I disagree, but it's probably a matter of definitions. I don't want to play with words, so I will concede that cognitive ability is independent from moral reasoning (which is socially enforced). However, this is not what I'm getting at. Cognitive ability ("intelligence") is correlated with optionality and power. Your ability to change this reality is correlated with your cognitive ability.
If you truly are an intelligent person, would you really find no other ways to use your talents than to inflict harm, exploit others, and make our shared reality a worse place? That would be a waste. I won't get into ambiguous cases and moral relativism. Say we can all agree that some things are "evil": child exploitation is evil. Throwing molotov cocktails at a civilian's house is evil. Sending bombs in the mail is evil.
Now what would you call someone who engages in these kind of activities when they could easily do something better and more satisfying with their lives? I'd say they're pretty stupid. They're probably good at fooling other people into thinking they're smart, but their behavior shows otherwise.
Take for example Ted Kaczynski, a terrorist who is worshipped like a saint and a prophet in certain ideological spheres. Ted Kaczynski is supposedly this 140IQ genius who saw it all coming and tried to warn us. But if you actually read Industrial Society and Its Future, you can see it's complete incoherent garbage, the kind of stuff I was writing when I was 12 to troll on internet forums. Ted Kaczynski is what a stupid person thinks a smart person looks like.
A smart person doesn't need to be evil, just like a billionaire doesn't need to go shoplifting. I'm not saying that stupid people can't be dangerous. But they should be dealt with for what they are: stupid people, inferior to us, worthy of pity. Not powerful monsters above us that we should fear.
lol, lot of words for a No True Scotsman. clearly there are intelligent and evil people in the world, however you refuse to engage with a basic question like this
No idea who this guy is, I'm just reading his Wikipedia page. Looks like he created some file system, good! But it also looks like he got a mail-order bride (suspicious...), was an abusive husband (not good), was not able to get over his divorce (uh-oh), harassed and ultimately murdered his ex-wife (definitely not good!), and ultimately landed in prison.
I think Hans Reiser is some sort of idiot savant or well trained monkey. Probably very good at computer science and building file systems, but his general intelligence seems overall very low, which is proven by his performance at the game of life. I wouldn't personally be afraid of Hans Reiser and I'm sure he could be mentally broken very easily.
I mean, you can do that already, you use your own domain name and can then change email providers at will, in theory.
But maybe you logged in to your domain registrar through google oauth. If your google account is locked you can't now get into your domain's settings to change your MX records.
The real problem isn't the email address itself, it's all the access that google owns on your behalf. Lose access to Google, lose access to everything.
It is not. One version of a compiler on one platform transforms a specific input into an exact and predictable artefact.
A compiler will tell you what is wrong. On top of that the intent is 100% preserved even when it is wrong.
An LLM will transform an arbitrarily vague input into an output. Adding more specification may or may not change the output.
There is a fundamental difference between asking for “make me a server in go that answers with the current time on port 80” and actually writing out the code where you _have to_ make all decisions such as “wait in what format” beforehand. (And using the defaults is also making a decision - because there are defaults)
Compilers have undefined behaviour. UB exists in well defined places.
Even a 100% perfect LLM that never makes mistakes has, by definition, UB everywhere when spec lacks.
Right, they allow for the idea of gradual specification - you can write in broad strokes where you don't care about the details, and in fine detail when you do. Whether the LLM followed the spec or not is mostly down to having the right tooling.
The value is in the imperative, the computer does what you tell it do, The control is very powerful and is arguably a major reason computer technology is as power and popular as it is today. Bits don't generally speaking argue with you the same way analog programming if by electronics or mechanical means did before the transistor.
You can certainly write in imperative or functional but you are still telling the computer what you want. LLM use impercise language can generate loose binding the actual reality people one. They have there use cases too but they have a radically different locus of control. Compilers don't ask you to give up percision either they will do what you tell them to do. AI can do whatever it thinks is the most likely next token which is foundationally different from what we do when we engage in programming or writing in general
This just isn’t true at all, with guidance and guard rails they produce much better code than the average developer does. They are only going to get better.
