svieira

Now the real question is "is the revert rate the same because you still have the same process, or do you fix-forward more often now, so your revert-rate is because of higher-severity incidents?"

> a good choice

For who?

"SOCRATES: Yes, Callicles, if he have that defence, which as you have often acknowledged he should have—if he be his own defence, and have never said or done anything wrong, either in respect of gods or men; and this has been repeatedly acknowledged by us to be the best sort of defence. And if any one could convict me of inability to defend myself or others after this sort, I should blush for shame, whether I was convicted before many, or before a few, or by myself alone; and if I died from want of ability to do so, that would indeed grieve me. But if I died because I have no powers of flattery or rhetoric, I am very sure that you would not find me repining at death. For no man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one’s soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils. "

- Socrates (via Plato), Gorgias

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htm#:~:te...

> Along with desperately loving entertainment, they desperately want companionship.

And I am presuming that the companionship that people need is the companionship of other human beings. Otherwise, tamagotchi, fish, cats, dogs, parrots, and horses are already perfectly good companions. AI can help fill in for some of those other ones (tamagotchi especially), but it cannot replace human companionship.

> People will have more artificial friends than human friends within ~20-30 years.

That would be awful, presuming that the artificial friends are not people.

Separately, you might like Count to the Eschaton by John Wright with its ultimate project being "the sophistication of all matter".

I recently re-read Venus, Inc. and the number of times that the satire didn't hit because it read too close to our current reality was quite depressing.

> don't allow

Is this "allow" or "encourage"? If "allow", how do you do that deterministically or at least fail-closed?

In the vein of these 2 minutes of Guy Steele's talk on Fortress (How to think about parallel programming: Not! https://youtu.be/dPK6t7echuA?si=huyI3LR8LVaB6Yen&t=1589) I think that the real thing here is "do not hide what is important nor obscure that which ought to belong to the user". The question is (as always) "what is important"?

And I think that the "tool" vs. "automation" delineation is one of the clearest and most succinct takes on _how to talk about this problem_ that I have seen in the past few years.

Is a query planner an agent? (It might be, I'm not sure semantically the "agent" vs. "automation" distinction will aid as much in the discussion as "tool" vs. "automation", but I'm open to being completely off base here).

> Give me the quick automated decision every time

Don't we already have this experience and isn't it called "the Google support experience"? And I don't know about you, but I don't like it.

Via LinkedIn (ai-tool-rich-hickey-kjl8e) but I suspect that we're rate limiting slop from there. Mods, feel free to swap out the original link if I was just-wrong about that.

> These systems are inherently immoral (it’s just a lot of matrix math)

(nit) "immoral" is "anti-moral". I suspect you want "amoral", that is "without" or "separated from" morals.

But, if you wanted "immoral" ... what about matrix math derived from gradient descent is inherently "immoral" in your view?

> If you wanted to go absolutely wild, some hypervisors can checkpoint the memory of a running VM and revert back to a prior version memory and all. I can’t imagine a way to make money off that

You may want to check out what Antithesis is doing in this space - https://antithesis.com/ Specifically, https://antithesis.com/docs/resources/deterministic_simulati...

The Boys On The Boat was good, working through Magnifica Humanitas (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume..., but in dead tree form) for my mind stretching.

Where did you jump to?

> I described the problem to the agent and it figured out WAY faster than I would have been able to that the customer's clock was set incorrectly.

:blinks: The architecture of your service relied on customer clocks being correct? That is, you built a distributed service without a clock synchronization primitive that relied on the clocks being sychronized?

"I prefer" was the bit that the parent was pointing to that wasn't true. There isn't a person-to-person connection being made here. Though there is the fascamile of one.

I wouldn't say it's all rubbish - it's very easy for someone new to theorem proving to presume the equivalent of "strong typing will eliminate the possibility of errors", but the more correct understanding is "strong typing will reduce the number of things you have to keep in your head at any one time thus reducing the possibility of errors".

Yes, it could, but then you would have re-invented React Native. But in WASM.

