latchup

You need to try out for the jumping to conclusions olympics team, that was an impressive leap there!

Jokes aside, we can absolutely reject the basis of our current economic system on the basis that it is cruel and violent and replace it with something better, and it would be far from the first time we did that. By your logic, the end of feudalism or the abolishment of slavery should have killed entire countries...

And I doubt you are about to explain to us that slavery is not violence (that's one of those ultra-libertarian thoughts of yours you probably shouldn't randomly blurt out).

In fact, virtual memory is already a limiting factor to increasing minimum transfer size, as pages must be an efficient unit of exchange. Traditional 4 KiB pages are already smaller than what would be a good minimum transfer size; this is exactly why hardware designers push for larger pages (with Apple silicon forgoing 4 KiB page support entirely).

I cannot help but feel that many of these discussions are led astray by the misconceptions of people with an insufficient understanding of modern computer architecture.

That's what I am trying to say: every big technology player, every industry, every government is all in on AI. That means you and I are along for the ride, whether we like it or not.

> Consider that you'll be wiping your ass with DIMMs once this one bursts; I can always put more memory to good use.

Except you can't, because DRAM makers have almost entirely pivoted from making (G)DDR chips to making HBM instead. HBM must be co-integrated at the interposer level and 3D-stacked, resulting in terrible yield. This makes it extremely pricy and impossible to package separately (no DIMMs).

So when I say the world is all in on this, I mean it. With every passing minute, there is less and less we can salvage once this is over; for consumer DRAM, it's already too late.

However, if you actually need the much higher precision of FP64 for scientific computing (like most non-AI data center users do) and extremely slow emulation is not an option, consider yourself fucked.

The real problem is the massive over-promises of transforming every industry, replacing most human labor, and eventually reaching super-intelligence based on current models.

I hope we can agree that these are all wholly unattainable, even from a purely technological perspective. However, we are investing as if there were no tomorrow without these outcomes, building massive data-centers filled with "GPUs" that, contrary to investor copium, will quickly become obsolete and are increasingly useless for general-purpose datacenter applications (Blackwell Ultra has NO FP64 hardware, for crying out loud...).

We can agree that the bubble deflating, one way or another, is the best outcome long term. That said, the longer we fuel these delusions, the worse the fallout will be when it does. And what I fear is that one day, a bubble (perhaps this one, perhaps another) will grow so large that it wipes out globalized free-market trade as we know it.

> Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.

Chosen by the editors as word of the year, by the way.

https://research.swtch.com/openssl

There seems to be a serious issue with Debian (and by extension, the tens of distros based on it) having no respect whatsoever for the developers of the software their OS is based on, which ends up hurting users the most. Not sure why they cannot just be respectful, but I am afraid they are shoveling Debian's grave, as people are abandoning stale and broken Debian-based distros in droves.

and

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=819703#158

Needless to say, Zawinski was more than a little frustrated with how the Debian maintainers do things.

But honestly, this took 30 seconds to Google and was highly publicized at the time. This whole "I never heard of this, link??" approach to defend a lost argument when the point made is easily verifiable serves to do nothing but detract from discussion. Which, you know, is what this place is for.

> Calling people too dumb to handle democracy sounds a tad facist.

Well, it's good thing I did not do that. I said the average person cannot begin to comprehend every facet of the modern world they live in. Your limited reading comprehension is not making a very compelling counterpoint here.

In my many years of living here, I have never seen a Swiss person treat their own illnesses, design their own trains, hunt their own meat, and do their own plumbing all at once – they delegate tasks they understand themselves to be incompetent in to specialists. Yet somehow, at the ballot box, their otherwise healthy and productive understanding of their own limited competence makes way for a strange form of celebratory group hubris, landing them in a constitutional crisis like a drunk driver in a ditch.

Maybe instead of trying make decisions they have no hope of truly understanding in an incredibly slow and inefficient process, they can just elect people they trust to be specialists in narrow fields to make these decisions for them for a fixed time span? Wow, exciting, we just fixed a flaw in democracy the Greeks knew about 3000 years ago by resorting to the same god damn system everyone else already uses: representative democracy. Which also sucks in its own, different ways, but at least it is much less likely to set the entire f-cking country on fire over night. That's kinda neat.

Generally speaking, people are stupid. Really REALLY f-cking stupid. Giving the average Joe this kind of unmoderated power in a modern world that almost entirely eludes his understanding is no different from handing him a loaded gun; eventually, someone will get hurt real bad. As someone living in Switzerland, the main reason things are as stable as they are is because:

* Changing anything significant requires a referendum, which is a huge pain in the ass. So politicians just kinda avoid important changes that require referenda, finding other ways to enrich themselves and leaving society stagnating. This means that actually important changes come about very slowly or not at all. Read up on how long it took for women's suffrage to become universal – and the outright threats of internal military action the federal government resorted to...