That is completely false in my experience. I have never once seen an LLM produce code that would be acceptable. It certainly is worse than what a human can do.
Have you seen the kind of code an average developer writes?
I agree that LLMs produce code that is less good than what a good developer could write, but most developers are not good developers, and even the good developer gets tired and must sleep eventually.
Arguments against LLMs are like the old arguments against high level languages like C. People argued that the compiler wrote trash code, that humans could do better, that the costs weren't worth it. None of that mattered and it's the same story here.
I don't know what model you're using or how you're prompting it, but for me some 60-80% of the time the results require only a little bit of steering to be 'acceptable' (like at least what I would expect from a junior engineer and I'll approve the PR even though it's not quite how I would do it), some 30% of the time the results are pretty much what I would do, and some 10% of the time the results are better than what I would do ("huh, good idea, okay let's do it that way").
They're not perfect by any stretch but if they're being likened to slot machines for code, I'll take those odds almost every day.
Ok but those government grants don't really exist today and what you're arguing for is zero sustainability for open source projects. This is certain to lead to the death of open source - there's not even the reputational pay-off any more if the only real consumer is AI.
ah yes the common rebuttal of "but this doesn't exists, so I want the boot to keep stomping on my face. Please don't do anything different! The boot is kinda nice actually now that I sustained enough nerve damage."
Grants are a very effective model of support, it seems to work for entire industries + professions around the world. Even better when there is a body of professionals working democratically to decide which people should be awarded the grants.
Just because you have a failure of imagination doesn't mean others do.
Bad faith reply. The government grants do not exist, it's not a failure of imagination, I too would like to live in that world, but we don't and aren't likely to any time soon. And even if we did, do you think that Deno would have been likely to receive a grant? I do not.
You are barking up the wrong tree. Ryan can't do anything to make government grants for this kind of work exist.
It would be a huge public service if you could get more public support for open source. Maybe you could do it instead of criticizing Ryan!
Some public support for this kind of work already exists, especially for the Python science ecosystem, but nothing that comes close to "competing" with VC for a project like Deno.
You should be the change you hope to see in the world and make this happen!
People want open source software, but they do not want the compromises that come with funding it. When people try and fail then you get shitty blog posts like this one. It's sheer entitlement. I think the days of building open source tooling and expecting to be able to commercialise it are now completely gone.
These things are easy to say but just because someone has the title CEO doesn't mean they're automatically void of human feelings. I'm sure you understand there's a big gap between a Ryan Dahl and a Satya Nadella, despite them sharing the same job title.
Well the people who get laid off also have feelings, not sure why we should care more about the ceo's feelings so much that we shouldn't criticize them
I'm not saying that we should care more for the CEO, but that we should have empathy for someone who is, ultimately, an engineer who built something and gave it away for free, watched everyone else around him get rich off the back of his hard work, and then tried to do something worthwhile again and still chose to give it away for free. There's a lot of immoral CEOs out there, I'm yet to see evidence that Dahl is one of them.
Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating? I'm not saying that he should be free from criticism, but that we should try and have some empathy for people who try things even if they fail, particularly when they've offered their services to the community for free for the last 5+ years (much longer when considering node.js)
> Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating?
I'm trying to understand why you carve an exception for this one individual.
When I worked in restaurants, the owner and I had a very interesting conversation after hours, and with beers, about his thoughts and feelings being responsible for the well being and livelihood of everyone that worked there. It was a positive moment, I thought I had a great boss, I work my ass off for him.
A year later I found he was trimming hours off of my paycheck. I quit on the spot. Months later I heard he did the same to the waitstaff tips and it wasn't much longer before it all fell apart.
People can appear very different publicly than privately, and they can change over time.
The reverse is true: asshole bosses who do right by workers quietly. Sometimes they're public assholes and privately terrible though. But sometimes (perhaps very rarely) they're openly caring AND do the right thing behind curtains.
I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here. Humanity is complex and varied.
Agreed. It is very easy to criticise if you've never been in the hot seat, and if you've never had to make tough decisions like this. As far as I can tell this person has never run a business with actual employees.
If Dahl had posted the typical layoff announcement people would be criticising that too.
