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You’re moving the goalposts. Gary Marcus’ proposal was being able to ask: Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc.

Which is a relatively trivial task for a current LLM.


The Gary Marcus proposal you refer to was about a novel, and not a codebase. I think GP's point is that motivations require analysis outside of the given (or derived) context window, which LLMs are essentially incapable of doing.

I don’t really see how this is an AI issue. We use AI all the time for code generation but if you put this on my desk with specific instructions to be light on review and it’s not a joke, I’m probably checking to see if you’re still on probation because that’s an attitude that’s incompatible with making good software.

People with this kind of attitude existed long before AI and will continue to exist.


Totally, and im not saying otherwise. I'm saying that it takes the same amount of work to become a good engineering team even with AI. But it takes exponentially less work to bacome worse team. If they say C++ makes it much more easier to shut yourself in the foot, in a similar manner LLMs are hard to aim. If your team can aim properly, you are going to hit more targets more quickly, but if and when you miss, the entire team is in wheelchairs.

Making good software isn’t what matters in most workplaces - making software that works (even if you have taped over the cracks) is.

It’s always been this way in toxic workplaces - LLM’s amplify this.


> The following fees apply when a user completes [...] any app installs within 24 hours of following an external content link

So does this mean a malicious competitor or motivated disgruntled user could fraudulently cause millions of app installs? With the scale smartphone activity fraud farms are at these days, paying a few thousand dollars on such a service to cause a developer to spend a few million dollars on worthless installs (or a lot of resources arguing with Google) seems like a worthwhile endeavour for the motivated.


A malicous competitor could also click on their competitors ads too. Antifraud is important.


Antifraud is "important" but when the party in charge of implementing it makes more profit when there's more fraud, what result do you expect?


If linking to external content is not viable, developers will not continue linking to external content. If developers stop linking to external content Google stops making money. It's not an infinite money glitch if Google didn't go after fraud, it hurts the profit they can make from it.


> If linking to external content is not viable, developers will not continue linking to external content.

So in other words, go back to in-app purchases processed by Google.


I got my AdSense account disabled because "fraudulent click activity" or how they worded it (someone clicked my ads frequently, I assume?). Google then kept all the my hard earned 16++ EUR or so.


I can't wait until I'm professionally done so I never ever have to use a google product again.


The only thing that gives some slight semblance of hope is that he at least acknowledges that Mozilla is vulnerable and he very very briefly mentions needing new sources of revenue.

No mention of an endowment (like Wikipedia has) or concrete plans to spend money efficiently or in a worthwhile way, and I sure hope ‘invest in AI’ doesn’t mean ‘piss away 9 figures that could have set up an endowment to give Mozilla some actual resilience’.

I hope is that he’s at least paranoid enough about Mozilla’s revenue sources to do anything about their current position that gives them resiliency. Mozilla has for well over a decade now been in a pathetic state where if Google turns off the taps it is quite simply over. He talks a lot about peoples’ trust in Mozilla. I don’t really remember what he’s talking about to be honest, but if Mozilla get to a point where they seem like they can exist without them simply being Google’s monopoly defence insurance, perhaps I’ll remember the feeling of trusting Mozilla. I miss it.


Being short anything AI now seems like shotgun tasting unless you really want to give Citadel and Jane Street money since the options premiums are so high, but I have been trying to get a bit less exposed to tech over the last few months and just been buying other ETFs that are less exposed to tech.


MS (or any large company for that matter) didn’t participate in BLM discussions and get speakers to describe themselves and list their pronouns because they thought it was virtuous or right, they were just following the cultural zeitgeist in a way that they thought would make them more money.

Walking it back is just the same behaviour manifesting in a different way. Investors don’t value DEI in the same way they did before so it becomes an expense with no value to shareholders, so it gets cut.

It’s very cynical but nothing about this should be particularly shocking.


Also, increasing efforts to support DEI and also decreasing those efforts can both be good things.

You can fail to recognize a problem, and you can also overreact to it.


There has certainly been an overreaction, and it continues to be the case even after efforts have been walked back.

I have yet to hear a good justification for why people who are not interested in programming should be encouraged to become interested purely in the name of equality, yet my institution is still spending huge amounts of public money on trying to achieve exactly that.


Because "not being interested in programming" might not be the only cause for the lack of representation.


You don’t need to loudly and publicly say no to Roskomnadzor’s extrajudicial notices, by recognising them you’re giving them more legitimacy than they deserve by acknowledging at all rather than treating the notice as the spam it is.

Just because the UK is modelling themselves in the same image doesn’t mean that the tactic for dealing with extrajudicial censorship attempts is different.


The Granite act is a direct result of this loud response. Being loud means that U.S. politicians notice, a U.S. under secratary notices, which means a stronger and more legally binding response is possible. Legislature and foreign diplomacy is involved not just some idealistic whining about jurisdiction.

https://x.com/prestonjbyrne/status/1996398535189860688


Exactly, this is reaching the level where the US government needs to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on the UK to cease. Raising the profile of the issue will help make that happen.


I moved away from Anker to UGREEN following Anker’s Eufy using unencrypted feeds and sending data to the cloud with no user consent, which was bad, but their gaslighting response to the tech media and overall handling of the situation made me completely lose all trust in them. Maybe they’ve gotten better since, happy to be proven wrong.

UGREEN fit that niche of ‘tech products that are generally of quite good quality’ for me fine. They feel like neither an upgrade or a downgrade to the Anker stuff I still have.


I shitposted about the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ for most of my teenage and adult life only to dual boot Linux for a bit as an experiment a year or two ago and have ~never booted in to Windows for anything other than games with anticheat since.

It’s more a case of Windows getting significantly worse and feeling like malware than Linux desktop being THAT much better than the last time I tried it, but between proton and maybe 95%+ of my work being in a browser window or browser window (Electron) these days, I basically never run in to compatibility issues and never have Candy Crush advertised to me.


>It’s more a case of Windows getting significantly worse

No disagreeing on that. I hate how intrusive it is. I feel that I am paying for something AND I am still the product.


OP has given all that they need, English is probably not their first language, and the first response was to ask for even more unpaid time and labour (presumably in English) in a format that is likely much more difficult for them to summarise coherent thoughts succinctly in, while addressing zero of their issues. They’re asking for MORE effort of the volunteer to fix their bot’s fuckup.

I’m honestly struggling to think of a more insulting way to respond to this. At least “Fuck off” isn’t pretending to care, it’s fewer words to read and isn’t asking for an indeterminate amount of time from you.


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