That one person is (according to the previous comment) using words to suggest "this is a thing that will happen" though they are planning to make it happen? And that those words are attributed to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? And that the selfsame God also has the other words attributed to Him?

Or are you suggesting a particular ontological presumption about the declared speaker of those words, which would then reflect a different shade of meaning onto my declaration?

> A lover needs someone free to reject him

As G. K. Chesterton said,

> Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1718/pg1718-images.html...

Actually, everything is infused with purpose (not agency, that's different). Including rain drops and hurricanes and black holes.

Then they are in for a very rude awakening, given that the same God says "You must not wrong the widow and the orphan; wronged, they will cry out to me for redress, and their cry will be heard. My anger will blaze out against you, and I will smite you with the sword, making widows of your own wives, orphans of your own children." (Exodus 22:22-24).

> And nature doesn't come with purposes, it's all something we impose on it.

That is the presumption others are calling you out for. Things very clearly act appear to act with purpose, they just clearly don't provide it for themselves. You are presuming one solution to the problem (that appearance does not hold in reality), but there is another one.

Some thinkers believe you have to encourage the people in the system and change the system to make it harder to do the wrong thing. Some reading on the topic includes:

* The canonical book on the subject - The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64882

* https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/06/what-is-distr...

* https://practicaldistributism.com/distributism-basics/

And not directly related, but full of mineable thoughts, the papal encyclicals of the last 100 years on economy, including Rerum Novarum (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...), Quadragesimo Anno (https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/docume...), Centesimus Annus (https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...), and the very latest Magnifica Humanitas (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...)

I don't think he's trying to start one, so much as he is being brainwashed by one.

  For the end of the world was long ago,
  And all we dwell to-day
  As children of some second birth,
  Like a strange people left on earth
  After a judgment day.

  For the end of the world was long ago,
  When the ends of the world waxed free,
  When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
  And the sun drowned in the sea.

  When Caesar's sun fell out of the sky
  And whoso hearkened right
  Could only hear the plunging
  Of the nations in the night.

  When the ends of the earth came marching in
  To torch and cresset gleam.
  And the roads of the world that lead to Rome
  Were filled with faces that moved like foam,
  Like faces in a dream.

  And men rode out of the eastern lands,
  Broad river and burning plain;
  Trees that are Titan flowers to see,
  And tiger skies, striped horribly,
  With tints of tropic rain.

  Where Ind's enamelled peaks arise
  Around that inmost one,
  Where ancient eagles on its brink,
  Vast as archangels, gather and drink
  The sacrament of the sun.

  And men brake out of the northern lands,
  Enormous lands alone,
  Where a spell is laid upon life and lust
  And the rain is changed to a silver dust
  And the sea to a great green stone.

  And a Shape that moveth murkily
  In mirrors of ice and night,
  Hath blanched with fear all beasts and birds,
  As death and a shock of evil words
  Blast a man's hair with white.

  And the cry of the palms and the purple moons,
  Or the cry of the frost and foam,
  Swept ever around an inmost place,
  And the din of distant race on race
  Cried and replied round Rome.

  And there was death on the Emperor
  And night upon the Pope:
  And Alfred, hiding in deep grass,
  Hardened his heart with hope.

  A sea-folk blinder than the sea
  Broke all about his land,
  But Alfred up against them bare
  And gripped the ground and grasped the air,
  Staggered, and strove to stand.

  He bent them back with spear and spade,
  With desperate dyke and wall,
  With foemen leaning on his shield
  And roaring on him when he reeled;
  And no help came at all.

  He broke them with a broken sword
  A little towards the sea,
  And for one hour of panting peace,
  Ringed with a roar that would not cease,
  With golden crown and girded fleece
  Made laws under a tree.

-----

G. K. Chesterton - The Ballad of the White Horse - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1719/1719-h/1719-h.htm

That actually makes the "Drift" analogy perfect, because you have to be "Drift compatible", you can't just grab two people off the street and throw them in a Jäger together and have it work.