wokwokwok

Your (many) replies on this topic are being down voted for a reason; please either post substantive comments or stop.

It’s remarkable (but not reassuring) how carefully they avoid saying “part of the Atlassian family” in any promotional material for some reason.

On the other hand, the parent post is entirely correct.

What, I ask, is the point of having laws and rules if you can just ignore the ones you don't like?

Its just a name, who cares?

Not me.

…but, if you break the law, you break the law. Not maybe maybe who cares, its not me being water boarded, I dont care…

If you break the law. You break the law.

Otherwise, who gives a duck what congress says?

Just fire them all and crown Trump King of America.

I’m being facetious. …but maybe its more of a big deal than you superficially pretend it is.

It’s just another case of the administration blatantly breaking the rules.

…so, you know. If youre ok with no laws or rules, I guess its fine.

Seems a bit chaotic to me. I prefer my governing body to be… marginally bound by some kind of responsibilty to something or someone.

I really like the idea of agent coding patterns. This feels like it could be expanded easily with more content though. Off the top of my head:

- tell the agent to write a plan, review the plan, tell the agent to implement the plan

- allow the agent to “self discover” the test harness (eg. “Validate this c compiler against gcc”)

- queue a bunch of tasks with // todo … and yolo “fix all the todo tasks”

- validate against a known output (“translate this to rust and ensure it emits the same byte or byte output as you go”)

- pick a suitable language for the task (“go is best for this task because I tried several languages and it did the best for this domain in go”)

This is the way.

The practice is:

- simple

- effective

- retains control and quality

Certainly the “unsupervised agent” workflows are getting a lot of attention right now, but they require a specific set of circumstances to be effective:

- clear validation loop (eg. Compile the kernel, here is gcc that does so correctly)

- ai enabled tooling (mcp / cli tool that will lint, test and provide feedback immediately)

- oversight to prevent sgents going off the rails (open area of research)

- an unlimited token budget

That means that most people can't use unsupervised agents.

Not that they dont work; Most people have simply not got an environment and task that is appropriate.

By comparison, anyone with cursor or claude can immediately start using this approach, or their own variant on it.

It does not require fancy tooling.

It does not require an arcane agent framework.

It works generally well across models.

This is one of those few genunie pieces of good practical advice for people getting into AI coding.

Simple. Obviously works once you start using it. No external dependencies. BYO tools to help with it, no “buy my AI startup xxx to help”. No “star my github so I can a job at $AI corp too”.

Great stuff.

This is irrelevant to the point.

Using nano banana does not require arcane prompt engineering.

People who have not learnt image prompt engineering probably didn't miss anything.

The irony of prompt engineering is that models are good at generating prompts.

Future tools will almost certainly simply “improve” you naive prompt before passing it to the model.

Claude already does this for code. Id be amazed if nano banana doesnt.

People who invested in learning prompt engineering probably picked up useful skills for building ai tools but not for using next gen ai tools other people make.

Its not wasted effort; its just increasingly irrelevant to people doing day-to-day BAU work.

If the api prevents you from passing a raw prompt to the model, prompt engineering at that level isnt just unnecessary; its irrelevant. Your prompt will be transformed into an unknown internal prompt before hitting the model.

How can a question that is:

1) clearly technical

2) reproducible

3) has a clear failure condition

Not be a suitable candidate for S/O?

Did we step into a dimension where only "How do I print('hello world')?" is a valid question while I wasn't watching, because it has a trivial one-line answer?

Hard questions doesn't mean they're bad, it just means many people aren't competent answer them. The same goes for obscure questions; there might just not be many people who care, but the question itself is entirely valid.

Does that mean they're not suitable for S/O?

I... can't believe anyone seriously believes that hard niche problems are too obscure or too hard for S/O to be bothered to grace themselves with.

It's absurd.

It just baffles me that a question that might take some effort to figure an answer out to might 'not be suitable' to S/O.

How about making it a site where only people who answer questions can even be eligible to be moderators?

What if moderators had to actually have karma from recently answering questions or they lose mod privileges?

Wouldn't that be a fresh change. You'd have to actually work to be a mod.

...

It shouldn't be controversial. That mods currently make visitors unwelcome is disgrace. :(

That SO incentivizes that behavior is ridiculous.

You’re being down voted because you’re not saying anything meaningful.

Yes, you can argue that [person] is [performing an action] because they believe, from their POV that [reason1, reason2, reason3].

> Or does [what person believes] not matter when they act upon it?

Yes.

What people choose to believe is distinct from fundamental baseline reality.

Let me put it another way for you; if I believe that fairies have invaded from space and I go out smashing peoples cars because, I personally, believe that this will make the fairies go home…

…does it help to argue about whether I believe in fairies or not?

It does not.

The arguement must be about whether fairies exist in baseline reality or not.

What I believe is not a point worth discussing.

…so, to take a step back to your argument:

Does he believe this will help? Who. Gives. A. Flying. Truck? Does it matter what he believes? Can we speculate what he thinks? It’s a useless and meaningless exercise and a logical fallacy; because anything can be justified if the only criteria are “you believe it will work”.