* Whether the Swiss like it or not, Switzerland is mostly a loud, spoilt economic annex of the EU. It will remain stable for as long as the EU is, and well off for as long as the EU wants to be seen as a peaceful and magnanimous partner in international relations. After all, "bullying" tiny and surrounded Switzerland into agreeing to anything – which the Swiss will cry about at any opportunity you give them – is a bad look.

So yeah, Swiss direct democracy is not all it's made out to be, and really not all that great up close. Admirers remind me a lot of Weaboos, strangely shortsighted in their admiration of a system they know little about.

Every sovereign nation has legal supremacy over its own territory. Any company doing business in the EU, no matter its origin, must follow EU laws inside the EU. However, these laws do not apply anywhere else (unless specified by some sort of treaty), so they are not forced to comply with them in the US when dealing with US customers.

If they still abide by EU law elsewhere, that is their choice, just like you can just choose to abide by Chinese law in the US — so long as it does not conflict with US law. If these rules do conflict with the first amendment, enforcing them in the US is simply not legal, and it's up to the company to figure out how to resolve this. In the worst case, they will have to give up business in the EU, or in this case, prohibit chat between US and EU customers, segregating their platform.

Aviation autopilot systems are the complete opposite. They are arguably the most reliable computer-based systems ever created. While they cannot fly a plane alone, pilots can trust them blindly to do specific, known tasks consistently well in over 99.99999% of cases, and provide clear diagnostics in case they cannot.

If gen AI agents were this consistently good at anything, this discussion would not be happening.

You do not need to fully understand large codebases to use them; this is what APIs are for. If you are adventurous, you might hunt a bug in some part of a large codebase, which usually leads you from the manifestation to the source of the bug on a fairly narrow path. None of this requires "understanding all these huge codebases". Your statement implies a significant lack of experience on your part, which makes your use of LLMs for code generation a bit alarming, to be honest.

The only people expected to truly understand huge codebases are those who maintain them. And that is exactly why AI PRs are so insulting: you are asking a maintainer to vet code you did not properly vet yourself. Because no, you do not understand the generated code as well as if you wrote it yourself. By PRing code you have a subpar understanding of, you come across as entitled and disrespectful, even with the best of intentions.

> That is just an opinion.

As opposed to yours? If you don't want to engage meaningfully with a comment, then there is no need to reply.

> I have projects I wrote with some help from the LLMs, and I understand ALL parts of it. In fact, it is written the way it is because I wanted it to be that way.

See, I could hit you with "That is just an opinion" here, especially as your statement is entirely anecdotal But I won't, because that would be lame and cowardly.

When you say "because I wanted it to be that way", what exactly does that mean? You told an extremely complex, probabilistic, and uninterpretable automaton what you want to write, and it wrote it not approximately, but exactly as you wanted it? I don't think this is possible from a mathematical point of view.

You further insist that you "understand ALL parts" of the output. This actually is possible, but seems way too time-inefficient to be plausible. It is very hard to exhaustively analyze all possible failure modes of code, whether you wrote it yourself or not. There is a reason why certifying safety-critical embedded code is hell, and why investigating isolated autopilot malfunctions in aircraft takes experts years. That is before we consider that those systems are carefully designed to be highly predictable, unlike an LLM.

* Gen AI never disagrees with or objects to boss's ideas, even if they are bad or harmful to the company or others. In fact, it always praises them no matter what. Brenda, being a well-intentioned human being, might object to bad or immoral ideas to prevent harm. Since boss's ego is too fragile to accept criticism, he prefers gen AI.

* Boss is usually not qualified, willing, or free to do Brenda's job to the same quality standard as Brenda. This compels him to pay Brenda and treat her with basic decency, which is a nuisance. Gen AI does not demand fair or decent treatment and (at least for now) is cheaper than Brenda. It can work at any time and under conditions Brenda refuses to. So boss prefers gen AI.

* Brenda takes accountability for and pride in her work, making sure it is of high quality and as free of errors as she can manage. This is wasteful: boss only needs output that is good enough to make it someone else's problem, and as fast as possible. This is exactly what gen AI gives him, so boss prefers gen AI.

And that's a problem. By typing out the code, your brain has time to process its implications and reflect on important implementation details, something you lose out on almost entirely when letting an LLM generate it.

Obviously, your high-level intentions and architectural planning are not tied to typing. However, I find that an entire class of nasty implementation bugs (memory and lifetime management, initialization, off-by-one errors, overflows, null handling, etc.) are easiest to spot and avoid right as you type them out. As a human capable of nonlinear cognition, I can catch many of these mid-typing and fix them immediately, saving an significant amount of time compared to if I did not. It doesn't help that LLMs are highly prone to generate these exact bugs, and no amount of agentic duct tape will make debugging these issues worthwhile.

