I've always viewed computers as being an obvious complement. Of course we worked so hard to build machines that are good at the things our brains don't take to as naturally.
All of this and the only image linked is a collage clocking in at a whopping 512x218px...anyone know where we can see the full resolution? It looks spectacular from the thumbnail!
Very impressive video! Such sprites must have been seen at that altitude often enough in history, and as they're quite distinct from lightening I wonder if there is an historical record of them?
Yes, and that influence reaches far outside of the cities themselves. I only realized this after moving to rural Canada where on a clear night you would see the sky in a way that you could never see it within 30 km of any major city. It is hard to describe in words, you'd have to go up North during a cold winter night and lay down and stare upwards.
But you have recourse! It’s not ideal, but it beats being at the mercy of a vendor in most cases. Trying to hack around a closed source format is an even bigger drain.
> Like a few good sounding pedals that, ideally, each have just a knob or two.
It makes for a nice narrative but I haven't found it holds much water; musicians are all over the place on this spectrum. You'll find both extremes very well represented, and a good chunk of people who compartmentalize their "dayjob" music and tinkering. I've found a lot of successful musicians love to tinker and are always on the search for new inspiration. Like any good craftsperson they take some amount of pride in their tools and I've been blown away by how technical many can get on the electronics side! It's always funny to see Reverb auctions go up for famous musicians and finding out a bassist in a pop punk band owns a bunch of weird synthesizers :)
Simple one to two knob pedals are a big deal but you'll see a very large number of pros touring with extremely complicated modeling setups and all sorts of gadgets. At a certain point you really know what you want, and having the ability to dial that in is important! I tend to gravitate towards simplicity in a band setting but I know a lot of people who want dirt pedals with 10 knobs so they can dial in the sounds they hear in their heads.
I swing bimodal on this. For a while I enjoy the most exotic modular patches and loaded pedalboard. Then for months I am all about piano and acoustic guitar, as vanilla as can be.
It’s all so deep I’m not going run out of fun in any mode.
I'm the same on the guitar side. I'll go weeks using a fractal fm9 straight into the PA. it's like playing through a computer which is awesome. however...
I'll get real sick of the complexity and go back to my cranked tube amp and one overdrive pedal.
Because people take what I consider a reasonable statement (“It is immoral to pass on certain genes.”) and conflate it with an evil implementation (“We should enforce this via violence.”) It’s what I call “Germany syndrome”, where past abuses (e.g. nazism) lead to an overreaction (“let’s not elect a remotely right-wing party for decades.”)
This is such a bad-faith reading man, I don’t know why you’re even bothering to respond. You can’t just say “well that’s eugenics” and act like that’s a sufficient reason to dismiss it. If you think it’s okay to eg have kids knowing they’ll have huntingtons or some other nasty way to die, why?
I’m not arguing that the state should forcibly implement this, which is usually the common (and legitimate) argument against this line of thinking.
Right, you're just making the moral case on which other people would build coercion, either formally through public policy interventions or socially. You yourself though are just interested in the ideas.
You can make a case for coercing people to do any good thing or not do any bad. We shouldn't approach this by denying right and wrong but rather by discussing what the state can or cannot do.
Socially is another story which I'd be fine with or even encourage. Saying I'm "just interested in ideas" is a hell of a way to dismiss thinking about what's right and wrong for me personally to do, for others to do. Not all thought has to involve the damn government as the actor.
I think what you’re missing is that advocating for social pressure towards eugenics is also alarming.
I’m not limited to only being concerned about advocates of government-mandated eugenics policies. Social efforts to encourage eugenics, like the idea that people with medical conditions or people with “low IQ” should not reproduce, are also concerning, much the same way that societal racism or sexism is concerning even when it occurs without government involvement.
I’d say it’s better to class “scientific racism” as a motivator for eugenics, but again, why does the abuse of an idea mean the idea is bad? I agree it’s not something that should or could be safely implemented by the state.
You have the causality reversed. Either way: it is the idea itself that is bad. You demonstrate it kind of beautifully on this thread. Is there moral complexity to conceiving children with a significant likelihood of inheriting Huntington's? Absolutely that's a complex question. But even you, doing your best to put the idea in its best light, couldn't keep yourself from sliding into questioning whether the "sickly" and the "low IQ" should exist.
