So now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!" in short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office. Certainly, none of the Emperor's various suits, had ever made so great an impression, as these invisible ones.
"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
"Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
"But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
It costs advertisers three whole dollars for a user to click on one of these things? That’s hilarious. I’m switching to ChatGPT and I’m going to click on every one. Maybe I’ll even write a browser extension that does it for me.
Assertions are for testing at runtime. They demonstrate that the behavior is correct on one input when it runs. Formal verification proves that the code is correct on _all_ inputs _before_ it runs.
Formal verification proves if your specified theorem is correct. You can state any number of properties, in one extreme you just have basic types.
The interesting, 'hard-to-wrap one's head around' thing is that this verification is done by basically comparing arbitrary computations for equality.
So to prove that `3+3 == 6`, you would create an object with the type being `3+3 == 6`. And the rules of these languages are such, that the only way you can ever create an instance and thus a valid object for this type is if it's a true statement. 3+3==7 has no instance and can never have. (Interestingly, the instance of the above type is called `refl` for reflexivity. This is the only instance possible, and its type is basically a generic expecting a type, and a value of that type (this is where dependent types come in). Its "constructor" will place a single value into both slots, so the only way it can ever be instantiated is via values that the language/compiler itself considers equal.
A proof is just a manipulation of each "side" until they are trivially equal to each other).
One important caveat of the above: these languages evaluate expression not like most ordinary languages, like stopping at a thunk when the outermost value can't be further simplified. They will continue inward simplifying everything, and comparing these together - so even functions can be compared (though implementation matters a lot, and will alter the shape of proofs!)
Exactly zero of what must have been countless thousands of codices, whole limitless libraries, survived the reciprocal destruction of the Mayan polities.
No cultural destruction visited by the Spaniards on the Mayan peoples can hold a candle to the destruction visited, centuries earlier, by the Mayans upon themselves, and from which their spectactular civilization never recovered.
They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.
Let's have the government collect the data and private companies can engage in that as well if they wish - both parties can call the other out if there's a discrepancy.
IMO the government's incentives are generally better aligned with truth telling but there are reasons[1] that independent studies may still catch the government out.
1. Famously, up here in Canada, Stephen Harper suppressed accurate dissemination of climate data during his administration that was only really discovered through independent analysis.
It’s astonishing how quickly attitudes have shifted on this forum since engineers have been reminded which side of the labor/capital divide they’re really on. I can scarcely believe some of the comments I’m seeing on here these days.
Me too. It feels like I’m taking psychic damage from reading so much of this stuff. Contrary to the theory that it’s “just the contract workers’ Nigerian English,” I think the models are developing an ultra-terse hyper-stylized dialect of their own under RL pressure. They seem to be writing increasingly in _code_, and I don’t mean computer code. The words don’t mean quite what they mean to humans.
Over the last few days with fable I've found it at times incomprehensible, terse word salad. It also invents phrases assuming I'll understand (but that could be because it's reusing terms in the codebase I no longer remember).
I've often had to paste its output back in to ask it what it actually means. Weird.
I think the main thing is just fatigue. There's so little variety. Each model has its preferred idiolect which everyone becomes tired of due to ubiquity. That's the worst part. It's like always eating fast food.
My non-English-native-speaker head of development, to whom I report, does 100% of his work using LLMs and doesn't even check if the code compiles, but somehow this isn't my biggest problem with it – it's the botspeak in the PR comments (or answers to my PR comments) that are so clearly not written by him, and the documentation that makes absolutely 0 sense sometimes even if I break it down. Just a word salad of "robust", "maintainable", "smoke test" that amount to absolutely nothing. And the "You're absolutely right, I fixed it" responses (narrator: he didn't fix it).
I used to have a lot of fatigue due to it until I stopped caring.
The 1977 Oldsmobile Toronado is generally considered to be the first car to have microprocessor control.
But Ford's EEC was built around Toshiba's TLCS-12, the world's first 12-bit microprocessor, developed specifically for engine control, and might have been in cars produced prior to 77, but documentation is spotty.
So do you only drive cars built prior to the late 70s? Because sacrificing the enormous safety improvements just for a bizarre feeling of moral superiority is a really awful hill to die on. And literal death is a real possibility
Or do you not drive and never planned to buy any kind of car and thus your claim is meaningless?
You can get up to 1983 without computers if that's what you're looking for. 1984, they all had computers. Then if it had a carburetor, there was still a computer somehow controlling that carburetor.
TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) is a coin battery powered computer inside each tyre of your car. They’ve been around for a couple of decades now. Even the lowest end cars have TPMS in each wheel. If you change wheels you need to go to a wheel shop and have them re pair (as in re pair wifi) the wheel with your car. I had to do this recently with my 2014 ford focus.
Anyway those are just four of hundreds of computers in your car these days.
Not exactly a great example as it's unnecessary and expensive to replace. Lots of other microprocessors actually make your car easier and safer to drive.
TPMS has been mandatory in the U.S. since 2007. It turns out riding on under-inflated tires is dangerous, and people don’t regularly check their tire pressure.
My car will not exceed a certain speed if TPMS is malfunctioning.
Did I just read an argument that it’s easier or safer to manually check your tire pressures rather than having the car do it automatically every time the car drives fast enough to “wake up” the TPMS units?
That battery lasts longer than the tire. People sometimes try to say but I don't drive my car much and that doesn't change the math because tires are destroyed not just from the way of driving but also the sun and ozone in the air destroy tires it still needs to be replaced every seven years., it still needs to be replaced every seven years.
That's a software issue rather than an inherent limitation. I've driven cars with abs-sensor based TPMS that will tell you which tire is under or over-inflated
I don't think this is a useful stance to take for more or less any reason (any reason you can point to will have a different underlying issue). Cars functionally have to have microprocessors, if nothing else but to control emissions, and that's a good thing. I don't want society to smell of exhaust, so that's an obvious and gigantic benefit. There are many other good reasons to have them, like rear cameras, tire pressure sensors, infotainment, the lot.
There are downsides, but many boil down to 'manufacturers are knobheads' (data collection, pushing subscriptions) and lessened control (tuning computers can be easier than tuning mechanics, you just aren't given control, so this to is arguably a case of 'manufacturers are knobheads', or sometimes liability issues).
In my lifetime I have seen the tech ethos shift slowly, then quickly, from “don’t be evil” to “don’t be a pussy.”
It took me utterly by surprise when, after finishing my PhD, I decided it would be less damaging to my soul to go into finance. Even more surprising, I think I was right.
Indeed. The most self-important butthurt dweeb I knew in college is now a self-important butthurt founder-influencer with a massive following on X of the sort of unkempt right-winger engineers who are driven by high school revenge fantasies. Good for him, I suppose, as unhappy as he still seems to be.
He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.
So he goes away sour;
And, 'tis said, to this hour
Declares that he's no taste for grapes.
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