mw888

Why is every comment a brief "very impressive, nice job" on a high impact technology followed by a tangential semi-personal rant?

This feels a bit like unprincipled optimism, despite any rationale.

But I'm for unprincipled optimism.

It is reinvented by 'crypto' in the form of 'subjectivity' (as opposed to the hard objectivity of 'your keys your coins' and the absolute acceptance of all objectively (though perhaps fraudulent or thieving) valid transactions.

One example of subjectivity is if, and this happens, a bug is found which can drastically increase the supply of coins beyond the intent of the creators; everyone comes together and removes those state transitions manually despite their objective validity. A more practical notion would be some type of "this transaction was fraud, someone has authority to reverse it." Of course, this is a hard tradeoff, but users should be able to make it.

Are we all secretly (or not so) hoping distillation keeps working to commoditize the frontier?

One of the best HM comments I've seen.

I self-taught some math which gave me the benefit of no deadline, and I did not memorize derivations - I learned them. The typical experience is that the derivation given to you is that 'satnav route' and offers little intuition for what it does or how you would have even thought to do it.

The exercise for me was always the same: re-derive the proof by injecting context, motivation and intuition.

Those most-intelligent of humans who carefully memorized verbally the most important civilizational facts known had the same reaction to the invention of writing.

You are clearly a wizard of a prior era. But it is a new era.

Tangential: I have no issue with it, but this seems by README writing style to be AI-assisted. As time goes on, whether AI was used or not will become far less a point of interest - if the project is good it is good.

The unceremonious use of (what I speculate is) AI-assistance is becoming more normal. I think a lot of people who were die-hard skeptics will just quietly protest less and less. Also, for people who use it well and poorly alike, the urge to not advertise any AI-use at all is common today. People who know how to use it well don't feel the need to explain themselves to unreasonable absolutist skeptics.

I'm not convinced a problem is actually here. I certainly wouldn't believe LLMs, an optional tool, make any part of this fundamentally worse. Maybe superficially for people who can't adapt.

That's the type of moral stance which doesn't encode well into reality. I don't even agree with it, but it is surely consistent enough from your end. The real issue is that it crosses so many practical legal boundaries, mainly around intent that it will never survive as representative of your actual morals—through the grinder that is the modern legal system.

You've conceded your point and picked another.

> they'll raze the ground to ashes before anyone can use it for legitimate means.

You were so cynical you thought this one category of people would literally prevent any fruitful use. Now you simply argue with me whether the category exists at all.

> I really have no idea what you're on about. There's TONS of examples of people abusing this already.

Grossly dishonest in spirit, you are.

> I can't wait to see Apple Verified™ photos of UFOs flying over the Golden Gate Bridge.

While I'm on board with you about the inabsolute security of this (relative to what's typically expected of cryptographic systems), the fact that their 'verified' state requires a live certification and can be revoked means that the sensor responsible for obviously faked images will see those images and that device no longer certified.

It all relies a lot on trust in Apple, and integration with Apple, and relatively unmotivated attackers.

Certainly not always. There's a hedonic adjustment which happens however, where some tasks go very smoothly without much specification and a lot of "you know what I mean" to the LLM, while others then require you to get painfully specific after it badly misinterprets your intent.

Or maybe you can just get too spoiled with it grokking your intent, then become so vague that your vague ideas are actually just bad ideas. Certainly has happened to me.

> In my work with LLM-included software, I built a tool that evaluates text output relative to a baseline of what's expected. It helps to ensure things don't drift over time.

Is that hotel example real? Curious how exactly you employ this technique—my naive idea was, if talking software development, a sort of 'sanity-check auto-linter agent' catch errors on a regular basis (every 10 seconds, every write, w/e).

Part of the boon of this will just be dealing with less employees.

Not so much reducing cost by reducing headcount, but reducing liability; it's the legal labyrinth which is the barrier to entry to scale business. While it is present elsewhere, it's universal in employment.

The real question is "how big can a business be before it requires a legal department?" That an AI can automate many rote tasks and have some expertise means the benefits of scale with less of the risk.