This idea chews up people's humanity. You've had an opportunity to play around with it harmlessly on this thread. Now recognize it for what it is and stomp it to death under the heel of your shoes, taking some satisfaction as you do.
I am saying precisely what I said: it is wrong to do. Not all that which is legal is moral, nor is all that which is illegal immoral. The state is an enforcer of the social contract and a monopolist of violence, not an arbiter of morality.
I believe people do plenty of immoral things but do not necessarily believe we ought to use that state violence to prevent or punish them. Adultery, for instance, is one of the more contemptible choices one can make, and yet goes unpunished by the state. Some jurisdictions don’t even consider it strongly in divorce proceedings.
This isn't an argument against anything I said. You can't say "some people in the past also said this." That tells nobody anything about whether it's right or wrong.
That's because it's one of the things that we know, empirically, turned out so wrong, it's one of the wrongest things humanity has ever wronged. Most people don't need to be told that, for this obvious reason.
Your starting point, where it’s a good idea to socially pressure people to not reproduce based on your assessment of what traits are sufficiently undesirable, is already bad.
“My assessment” is kind of uncharitable. Again I’d take huntingtons as an easy example of something that consigns one’s children to an early and horrible death. Not to mention in a society where we often bear the cost of medical care, social pressures are inevitable and more justified.
Why do you think it’s bad? This is a strong opinion weakly held for me; I recognize it’s controversial but fail to see why it’s not an obvious choice.
No it isn't. If you want to do Nazi apologia, go right ahead but at least have the integrity to own it. They started with a bit of 'what if the state decides which life is worth living' and quickly ended up with industrial extermination factories which had the only purpose of murdering people they deemed unworthy.
There have been, of course, many other atrocities throughout human history with many victims. But none were the moral equivalent - it's not a numberwang olymplics.
Arguing otherwise is morally blind and intellectually chickenshit. You want to say Hitler was a little bit right - then just say that.
I have no particular love for the nazis. As I’ve said multiple times, I am against the state deciding this, which means I am against the top of the slide down.
I disagree; I think some were morally worse. The transatlantic slave trade, the holodomor, leopold’s congo, and the khmer rouge all rank worse, as far as I’m concerned. Not in terms of numbers, in terms of horror factor.
Refusing to engage because “oh the nazis said something” is intellectually chickenshit. The core difference is some things which are reprehensible when backed by state violence are fine when chosen individually or encouraged by social pressures.
Just to hit this one more time as directly as I possibly can:
> The core difference is some things which are reprehensible when backed by state violence are fine when chosen individually or encouraged by social pressures.
No. It is both reprehensible for the state to tell people they're too sicky or unintelligent to procreate and for society to pressure people not to procreate based on society's assessment of how sickly or unintelligent they are.
We can set aside all the prior examples of when people have previously believed this, or tried to implement this in various ways, all of which were reprehensible. Even if this was day 0 and we were starting fresh, the idea of society pressuring the sickly or unintelligent not to procreate would be reprehensible.
This is a thread that began with opprobrium over "sickly" people being allowed into the gene pool and is now ending with a dissection of whether the Nazis really were as bad as they're made out to be. For the record: my assessment of Nazism doesn't much change even if you switch its mode of governance from fascism to classical liberalism. Nazism wasn't bad simply because it didn't adhere to the non-aggression principle.
I am a general fan of the non-aggression principle and nowhere did I say nazism was good. I was responding to the guy who claimed my position was inextricably linked to the worst thing ever.
I also didn’t say sickly people shouldn’t be “allowed” into the gene pool, I said it’s usually wrong for them to have biological children
I have no idea who you are, no personal connection to this thread, no real reason to commit myself to any side of this argument; this is all happening basically in the abstract to me. It is in that spirit that I tell you, as candidly as I can, that your position is in fact inextricably linked to the worst thing ever.
I believe you when you say that you don't believe it is and that you fervently don't want it to be. But that doesn't change the morality of a discussion about whether it is good or bad that certain people (those clearing your moral filter) exist.
It sucks that GP’s comment is flagged dead… it’s an opinion a lot of people seem to disagree with but IMO it’s not against the site’s guidelines or anything. It could be an interesting conversation if folks are willing to debate in a curious way.
My personal take is that it’s a moral imperative for humans to eventually edit obviously-bad disorders out of the gene pool going forward, through CRISPR-style editing or just selecting sperm/eggs to exclude the known bad genes. We have to come up with a good definition of “disorder” that people can be happy with, but I don’t think it’s an impossible task to do so.