The discussion worth having is, in baseline reality, will it actually help?

Which is what the post you are replying to is addressing; but instead or following that up, you’ve moved this discussion into a meaningless sub thread of unprovable points about what people may or may not believe.

Which is why you’ve received my downvote.

You are not an expert in this field, and cherry-picking random articles in random journals does not make you an expert.

> Should I pick some other experts to listen to?

I think it's reasonably clear that you haven't spoken to an expert in this field.

> I'm sorry if I don't take the word of some random guy's dentist over multiple meta analyses in major medical journals.

Are you certain you're competent to review and understand the literature on the topic? It takes a lot of time and effort; that's what dentists do as a job. That's why they have to go to school. That's why random people on the internet do not do dentistry.

If you don't trust my dentist, then talk to your dentist.

This is literally my point: I'm not telling you how it is; I'm telling you, talk to someone who knows what they're talking about; and, don't believe that you are an expert because you put some trivial amount of effort into investigating it yourself.

You can't be an expert at everything. No one can.

As some point, you have to trust other people.

If you're not prepared to listen to an expert, and that's what your dentist is on this topic, then nothing I, or anyone else can say, makes any difference to you.

At some point, you have to accept that your random wikipedia page and 5 minutes on google is not a convincing argument.

This is right up there in the conspiracy theory territory.

Rational discussion means listening to experts and admitting that you are not an expert.

What do you want me to say?

You aren't a qualified expert on this topic. If you want an expert opinion, talk to an expert, not some dubious fucking provenance wikipedia page.

Talk to your dentist.

They are experts in this field, and, unlike “random person on the internet who spent 2 minutes on google”, have informed opinions on this topic.

If you want a serious discussion on why fluoride is good or bad, that’s where you need to go.

Random person on the internet is very easy to disagree with, because we’re all idiots right? It’s a very easy lazy way of self confirmation.

…but if you are serious about critically considering the issue and facing your own biases, talk to an actual topic expert.

My dentist told me he had carefully reviewed the literature and determined to his satisfaction that public fluoridated water was in the best interests of public health, currently. He offered to share some reading that he was convinced by.

You can’t really ask for more that that.

Discussing this here is a bit like protesting by posting on social media; yes, I suppose it’s better than doing nothing and not engaging with the topic at all… but only barely, and not in any meaningful way.

> However, what's wrong with allowing another app to post messages to my messages?

> If I don't want it, let me turn them off.

Can you it off for anyone sending you messages too?

That's the issue; you not wanting to use it does not mean that spammers won't use it.

That's the problem. You can't have nice things if some people can use it to abuse the system; and there are a lot of people who will.

> But my point is this isn't something unreasonable for a user to want.

This ignores the reality which is that doing it in a way that gives a nice user experience without an enormously painful security issue is really non trivial.

Maybe it's OK to have the choice?

...

If you love your android phone, don't care about iOS, don't like iphones.... why do you care? I mean, why does it upset android users when they see this sort of thing for people using iphones?

It mystifies me. If you love you phone, and you think it's better, then use it.

Nothing lost right?

Because running a parallel process is often difficult. In most cases, the question becomes:

So, how exactly is my app/whatever supposed to spin up a parallel process in the OS and then talk to it over IPC? How do you shut it down when the 'host' process dies?

Not vaguely. Not hand wave "just launch it". How exactly do you do it?

How do you do it in environments where that capability (spawning arbitrary processes) is limited? eg. mobile.

How do you package it so that you distribute it in parallel? Will it conflict with other applications that do the same thing?

When you look at, for example, a jupyter kernel, it is already a host process launched and managed by jupyter-lab or whatever, which talks via network chatter.

So now each kernel process has to manage another process, which it talks to via IPC?

...

Certainly, there are no obvious performance reasons to avoid IPC, but I think there are use cases where having the compiler embedded makes more sense.

There's no distinction to me.

AI is hard; edge cases are hard. AI sucks at edge cases.

Between AI for cars and AI for software the long tail of edge cases that have to be catered for is different, yes.

...but I'm sure the same will apply for AI for art (e.g. hands), and AI for (insert domain here).

Obviously no analogy is perfect, but I think you have to really make an effort to look away from reality not to see the glaringly obvious parallels in cars, art, programming, problem solving, robots, etc. where machine learning models struggle with edge cases.

Does the tooling they used matter? no, not at all.

...but if they've claimed to solve the 'edge case problem', they've done something really interesting. If not, they haven't.

So, don't claim to have done something really interesting if you haven't.

You can say "I've been using AI to build a blah blah blah. It's great!" and that's perfectly ok.

You have to go out of your way to say "I've been using an AI to build blah blah blah and I haven't written any of it, it's all generated by AI". <-- kinda attention seeking.

"no lines of code directly written" really? Why did you mention that? You got the AI to write your software for you? That sounds cool! Let's talk! Are you an AI consultant by any chance? (yes, they are). ...but.

No. You didn't. You really didn't. I'm completely happy to call people out for doing that; its not unfair at all.

Too many AI grifters out there.