The only two ways I see LLM code generation bring any value to you is if:

* Much of what you write is straight-up boilerplate. In this case, unless you are forced by your project or language to do this, you should stop. You are actively making the world a worse place.

* You simply want to complete your task and do not care about who else has to review, debug, or extend your code, and the massive costs in capital and human life quality your shitty code will incur downstream of you. In this case, you should also stop, as you are actively making the world a worse place.

The 10$ shirt becomes a much shittier proposal once, in addition to its worse looks, fit, and comfort, you factor in its significantly lower durability and lifespan. That's why the 100$ shirt still exists after all. Nevermind that the example is a bad one to begin with because low-price commodities like T-shirts are never worth fixing when they break, but code with a paid maintainer clearly is.

In an market bubble like the one we find ourselves in, longevity is simply not relevant because the financial opportunity lies precisely in getting off in the train right before it crashes. For investors and managers, that is. Developers may be allowed to change cars, but they are stuck the train.

It's sad how some of the doomed are so desperate to avoid their fate that they fall prey to promises they know to be bullshit. The argument for Wish and TEMU products is exactly the same, yet we can all see it for what it is in those cases: a particularly short-lived lie.

Call me a buzzkill here, but my bet is you aren't gonna hit it big. While you can win at the casino, that requires a careful plan with contingency solutions, which AI simply does not have. Realistically speaking, it is indeed best to just not play this game; you are just digging a deeper hole.

As for defense, they are spending exactly as much as necessary at each point in time: just enough to keep credible US backing until 2025, and as much as they can without destroying their economy since. There is no good argument for an irresponsible spending spree, as the only powers that can realistically challenge the EU without triggering nuclear holocaust are the US and China anyways (Russia don't stand a chance).

Jokes aside, congratulations on slipping and falling up the summit, collecting not a single bruise to your ego or soul along the way. I am genuinely happy for you.

To me, this means that every traditionally run company (top-down) must be broken by construction. And indeed, I have never seen or heard of truly fact-based management.

The entire challenge with multi-level management is that you always play a long game of telephone with increasingly less technical people, which are unable (due to lack of time and understanding) to grasp the ground-truth facts without simplification. Thus, management based on hard facts is impossible in this setting, though it is a great theoretical ideal many aspire to.

In practice, doing so is very hard and people are lazy, so the "facts" can become so twisted as to be entirely unrecognizable.

Have you considered the possibility this is not a result of incompetence, but intentional? If these things are never clearly communicated and, more importantly, put in writing, management can just reframe what was agreed upon as best suits them later to deflect any blame if things go sideways. This is a perfectly rational move, since they hold all the power to do so.

I think a lot of what is wrong with this discussion is that people implicitly assume management is honest and communicates openly and sincerely. This is sadly only true in a small fraction of cases, likely because the incentives point squarely in the opposite direction: those who judge the game are always better off cheating.

What an employee says about their boss generally has zero implications on their career and lives, so long as it does not outright accuse them of a crime. When's the last time someone called you to provide a reference on your boss? I thought so.

In turn, what a boss says about their employees can be entirely career-ending and therefore life-altering, even if said in jest or later retracted. A higher standard exists precisely because the stakes are so much higher.

Forking is far from the first step in conflict resolution; it is the ultima ratio between projects in the open-source world, when all dialogue breaks down. In other words, the worst outcome is that people agree to disagree and go their separate ways, which is arguably as good a solution as is possible.

In the corporate world, coordination mostly exists within companies through top-down decision-making, as you said. Between them, however, things look much grimmer. Legal action is often taken lightly, and more often than not, a core business goal is to not just dominate, but to annihilate the competition by driving them out of business.

Coordination between corporations, such as through consortia, is only ever found if everyone involved stands to profit significantly and risks are low. And ironically, when it does happen, it often takes the form of shared development of an open-source project, to eliminate the perceived risk of being shafted.

The fact you nevertheless refer to this software as "dodgy" really shows how well Apple's messaging works to deter people from using it, even when their main argument against it is security (from what?).

Funny, considering that without Apple's draconian restrictions on user freedoms, IOS security is basically nonexistent even when compared to the low standard set by Android. It is true that the inside of Apple's jail feels safe, but in truth, there is much less keeping attackers out than users in.

The first Boeing 747 was rolled out in 1968, only 65 years after the first successful heavier-than-air flight. If you told people back then that not much will fundamentally change in civil aviation over the next 57 years, no one would have believed you.

>So, basically, you think all the pro-AI folks are "bad," and defensive because they feel like anti-AI folks are attacking the thing that makes them not bad?

Thanks, I needed a laugh. I have indeed grown bitter over the years, but life has always has a way to make me smile in store.