I think it’s a moral imperative precisely because we’re so good at medical intervention that we’re able to keep people with a variety of conditions and disorders alive and even procreating, when “naturally” they wouldn’t have been able to do so without advanced medicine. Because of this, such disorders become more and more common in the gene pool because they’re no longer being effectively selected against.
We ought to prevent the human race from being utterly dependent on advanced medicine for survival, is my point. And IMO the way to do that, is to make sure that if we’re using advanced medicine to allow people with a genetic disorder to live a healthy life and procreate, we ought to do the gene editing necessary to make sure the disorder itself is not passed on to the next generation. (Basically address the “root cause” as well as the symptoms.)
Interesting, are you stating there is no scenario under which you would consider those types of body modifications not quite acceptable? I am curious about your individual line. You state there isn't one, but I am relatively certain one exists.
It’s Sorites. I don’t have a line because the cost to identify it is much greater than the cost to move forward. When we cross it or approach a positive feedback loop, we will take a step back and re-evaluate.
> Interesting, are you stating there is no scenario under which you would consider those types of body modifications not quite acceptable?
Yes! If some body modifications make someone more efficient at killing, raping, stealing, committing crimes we should all be against it. If it is just because it annoys some people's sense of nature, no.
Once we can control fully developed adult brains, at the level you're suggesting for this thought experiment, that power will force us to reconsider criminality as a mental health issue — even if the personality disorders leading to criminality happen to be harder to fix in adults than boosting of IQ.
But note how I phrased that: Being able to rewrite the DNA of killers etc. to make them smarter, in the absence of influencing developed adult brains, only makes their descendants (in the strictly genetic sense of the word) smarter.
At some point in this century, and probably sooner rather than later, we're going to be able to cost-effectively write arbitrary human-length genomes. Simply printing a custom genome will likely happen well before it becomes possible to safely rewrite live adult genomes, which is itself a different task from understanding, controlling, or safely re-activating in adults, the developmental pathways that lead to healthy growth within a brain for things as vague as "lust", "empathy", or "intelligence".
But to your previous question, "At what point does it get silly?": at some point, we're all made of atoms, and if we had a level of control over matter as in fictional narratives like The Culture or Star Trek, then (modulo weight changes) all your atoms can be rearranged to turn you into a copy of me, or anyone else on the planet, or any other species including fully customised not-found-in-nature varieties.
I'm reminded of a cover of a Monty Python song:
> Oh, I'm a lycanthrope and I'm okay, I romp all night and I sleep all day.
It’s totally valid to see a new piece of tech, try it, say it’s not for you, and move on. With LLMs it feels forced-fed, and simply saying “eh I’m good, no thanks” isn’t enough. Lots of hype and headlines on how it’s going to take our jobs and replace us, pressure from management to adopt it.
Some new trends make perfect sense to me and I’ll adopt them. I’ve let some pass me by and rarely regretted it. That doesn’t make me a luddite.
I have a hard time being sold on “yea it’s wrong a lot, also you have to spend more time than you already do on code review.”
Getting to sit down and write the code is the most enjoyable part of the job, why would I deprive myself of that? By the time the problem has been defined well enough to explain it to an LLM sitting down and writing the code is typically very simple.
You're giving the game away when you talk about the joy LLMs are robbing from you. I think we all intuit why people don't like the idea of big parts of their jobs being automated away! But that's not an argument on the merits. Our entire field is premised on automating people's jobs away, so it's always a little rich to hear programmers kvetching about it being done to them.
I naively bought into the idea of a future where the computers do the stuff we’re bad at and we get to focus on the cool human stuff we enjoy. If these LLMs were truly incredible at doing my job I’d pack it up and find something else to do, but for now I’m wholly unimpressed, despite what management seems to see in it.
Well, I've spent my entire career writing software, starting in C in the 1990s, and what I'm seeing on my dev laptop is basically science fiction as far as I'm concerned.
Hey both things can be true. It’s a long ways from the AI renaissances of the past. There’s areas LLMs make a lot of sense. I just don’t find them to be great pair programming partners yet.
