There are people who see red whenever AI is involved. We've been automating away jobs for years, but now that we're starting to automate our own jobs, all of a sudden it's a moral outrage. People are just being emotional and not thinking straight. It will take a generation or two for it all to be accepted without drama.
There's so much to do in databases, and it's so hard to get right and test is all, I think we'll all have 10x the jobs. The easy stuff will go away, but to e.g.: test the new DB engine and ensure there aren't any exploits -> let's just work on it. But it's not that the introduction of compilers made engineers obsolete.
Just keep using the proper Postgres project if it makes more sense to you. But notice that this isn't just a strict translation, it actually makes changes (moving from process to thread based design, for instance). Time will tell if people find these changes beneficial or if the original remains preferable.
It's also worth noting, that while you are able to use LLM's to produce your own translation, he's actually done it. There's value in actually putting in the work.
This isn't a unique situation at all. Many Postgres extensions are developed and maintained by a single person, and may therefore be avoided by more conservative users, even if they offer some technical advantages. To each, their own.
Not that it's an ideal solution, but you have all the tools you need to do something about it. You can put all your preferred writing style guidelines into an LLM and have it ingest and rewrite any text you dislike.
Only if the problem is ideological, ie. you don't like the "idea" of llm's. But if in fact your actual dislike is the style of writing, then you can simply change the defaults. It's pretty easy to make a llm conform to your preferred style, avoid the use of em-dashes, or reduce verbosity, etc.
With all due respect, this reads to me as a couple of confusing non sequiturs. I took a quick look at the link you included, and it didn't help me understand what you're talking about either. Probably I'm just horrendously ignorant, but I would love to understand what you're referring to, and the point you're making about it.
Because we may be missing comments that GitHub has deleted without leaving tombstones (which sucks), it is not entirely clear whether the person creating and responding to the issue I linked is the person trying to have others run that trojan file, or whether they have fallen victim to it .. and merely quoted the link from a now-vanished comment.
It's your comment which is deficient. I happen to know what you're referring to, but this and your GP comment are written as reminders for people who already know what you're talking about, rather than being explanatory for people who don't.
A better approach might have been It seems the usual suspects are still abusing Github pull requests to distribute malware [...]
I wonder if you would feel different after witnessing an execution (by guillotine)? I believe Camus is arguing that you would, giving his father as example of someone who similarly changed his mind.
I have always actively avoided all the videos online of beheadings or other types of death, because i'm squeamish and don't want such images in my head. However, while not in person, I did actually witness a guillotine execution video. Admittedly it was filmed at a few hundred feet away, so it lacked any gore or closeups of the corpse. It was a shocking process - how quickly it happened (30 seconds from the appearance of the condemned to their demise). But it wasn't too hard to watch, and hasn't haunted me.
Anyway, there are a great many videos online of murders and other death scenes, and famously there were VHS tapes available pre-internet called "faces of death" showing such events. A great many people actively seek out and watch such things, seemingly with no negative reaction to them. So there are a lot of people who would presumably be even less affected by a guillotine execution than I was.
I mean, hangings and torture used to be done publicly and people would gather to watch in large crowds, even bringing the whole family. There are still people who travel to witness death-row executions for no apparent reason than their own pleasure. This kind of morbid obsession with violence and trivialization of it as a spectacle has become much less common as people have become more civilized with time, but I doubt it will ever fully disappear.
Camus also writes that these morbid events essentially harden the people who need to be softened, trivializing violence and thus perpetuating it. He uses the example of pickpockets, where a large majority of pickpockets convicted had atteneded an execution of another pickpocjet, sometimes stealing from others while the execution was ongoing.
>From A to Z I'd be thinking about the persons you don't care about: the victims.
And what exactly does the extra torture for the victim you care about? Is she better after the arm breaking or after the ball cutting?
I don't know any indicator that countries with death penalty have less victims or less crimes or less vicious crimes, or that added torture improves anything at all for past and future victims.
No, you are caring about you: you feel advocating for extra torture puts you in a better moral possition than people that defends a painless death penalty, or even worse, "only" life imprissoning, or those savages that would say "a mere" 20-25 years in jail.
There has been enough deaths of people that were wrongly judged, to add torture to the mix.
This may sound harsh, but I believe that anyone who fantasizes about cruelly murdering anyone has something wrong with them. Have you seen a death, saw someone dying in all the glory of their guts splayed around you? If that is something you desire to see, perhaps this death drive of yours requires some introspective.
> Your comment is below the intellectual and interpersonal standard that makes HN a good place to be.
You should install an extension and tag certain accounts. You'll notice it's the same people doing it for years (and also constant 2 months old accounts, but that's a different issue).
What criteria would allow for someone to "deserve" death? Is it as a form of revenge, like most "deserved" punishments?
Camus believes that state sanctioned revenge just breeds more violence. The death penalty is not a deterrent, it is something that offends the senses, and it is ultimately served on the platter as a criminal getting their just punishment in revenge.
