HaraldvonBlauzahn

Accusation in a mirror, a propaganda and hate speech technique.

These people for sure studied how such propaganda works. And if you listen closely, the patterns of speech give it away. I have seen it used in the Brexit debate, and it already smelled like Fascism to me.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

That's exactly what Baldur Bjarnason explains in his well-researched book "The Intelligence Illusion". I can highly recommend it!

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

review

You should stop using words that clearly mean human cognitive activity, like "to review", to describe what LLMs do.

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HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

By that logic, we would not need regulation for financial institutions because "the free market will sort it out".

Except that capitalism or the free market does not care about people. Only people, we ourselves, care about people. We need rules shielding off harm like the guests of a hotel need a fire safety system.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

More like 500 lines per person-year.

You can do the math yourself:

how many lines of code does the linux kernel have?
what is the estimated value of the kernel, which is the hypothetical cost to re-create it?
what do you think the seniority of a linux kernel developer is?
what annual salary do they make in the country which uses Linux most - the US?
now divide kernel value by annual salary to get man-years, and lines of code by man-years to get average lines of code per year

Result: Typing in code that somehow compiles was never the bottleneck

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HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

How much is one million lines of code?

If a senior engineer works in a well-defined, well-architected greenfield project, and does extensive tests, 10,000 lines of code written in one year are very productive. The amount of new code per person-year will be much less in larger projects - a good indicator is the line count and the estimated value of the Linux kernel (40 million lines in 2025, redeveloping it in 2011 would have already cost 2200 million Euros, which would pay e.g. 36000 person-years for mid-level German software developers, that would mean 1111 lines per person-year{actually about half of that because of the interim growth of line count in the meantime }- and most software projects can only dream about so much actual value.)

So, you can say 1,000,000 lines of code generated in 11 days are probably 100 person-years of technical debt.

One caveat: It is relatively simple to auto-translate code in restricted languages like Java, Python, or Rust to unrestricted languages like C or C++. In that case, enforced invariants (like "no use of freed memory" or "sharing data across threads xor mutation") become implicit, but verbatim translation is often possible.

The other direction will require a re-design..

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HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

The ELIZA effect was discovered in the 1960ies.

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HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

The news isn't that AI obviously is not sentient.

The news is that even some relatively smart people can be induced to think it is.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

The first sightings of such phenomens were called ELIZA effect. In 1966.

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HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

Yeah, this is what the "(2022)" in the title was trying to tell you.

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HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

It is interesting - and scary - how shallow the roots of our common sense can be.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

Speaking of things that robots should do:

Those things, Pinker says, include dangerous and boring occupations, and tasks around the house, from cleaning to child care.

I have the feeling that people paying more attention to their addictive-by-design smartphone than to their baby might have really negative consequences.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

This reminds me on the reports that some native American people thought that taking a photography of them would rob them of their soul.

Or that many things that doctors do today as a matter of routine would have left them being burned as a witch in earlier times.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

Good names matter.

If you don't refactor codebases continuously and consistently(!), the'll become a total mess over time. I've worked recently with code bases that still use DOS character encodings common before 2000 or so.

If something is purely local, in a single process, it is easy to change. But the more stuff it touches, the more difficult and laborious it gets. On the extreme end, there are things like network protocols like IPv4 which are almost impossible to get rid of.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

Scheme does not demands immutability like Clojure, but it prefers it
I'm not sure what "prefers" means in this context; do you mean it "defaults" to? Rust in example doesn't "demand" immutability, it just defaults to it.

In Clojure, all standard data types are immutable. (Except Java arrays, which are accesible; Clojure's vector type is immutable too). If you need mutable containers, there are transients, which do have methods for mutating access. But these need to be "frozen" into normal collections before they are e.g. returned from a function; their scope is strictly local to a function.

Schemes are a bit more liberal, you can modify variables in Scheme but it is not idiomatic. Like in Clojure, recursion is often used over iteration. Also, e.g. in Racket, you have a lot of things like list conprehensions or dictionary comprehensions in Python.

Common Lisp is even more liberal; one can use a purely functional style but it wholly depends on own discipline.

I had looked into Clojure for a while, but I don't like Lisp.

So, Lisps might not be your cup of tea; Scala is pretty close in these aspects.

But Lisps are fantastic languages; Minimalist, very expressive, very performant implementations like SBCL or Guile, and run on many kinds of substrate, like the JVM (Clojure, Kawa, Armed Bear), native/POSIX(SBCL, Guile and many more), JavaScript (ClojureScript), GraalVM (babashka), the Python bytecode machine (basilisp), and so on.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2mo ago

I linked to the top search result.