I think people are kind of kidding themselves here. For Go and Python, two extraordinarily common languages in production software, it would be weird for me at this point not to start with LLM output. Actually building an entire application, soup-to-nuts, vibe-code style? No, I wouldn't do that. But having the LLM writing as much as 80% of the code, under close supervision, with a careful series of prompts (like, "ok now add otel spans to all the functions that take unpredictable amounts of time")? Sure.
I'm glad that works for you. Ultimately I think different people will prefer different ways of working. Often when I'm starting a new project I have lots of boilerplate from previous ones I can bootstrap off of. If it's a new tool I'm unfamiliar with I prefer to stumble through it, otherwise I never fully get my head around it. This tends to not look like insane levels of productivity, but I've always found in the long run time spent scratching my head or writing awkward code over and over again (Rust did this to me a lot in the early days) ends up paying off huge dividends in the long run, especially when it's code I'm on the hook for.
What I've found frustrating about the narrative around these tools; I've watched them from afar with intrigue but ultimately found that method of working just isn't for me. Over the years I've trialed more tools than I can remember and adopted the ones I found useful, while casting aside ones that aren't a great fit. Sometimes I find myself wandering back to them once they're fully baked. Maybe that will be the case here, but is it not valid to say "eh...this isn't it for me"? Am I kidding myself?
In my last microservice I took over tests were written by juniors and med. devs using cursor and it was a big blob of generated crap that pass the test, pass the coverage % and are absolute useless garbage
> Our entire field is premised on automating people's jobs away, so it's always a little rich to hear programmers kvetching about it being done to them.
Watch out, you’re giving your game away.
My job is about enabling analysis that was previously done ad hoc and informally. If I’m harming people then that’s something I have to take responsibility for, but it’s also caused not by my direct contribution but by the larger system that I’m working within.
I expressively don’t want to automate away work when that will just result in more profit for private owners and less income for regular working people.[1] And I also don’t want to automate work if that means shifting drudgery to some worker to fill in that freed up time.
And how does this contradict what “we” are doing and stand for!? We criticize technology on this board all the time!
But it’s nice to have the priorities of such a prominent member on the record.
[1] But I DO want to automate work in the hypothetical society where we all own the automation and thus the only thing we are deprived of is drudgery.
The parts worth thinking about you still think about. The parts that you’ve done a million times before you delegate so you can spend better and greater effort on the parts worth thinking about.
This is where the disconnect is for me; mundane code can sometimes be nefarious, and I find the mental space I'm in when writing it is very different than reviewing, especially if my mind is elsewhere. The best analogy I can use is a self-driving car, where there's a chance at any point it could make an unpredictable and potentially fatal move. You as the driver cannot trust it but are not actively engaged in the act of driving and have a much higher likelihood of being complacent.
Code review is difficult to get right, especially if the goal is judging correctness. Maybe this is a personal failing, but I find being actively engaged to be a critical part of the process; the more time I spend with the code I'm maintaining (and usually on call for!) the better understanding I have. Tedium can sometimes be a great signal for an abstraction!
The parts I've done a million times before take up... maybe 5% of my day? Even if an LLM replaced 100% of this work my productivity is increased by the same amount as taking a slightly shorter lunch.
> The parts that you’ve done a million times before you delegate
That's where I'm confused. I've been coding for more than 20 years, and every task I ever did was different from the other ones. What kind of task do you do a million times before realizing that you should script it in bash or Python?
First of all, it’s not tedious for a lot of us. Writing characters themselves is not a lot of time. Secondly, we don’t work in a waterfall model, even on the lowest levels, so the code quantity in an iteration is almost always abysmal or small. Many-many times it’s less than articulate it in English. Thirdly, if you need a wireframe for your code, or a first draft version, you can almost always copy-paste or generate them.
I can imagine that LLM is really helpful in some cases for some people. But so far, I couldn’t find a single example when I and simple copy-pasting wouldn’t have been faster. Not even when I tried it, not when others showed me how to use it.
Because the tedious parts was done long ago while learning the tech. For any platform/library/framework you've been using for a while, you have some old projects laying around that you can extract the scaffolding from. And for new $THING you're learning, you have to take the slow approach anyway to get its semantic.
For me it's typically wrong not in a fundamental way but a trivial way like bad import paths or function calls, like if I forgot to give it relevant context.
And yet the time it takes me to use the LLM and correct its output is usually faster than not using it at all.
Over time I've developed a good sense for what tasks it succeeds at (or is only trivially wrong) and what tasks it's just not up for.