Either such a revenge is public, to declare that justice has occured, or it does not happen at all. What revenge is a secret and supressed lethal injection? By all accounts, revenge should be public and furious, it should be there for the victims to see.
>Indeed, one must kill publicly or confess that one does. not feel authorized to kill. If society justifies the death penalty by the necessity of the example, it must justify itself by making the publicity necessary (Camus).
Thus, revenge is not a sufficient reason for capital punishment due to the abhorence we have to see death in public. Camus adds that such public exetions only harden the ones who need to be softened and offend the soft. He uses the example of pickpockets. A large majority of pickpockets who were sentenced had viewed the execution of a pickpocket before. Revenge only perpetuates violence.
Camus doesn't think that a muderer _doesn't_ deserve a punishment, but rather that a murder in any case cannot be accepted.
Camus is just wrong. And the word "murder" is doing a lot of work in hiding the deception. It hides the artificial difference between cases where you cause the death of someone. Murder is used, almost by definition, to classify the _unjustified_ causing of death. But there are many cases where causing of death is justified, and we all agree; for instance you are fine to cause the death of someone who is actively trying to kill you. And it is a very logical progression from there, to accept the causing of death in many other cases. For example, you shouldn't have to wait for an attacker to pull the trigger of a lethal weapon before defending yourself, you should be free to ANTICIPATE his action and cause his death preemptively. And you can use this exact same line of reasoning to show that there are a great many cases where causing death is justified. There are destructive and evil people on the planet, and nobody will miss them when they are gone. The same way its good to cull deer, if the population of deer gets out of control... it's just better overall for the environment.
Camus does talk about this in I believe part 3. He doesn't have a problem with killing someone who would cause harm to you. His problem is that the framing of the justification of death by the state is after the case, preventing no harm, and in fact creating harm-see comments above and the article. Secondly, assuming the innocence of the victim is put on society so that allows for execution by the state is just incorrect. It is not justice for a victim but a show for an undeserving audience. I don't think I explained it well, so if you have time, I really encourage reading Camus's article. Even if you don't agree, I still find his reasoning and viewpoints interesting.
I know that the belief in the majority is a core part of our democracy, but I'd like to challenge it for a moment here. First, does common belief make sonething right? Lets say society A has a majority vote that says people who murder are horrible and should be executed. Society B says no, murder is okay, because the majority say its okay. So, is murder right or wrong? The point is that a crowd doesn't always have a right answer. Second, opinions are not homogenous, and popular opinion can be wrong (think geocentric systems, newtonian laws, disease, etc.). A morality by plurality is arbitrary and non-universal which seems to defy the point of moral frameworks.
> The point is that a crowd doesn't always have a right answer...
> popular opinion can be wrong
By that logic, all the laws, regulations and norms would possibly be meaningless. So if we were to ignore those, we all would descend into anarchy.
> A morality by plurality is arbitrary and non-universal
In fact, a majority of popular support is a necessary (may not be sufficient) condition for morality of a society. Something is not considered moral if it is not supported by most of the members.
> society A vs society B
irrelevant. Morality based laws in a society generally consider morality only of that society. That's why we have the notion of sovereignty.
You stop the philosophical navel gazing and use your best judgment. If someone has their hands wrapped around YOUR throat and is actively trying to kill you, you would defend yourself to the death if necessary. And you would clearly claim that you had objective proof that the attacker deserved death. You just apply the same concept, to less immediate forms of attack.
I don’t find this a convincing argument. This works as an argument for permitting lethal force to end a life-threatening attack. But once someone is already detained there’s no way that killing them meaningfully increases public protection over just keeping them locked up.
That's just your opinion. The point of my comment is to show there are cases where even you agree causing the death of someone is "deserved". Once we both agree there are deserving cases, the rest is just a disagreement about where to draw the line. You have your preference, I have mine.
No, we don’t agree it’s “deserved” in any cases. I agree in the self defense case it’s justifiable based on near certainty about the outcome if you don’t respond with lethal force. That has nothing to do with “deserved”, which is always subjective unless we discover some universal moral code we’re all bound to abide by. So I think where we agree is that it’s all opinion.
What is under discussion is the taking of a life. You think it's fine to take a life in certain circumstances, but object in others. Fine. But you have no more a hold on the truth (moral or otherwise) than someone who draws the line somewhere else. So your objection comes down to a complaint about my use of the word "deserve". Fine, use a different word. It doesn't change in any useful real-world way the point, instead it's just typical philosophical navel gazing. The fact is we all agree there are times we should indeed take a life, it's a category that exists, even for your worldview.
Yes, it does. are you familiar with the rules for perjury? Once someone lies under oath, everything they say gets thrown out. The logic being that others cannot know what words can be trusted; you are done as a witness.
For some crimes, everything they are should be thrown out, because society should not be burdened with the trust that these people will not commit another similar crime. Removing them from society protects the very fabric of our society: our trust in others.
