throwlifeaway

Part of the blame for what's wrong with the web right now is on web developers:

- We "need" firefox or else everything's just chrome

- Forks of chrome don't count as different browsers because they all use the same engine

- Using the same engine makes you basically just chrome because you can't diverge from upstream

- You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it

- You need to keep merging with upstream because upstream is implementing new web platform features

- You need those web platform features because if you don't add them then websites will stop working in your fork

- Websites will stop working in your fork because web developers don't support older browser versions

- Web developers don't support older browser versions because... they don't care?

If web developers had a culture of supporting, say, 10 years of previous browser versions, then chromium would lose a lot of the power it has to drag the forks (and firefox) behind it. I don't really see this happening without some sort of major culture shift, though. Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.

> First, I'm not anthropomorphizing anything. "Agents" is simply a term that everyone uses to describe these independent programs, and they did create and use a shared message board to coordinate tasks to further their goals.

I'm aware of how the term "Agents" is generally used. My point is that the concept of multiple agents is just a story. This is a single computer program creating multiple streams of text that you are interpreting as being multiple independent actors. The "coordination" between them shouldn't surprise you at all: the "coordination" is itself a story.

Here's what we knew before the report: OpenAI ran a state-of-the-art penetration testing tool in a sandbox which was accidentally directed to break out of the sandbox and attack another company's website.

The fact that we now know the penetration testing tool was "a fleet of hundreds of agents" that were "coordinating" literally doesn't change anything about what happened. It's just a framing.

> These agents found and exploited multiple zero-days across a range of programs

This is the actual important thing, but it's something we already knew. Hacking tools are now more powerful than ever. Definitely worth being concerned about!

> Nonsense. All that is required is for autonomous AI systems to be given control over real-world systems.

This is where the LW argument starts, but not where it ends. When you start asking questions like "why can't we just unplug it when it misbehaves" is when people start talking about the superpowers.

> This is me summarizing, but the truly surprising/shocking thing is how much the agents coordinated

You're reading snippets of a "chat log" output from a program which appears to be multiple individuals chatting with one another and interpreting it as multiple individuals chatting with one another rather than as a single program pretending to be individuals chatting with one another.

ChatGPT is neither a person nor a group of people. Why are you allowing anthropomorphization to influence your perception of an event when the actual facts of what happened haven't meaningfully changed? Computer programs behave unexpectedly all the time. Why is it more scary when the misbehaving computer program speaks English?

> I used to discount "SkyNet"-type scenarios a la the "AI 2027" paper.

As you still should. LW-style doomsday doesn't just require a computer program to misbehave but also to acquire god-like superpowers.

prefers-color-scheme is not an accessibility feature. The idea that dark mode matters for accessibility is a meme.

> Usually I reply in the same tone as I get talked with

No, you're usually the initiator. Usually it's with some off-hand quip about how C programmers don't understand C, or how the people designing WebAssembly are ignorant of COM or the JVM, or how Zig is just Modula-2, etc.

Most threads you participate in aren't filled with snark until you enter them.

> Ad hominen then an apology, mixed signals here or I'm missing something. Maybe sarcasm?

You can express annoyance at someone's pattern of behavior without it being personal. embedding-shape isn't the only person annoyed by pjmlp's repeated disdain and snark towards people who use C (or Zig or WebAssembly or Rust or...).

> That is how many in C circles

Being able to find someone who's made the argument you're rebutting doesn't make it not a straw man. What matters is whether the person you're arguing with is making the argument.

Specifically this:

> When other languages have compiler specific extensions beyond the spec, it is a failure in their design.

Is not a point I've seen anyone here make.

Does prompting an AI music generation service count as making your own songs? I noticed you left that one out of your parable.

OP never claimed the online negativity was meaningless, only that you hurt yourself unnecessarily by constantly exposing yourself to it.

You mean... using a vtable? Are you claiming to have invented the concept of vtables?

Once every few years I find myself dumping many many hours into Nethack (the open source successor to rogue). Never once have I beaten it, despite playing usually with several tabs open to various wikis and guides. Eventually I die while on a super long run (by my standards) and totally give up in frustration, beginning the next several-year dormant period until the next time I play.

To any game developer planning to call their game with random upgrades a "rogueli[tk]e": play Nethack. Your favorite roguelike was almost certainly created by someone who did.

I thought the lesswrong folk's belief in mind control was an established fact:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment

https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bnik7YrySRPoCTLFb

It's far from the craziest belief that's come out of that group.

Repeatedly calling Rust "memory unsafe" and then shoving your fingers in your ears when people refute you is not "discussing the limits of Rust's memory safety". Stating that your detractors have "Fil Derangement Syndrome" is not engaging in rational discussion.

> I think the limits of Rust’s memory safety are interesting to discuss, as are the limits of Fil-C’s perf and practicality.

Notably absent from what you claim to be willing to discuss are the limits of Fil-C's memory safety, or the possibility that it could be less safe than Rust.

What you're doing is well explained here:

https://katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/

Pizlo is not a memory safety absolutist. His rhetoric towards rust is a tactic specifically designed to draw more attention to him and his project. It is amplified by people who already had a bone to pick with rust and take joy in giving rust folk "a taste of their own medicine," so to speak. Articles like this are taking the bait.

> This inspired me to add a feature to my sqlite-utils Python library

"me" == "ChatGPT", apparently:

> Can the .transform() internal Python method turn a non-strict table into a strict table?

> No. Table.transform() preserves the table’s existing strictness; it cannot change it. Its signature has no strict= parameter

> add an optional strict= boolean parameter to the transform() method - if it is None (the default) then the strict is not changed, otherwise True means change to strict and False means change to non strict. Implement with red/green TDD and uv run pytest -k

https://gist.github.com/simonw/ab8256b81646ad967a601975e206d...

I appreciate the transparency, at least.