• 11 Posts
  • 184 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • diztoTechTakesThe AI 2040 "not how this works" supercut
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    1 day ago

    Yeah I have to admit I don’t have the energy to gaze into that particular idiotic abyss. How do they even write that kind of fiction, in a world where AI companies routinely use critihype to obtain more investments? The least unhinged CEO: “we caught our AI trying to start a nuclear war, it’s almost skynet, please give us another trillion dollars”, the least unhinged investors: “shut up and take our money”.





  • I think there’s something to the compilers analogy, in the sense that if you used a C compiler through a chat interface with one liners to insert snippets into assembly without keeping the source code in source files as such, it would probably be slower than just writing in assembly yourself.

    That LLMs have a number of extremely undesirable properties as “compilers” (from nondeterminism to plagiarism) does not make the dumb ass chat interface any less fundamentally shit. It just makes them shit in other ways too.




  • diztoTechTakesrsync goes AI slop, breaks your backups
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    2 months ago

    It’s a perfect example of how “using LLMs for test coverage” can also be harmful. He expected the tests to to prevent introduction of said regressions, probably based on a combination of the quantity of tests and their style (they look like what decent human written tests look like). But the tests are AI slop, and so they give a lot less value per line of code than he expects, hence a significant regression.

    It is literally useful to call these tests AI slop, and the problem is in part caused by not calling them AI slop, and having consequent inflated expectations. LLMs are not any better at writing tests than at writing other code! It is merely that the bar for tests can, legitimately, be a lot lower (in projects where there would otherwise be no tests at all). Making an exception to calling AI generated tests “slop” is thus counter productive, because it leads people to act as if LLMs are actually better at writing tests than at writing other code, and not just because the bar for tests is frequently very low.

    edit: actually scratch that I looked at the PR and those tests even look like dogshit and worse than the tests I seen claude write at a workplace that was into vibecoding (which i since quit).





  • diztoMoreWriteRandom Positivity Threads
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    3 months ago

    A guy I know because he invented a mechanism and I built an alternative implementation of the same behavior out of Lego and put on youtube, cited my thing in his doctoral thesis and will be defending on Monday, and I can watch that online. Can’t wait.


  • Oh they are going to charge per token for github copilot? That thing is a money waste for everyone, I’m pretty sure. I get a mix of inane mildly good suggestions, irrelevant stuff, and an occasional suggestion of super evil sabotage. Due to mild OCD about issues, I tend to have to fix said mildly good suggestions, but from the objective perspective that nitpickery is not worth it, everything was fine without, we had compiler warnings, coverity, etc.

    edit: the difference being that the old stuff was deterministic and you just ran it on the whole codebase and had it pass. Unlike gh copilot that’ll just make up new shit. And as for the times it caught some bad bug that you made… add more tests instead.



  • diztoTechTakesGitHub Copilot puts ads into pull requests
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    4 months ago

    I wouldn’t be too surprised if they really don’t, they’re just advertising the advertising lol.

    edit: Basically what if you spent a trillion dollars so that you could beam ads to people’s bathroom mirrors. And better yet, ads reflected from water down in their toilets. Then in the interest of expediency you just take random ads and put them there for free, and your actual product, shares, sells better.



  • diztoSneerClubA Post-Mortem for Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths
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    7 months ago

    It’s kind of ridiculous on its face. Yudkowsky was never some guy making money off writing code or any other “nerdy” activity (even though people doing that can be as sociopathic as anyone else). Pre-HPMoR part of his career is just “does sociopathy for a living”. After, too, but like with a bit of branching out into book writing.




  • I think it’s not very difficult to construct a really shitty small reactor that is horrendously expensive per watt. Can probably be built in a year if you get rid of NRC and just half ass it completely.

    I mean, Demon Core was a small reactor. You pretty much have to do a lot of work to ensure you won’t create a small reactor when a truckload of fresh fuel falls into a river.

    What’s difficult is making a safe reactor that is actually making electricity at somewhat reasonable price per watt.