Child rapists, serial killers… these fuckers need to die, or society learns that we catch and release such predators back into the world. Where they become someone’s neighbors. Are you willing to let them move into next door to you? You think keeping them alive protects society?
Pay for your work. An eye for an eye. Equivalent exchange. Justice for any crimes perpetuated.
Such are some timeless principles that brings fairness.
And to counter on Camus when he writes:
> that there is no proof that the death penalty ever made a single murderer recoil when he had made up his mind, whereas clearly it had no effect but one of fascination on thousands of criminals;
This is where he's wrong. Having such a law alters the calculus of people's decisions. It's a simple first principle. It's one net of many nets for would be offenders, if it alters even one of their minds it's worth it.
Why is writing "it's not X, it's Y" a bad thing? Other than it happens to be used a lot by LLM's, it seems like a fine language construct. It's not like it's new; it was used plenty before the time of LLMs too. In my opinion, we shouldn't let the LLM companies claim parts of the English language for themselves, and make it effectively unusable by everyone else. That's what is happening because of this pervasive hatred for anything remotely associated with AI.
The "not X, it's Y" creates dramatic tension, "It wasn't a pimple, it was a tumor", but fucking AI overuses it for everything like they're doing a fucking TED-talk, despite being vapid, e.g. "This isn't a plan to spend half a day in New York, this is an itinerary for the best of what the city's history and culture has to offer."
My take on it is that you would get the exact same effect if 5 human writers happened to become elevated above all other writers in popularity. Then people would notice their tendencies and hate on them, "those damn big 5 human writers always use simile rather than metaphor", or whatever. I guess what i'm trying to say, is that we are annoyed by the tendency of just 5 specific LLM writers, who have the very human characteristic of having biases, tendencies, and crutches that they overuse.
It only happens twice in this article and they're both fairly reasonable. There are many other tells that I find a lot worse. In particular, "The Setup" is an awful choice for the first h2-level heading, especially when the description is that short. Better not to have a separate heading for the teaser at all.
(Also better not to lead with a 1.6 MB hero image that's completely irrelevant to the topic, for less than a thousand words of text that are still probably at least twice as many as merited; but that's probably not the LLM's fault, it's just how people do web stuff nowadays.)
It has simply become a "marker" for LLM style, so I'd argue authors caring about their text will now just use a different structure to get the meaning across. That's just part of being a writer. You can choose to write it, and it'll be correct, readers (including me) will just conclude its most likely an LLM and often stop reading.
You individually or collectively, can’t compete against mechanization.
At this point it’s a matter of costs and incentives. Culture will route around using “its not A, its B”, because thats cheaper than making tech companies change their models.
If the author was honestly trying to communicate, he would believe that the reader is already expecting it to be X, but it tends to get used for things where you didn't even consider it to be X in the first place. So it's not clarifying a potential misunderstanding, just making it sound surprising even if it isn't. You're left with the feeling that something's importantly different from expectations even when it's not.
In this case, I think it's fine. It points out that the victim only has to trust YouTube itself, not a stranger posting on it (eg, if it was listed as an example of a user comment). But I'm desensitized to everybody else abusing that construct so it didn't communicate that to me.
To be fair, as you can see in the clip, the two models handled the prompt slightly differently. The pxpipe variant gave the right count initially but needed a quick follow-up to output the ledger balance in a single line. The standard model, on the other hand, nailed the formatting on its first try. We've completely solved readability here on Fable; our only real hurdle left is getting the models to follow formatting constraints perfectly on the very first reply.
Of course, this was just rewritten by another LLM.
Yeah, but as you say, this is another LLM rewriting it. The amount of noncontextual information is nauseating and destroys the point of a README (in my humble opinion).
A human might have written a disclaimer like this:
> When not using Fable, pxpipe may require additional follow-ups to precisely follow your formatting instructions.
This kind of garbled information dump is very inconsiderate of the reader, and all good writing is considerate of the audience consuming it.
To be fair to the rewriting LLM, it was given only that single paragraph, with no other context and asked only to make it more comprehensible. But your point still stands. Here's what it said about _your_ rewrite:
That human rewrite is excellent. It ruthlessly cuts out the "narrative" of the test case (the transaction counts, the video clip, the "first try vs second try" details) and extracts the only piece of information an actual user reading a README cares about: what to expect when using the software.
Which suggests some ideas that should have been included in the prompt, to get closer to your ideal rewrite.
Some of the discussion going online, has asserted that heat related deaths in Europe exceed gun related deaths in the USA by some margin. If true, it has been ignored as a problem for too long.
Yeah, annual heat deaths in Europe (about 70k) exceed annual gun deaths in the US (about 44k) in absolute numbers. They're slightly under US gun deaths if you adjust for population (about 13 per 100k gun deaths in the US, and 12 heat deaths per 100k in Europe).
In comparison, fewer than 2k people die annually of heat in the US, well under 1 per 100k. And for symmetry, there are about 7k gun deaths annually in the EU, which is just slightly under 1 per 100k.
