Maybe Katana is somewhere with stronger consumer-protection laws than the USA. It’s not possible to make judgements about legal/illegal without at least knowing the jurisdiction.

We can say for sure that it’s obnoxious and unethical.

OK but I would hi-five those people. It’s harder to fight capitalism if you’re also fighting health problems!

I donno anything about China, but whoever made this meme certainly doesn’t know anything about the USA. The idea that “liberals” or anyone else (??) are high-fiving themselves over a credit score. lol

As with dating apps, if the mental health recommendations actually worked then engagement would go down. I doubt they even need a human putting their thumb on the scales; the algorithm optimizes engagement in whatever way it needs to.

It’s basically impossible to tell with these between the example being totally fabricated, true but only happens some small percentage of time, true and happens most of the time but you got lucky, and true and reliable but now the company has patched this specific case because it blew up online.

There are automated checks which can help enforce correctness of the parts of the code that are being checked. For example, we could imagine a check that says “when I add a sprite to the list of assets, then the list of assets becomes one item longer than it was before”. And if I wrote code that had a bug here, the automated check would catch it and show the problem without any humans needing to take the time.

But since code can do whatever you write it to do, there’s always human review needed. If I wrote code so that adding a sprite also sent a single message to my enemy’s Minecraft server then it’s not going to fail any tests or show up anywhere, but we need humans to look at the code and see that I’m trying to turn other developers into a DDoS engine.

As others replied, you could choose to find and run someone’s branch. This actually does happen with open-source projects: the original author disappears or abandons the project, other people want changes, and someone says “hey I have a copy of the project but with all those changes you want” and we all end up using that fork instead.

But as a tool for evaluating code that’ll get merged, it does not work. Imagine you want to check out the new bleeding-edge version of Godot. There’s currently ~4700 possible bleeding-edge versions, so which one will you use? You can’t do this organically.

Most big projects do have something like beta releases. The humans decide what code changes to merge and they do all that and produce a new godot-beta. The people who want to test out the latest stuff use that and report problems which get fixed before they finally release the finished version to the public. But they could never just merge in random crap and then see if it was a good idea afterward.

Conservapedia was comically stupid. Like, there was a lengthy diatribe against the Theory of Relativity that seemed largely based off Andrew Schlafly confusing the Physics term “relativity” with “moral relativity” and being against the latter. This was especially weird because Schlafly personally had a background in applied physics and so ought to know that GPS satellites serve as a proof of some of Relativity.

As embarrassing as basically every page of Conservapedia was, at least it represented some stupid man’s beliefs and effort. Grokipedia can’t even do that.

I definitely wouldn’t expect people to have heard of Kirk at all. Even within the US he was a bit of a niche asshole. But I would expect that before posting “RIP <somedude> he was a good guy” they would do some quick web searches and get an idea of what somedude was about and then only post if they agreed that that’s their notion of a good guy.

People always imagine this as “I will pay you $100 to kick the puppy” and of course they would never.

But what actually happens is that you have a long-term donor. You rely on their help (they’re paying for you to be able to hire a nice college intern who’s really smart and has been fun to have on the project). They never tell you what to do so you see them as more of a friend than anything else. It’s perfectly normal to get some lunch with friends and talk. You’re stuck on some problems and they have some good connections that help you out. That might even be worth more than $100k, but it’s not money at all so it’s OK that they’re helping you like this. They also talk you up, which is like free advertising except you didn’t ask for it so that also doesn’t count. Anyway, at some of the lunches they’re telling you about what’s going on with them and there’s some problems they’re dealing with that you could help with. They don’t ask for help, of course, because they know you’re independent. But being independent means it’s OK for you to do what you want. Even help a friend out who didn’t ask for help so they’re not influencing you…

The theory is that the new hire gets better over time

It always amazes me how few people get this. Have they only ever made terrible hires?

The way that a company makes big profits is by hiring fresh graduates and giving them a cushy life while they grow into good SWEs. By the time you’re paying $200k for a senior software engineer, they’re generating far more than that in value. And you only had to invest a couple years and some chump change.

But now businesses only think in the short-term and so paying $10k for a month of giving Anthropic access to our code base sounds like a bargain.

Executives are mostly irrelevant as long as they’re not forcing the whole company into the bullshit.

I’m seeing a lot of this, though. Like, I’m not technically required to use AI, but the VP will send me a message noting that I’ve only used 2k tokens this month and maybe I could get more done if I was using more…?

More as an alternative to a search engine.

In my ideal world, StackOverflow would be a public good with a lot of funding and no ads/sponsorship.

Since that’s not the case, and everything is hopelessly polluted with ads and SEO, LLMs are momentarily a useful tool for getting results. Their info might be only 3/4 correct, but my search results are also trash. Who knows what people will do in a year when the LLMs have been eating each others slop and are also being stuffed with ads by their owners.

Coding junkie is where you sneak away from your friends and code a few lines in the bathroom

We’re talking here about garbage code that we don’t want. If the choice is “let me commit bad code that causes problems or else I will quit using computers”… is this a dilemma for you?

It does seem silly, but it’s perfectly aligned with the marketing hype that the AI companies are producing.

The disconnect is coming here:

I just don’t see the line where any of that is impossible. It seems inevitable

I agree with you that robots building robots is not impossible. I disagree with you that it’s therefore inevitable. I strongly disagree with you that it’s therefore inevitable in the immediate future.

Come on. Obama’s continuation of presidential power-creep is not what enables Trump. Trump getting elected, taking over the Supreme Court, getting elected again, having all the billionaires lick his ass, etc is what enables him.

If you wanna lay it on Obama, blame him for not taking the right wing seriously enough and going after them at the local level where they had been building strength for the past 50+ years. Or for not betraying all his moderate-conservative supporters to implement some seriously progressive policy.

OK, cool. That definitely helps things.

I think where we’re disagreeing is that I think in a capitalist society the promise of money will inevitably corrupt the government (because it’s made of people). Maybe it can be avoided if the government performs additional regulatory action to stop anyone from getting too wealthy, but that sounds like beyond the limits that you want to set for government.

Without force

Whoah, whoah. Why’d you rule that out?

Your business plan: quality goods at reasonable prices. My business plan: hire some goons to kill you and take your stuff.

Historically, this has a lot of precedence.

Do you already know some French Canadians? The best and most fun way to learn a language is by talking with people. If you know someone who speaks a language you want to learn and they’re willing to struggle through talking with you, pick that language.