast from this piece of code.

Still, Elixir scores best on the TenCent AutoCodebench, by far actually, "despite" being like Clojure built with an AST and immutability. Clojure wasn't part of those tests but I use both daily with LLMs (mostly Codex) and imagine it's on par with Elixir. The repl is better than Elixir's. Both have serious strengths.

Yeah great point. In my case I'd dropped Clojure and then returned because of how I could use it with LLMs. Still, the good news is maybe that LLMs don't just kill everything but three languages.

Hehe, a good joke, but to be a little boring, Clojure is successful and excellent and LLMs love it in my experience. And it's better in LLM era because there little frictions get agented away so to speak but the benefits mostly remain and are even amplified, like immutability as an example. Parens with overlong functions can be an issue but it's really not such a horror show. And Datomic-flavored Datalog in a Clojure triplestore feels almost made to order for LLMs.

If machines start doing all of the work, even much or most cognitive work, then I think this has to change. Meanwhile look at Nordic countries for example. Not communist, rich, low inequality by design. They were the pioneers btw in social democracy, in which they all live. Interesting, "always been history" is actually not right, or at least, also, it's "not been pre-history" is right because early humans before and up to us as homo sapiens, did indeed from all evidence I've seen have dramatically greater social equality and sharing economies. Our current state is the less "natural" in the sense of being out of tune with our instincts.

I'd suggest we already have a some UBI, but in the form of education, health care, disaster relief, food stamps, and so on.

We have state supported pension plans in most developed countries, unemplyment insurance, these large welfare states with extensive public education, national health and so on, so while the means of production mostly haven't been socialized, the fruits often have, through taxation. Now, some of this existed before the Industrial Revolution -- I wasn't aware how much until I read Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, which is a more important book now than ever, I humbly propose, but the scale is dwarfed by what we have now. And as Polanyi points out, we did get socialism as a response, as well as fascism, which was often btw called corporatism (as in the nation as a single body, not having to do with companies). Liberal democratic capitalism won out, for a while, and in large part because it became social democracy, or so goes a claim to which I subscribe. Without the social welfare aspects of modern democracy, the system would likely have broken politically.