No, I’m a proper one ;-)

split into occupation zones.

Who’d voluntarily occupy it though?

If Germany was a US state, it would be the fifth largest by land area, but its population of 83mil is more than the two most populous US-states combined (CA 39mil + TX 32mil ≈ 71mil). Its top three states, population-wise (NW 18mil, BY 13mil, BW 11mil) would individually make it into the top ten (with BW being #10, so it’d get pushed out if we also add the other two).

So, yeah, the comparison isn’t really fair.

Right, it’s the one place you’ll want to avoid at any cost. The only sign that allows you to do a U-turn on the highway is “Willkommen in Bayern”.

Signed, a definitely biased Swabian

Smashing any of these you find should be considered an act of civil courage

It makes sense a programmer will play with their electronic objects differently than someone outside the industry. It remains a toy to be played with. Subscribing mental health or personality implications is just plain wrong.

If we’ll take the toy analogy, compare someone cuddling plush animals or playing make-believe to someone violently stabbing them with a knife. Sure, the plushy doesn’t feel anything so it doesn’t amount to torture, but they clearly have a different idea of “playing” if “playing violence” is fun to them. The “something else” here would be whether they do it for the fun of violence or for the curiosity of cutting them open to see what’s inside.

I could just as easily suggest your insistence is an indication you have a personality disorder or inclination towards inhumanity for attempting to humanize objects.

I’d think you misunderstood me: It’s not about the text generation models for me, which you’ll find I took care to point out are not human, and that the string of numbers they spit out that translates to an imitation of distress doesn’t actually represent distress but rather the result of a pseudo-random algorithm that just happens to resemble it.

More realistically, I’m debating with AI or a troll paid by people building data centers

Nah, I may have different takes on some nuanced issues, but I absolutely hate the slopidemic as much as anyone here.

I’ve been the odd one out in a group where we’d practice discussing current business topics (English being my second language and working in a German company means I didn’t have a lot of practice) by consistently picking news articles or scientific papers about the problems, shortcomings, the environmental destruction, the effect it has on coding skills, about Ford having to hire back its engineers when it turned out that AI couldn’t actually replace them…

It’s perfectly possible to disagree on nuances while still sharing a common overarching opinion. Point in case:

I do think it’s important for the average person who may read this to know that it’s impossible to torture a non-living object, even when it’s coded to respond in complete sentences like a person.

That’s why I emphasised that it’s not the action I’m concerned about, but the intention behind it. I don’t give a fuck about its mimicry of feelings, and I endorse comprehensive testing of its response to all manner of inputs. I explicitly noted the difference to animal testing for that reason: there is nothing unethical about feeding a text processor some particular string.

And we may have discovered a method to piss off billionaires and waste more of their AI money. In that case, I heartily recommend all to play as they wish with LLMs and open AI. Have nonsensical fun with it because nothing of value is being lost!!

The tradeoff being that we’re also wasting more energy, contributing to environmental destruction and padding the “growth” in usage numbers, which corporate shareholders clearly care more about than actual profits and may be used justify further investments into data centers. The models have no value, but the resources their gluttonous hosts devour do.

For pissing off billionaires, I think clogging the water supply of their data centers would be more productive. I’m sure you could also make a fun game out of finding ways to sabotage them directly.

I’m also upset that a mainstream tool doesn’t support a niche feature.

(Mostly because I have to use certain tools at work because corporate bullshit and get annoyed when I’m reminded that the way I’m used to doing things doesn’t work here)

But if I was developing a tool for a certain audience, I would also prioritise the needs and habits of that aufience. And if that means leaving out regex because laypeople will only shoot themselves in the foot… I’ll bitch and moan and cry but ultimately comply.

If you’re seeking to prompt expressions of distress* from it for your entertainment, it kinda is a weird way to waste energy and water for personal gratification and I’d be worried why you’re so delighted by it, in the same vein that I’m concerned about people who love gratuitous torture scenes in games or movies.

Curiosity about the way the model handles such input is something else though, and frankly, I would consider that a reasonable part of any scientific inquiry into model behaviour*. The ethical concerns about human experiments don’t apply, nor do those about animal experiments, and testing the full range of linguistic “stimuli”* is perfectly sensible. Of course, the difference between science and fucking around is writing it down, but personal curiosity is also a good thing, so long as people remain aware of what they’re working with.

But anyone who feels the need to implement a Typescript compiler in Rust is a maniac and needs to be stopped

* Using human terms as metaphor, not because they’re equivalent but because it’s more convenient than variations of “sequence of numbers produced / consumed by a weighted random generator resembling…”

The biblical canon is written by flawed, biased narrators though. I think it’s perfectly valid to project an alternate canon onto their story.

Also they can sleep soundly knowing Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.

Frankly, I wouldn’t put it past him to fuck up that part too

Of course, that’s what I do. That’s what I recommend everyone should do, or get someone to do for them. My point is that I’m sceptical of the type of person to endorse the opposite.

It’s more about the ethical and cognitive effects of relying on AI. To simplify, I don’t think there is any good use for “leaning heavily” on it for code generation. The worst case scenario is that the code fucks your system in some way.

I don’t know what precautions the author might have made, but to dedicate a paragraph to pointing out how useful AI was to him sounds more like the type of AI hype techbro to just trust the AI to get it right, which makes me trust him less.

Plus, you know, the whole energy consumption and cognitive decline issue.

I haven’t seen this particular code, but I’ve had the pleasure of working with AI-generated code before. There was a single line that I ended up using in my manually written version, the rest of it was just hard to read and maintain. The advice for editing that code I got from the person who sent it was to just feed it to the model and ask it to make those changes.

I don’t want to outsource my brain and I find it untrustworthy to see someone advocate for it.

I was more thinking about the mentality and ethics behind using it and considering it worth mentioning, not so much whether I personally would get to use it. That was poor phrasing on my part, sorry. What I meant is that it implies a certain mindset that I find deeply untrustworthy.

I did read the rest of the article. It’s interesting, no doubt.

Sounds interesting, if it’s all locally hosted it might actually be a good-

I leaned heavily on Codex throughout the build.

Aaaaand I’m out.

I get the argument about quick and easy development turnaround, but I just can’t trust anything vibecoded, let alone models from that company.

I don’t know, to be honest; I’m not deeply familiar with its workings. I just know that I made a habit of running a command “dry” without sudo, both because not everything should be done with superuser privileges* and because it’s a way to make sure I get the syntax right, then if it does need sudo, I repeat it with sudo.

*Which is why sudo -i (the interactive mode) is a dangerous tool that shouldn’t actually be your default mode of working

Pretty sure the person you responded to knows that and is joking, since you can hardly have a fraction of a CVE. Germany (where their instance is hosted) uses comma for decimal separators, so that joke is pretty close at hand.

Doesn’t it autocomplete? I mean, not if it’s an argument for sudo, obviously, but my terminal starts in interactive mode anyway, so that’s rarely an issue

Then you’re probably more knowledgeable on the topic than me. I did a great job of only learning the basic minimum of frontend development in my WebDev classes, never mind UI design or UX testing. If it weren’t for a webapp QA gig I did for a while, I would’ve had no experience with usability at all.

Scratching our horse has a tendency to prompt her to scratch back. We’ve more or less taught her to just do that with her lip (seriously, horse lips are flexible and strong enough to do that just fine) rather than her teeth like she would with other horses, but sometimes, those habits slip back in…

So she sometimes wonders why we tell her off when she just wants to return the favour. I always feel bad, but I’d rather not have her rip holes in my clothes (nor skin, for that matter).