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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 5h

Maybe have a listen to Dimitri Alperovitch's latest "Geopolitics Decanted" podcast. The take of his guest, Sarah Stewart, is that it achieved a trade cease fire which, unfortunately, will not last. I know almost nothing about trade so I can't evaluate its credibility. podcast.silverado.org

Geopolitics Decanted with Dmitri Alperovitch | Silverado Policy Accelerator

Geopolitics Decanted is a podcast featuring geopolitical analysis and in-depth expert interviews on topics ranging from War in Ukraine, Great Power Competition with China, changing nature of warfare, ...

podcast.silverado.org

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 1d

It's not like I expected her to offer a solution. It's an insanely hard problem! But it would have been nice if she had engaged with that side of the dilemma. This is why I thought Command and Control was a much better book.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 1d

I didn't think much of the book. She seems to be crying "Why has no one done something to stop this madness?", but not engaging with the actual obstacles like a) nuclear weapons are physically possible and b) the leadership of some countries (not just the USA) are vicious and untrustworthy.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

Great if he now rejects all that. Great if he now espouses progressive ideas. But a lot people espouse progressive idea, without all the troubling stuff. Why does writing progressive flavored posts on Reddit launch him as the standard bearer for progressives?

DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

Yes, that was as an employee of Blackwater. It's disqualifying for me because as we found in Iraq, "Security contractor" effectively means not accountable to local, US, or US military law. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisour_...

Nisour Square massacre - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

As humans, interns have considerable ability to work towards hopelessly vague goals like "make my supervisor happy". The only goal of an LLM is "emit text that maximizes a match to a statistical model of token usage" (maybe with some human driven reinforcement training as frosting).

DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

Yes the characterization of an LLM as an intern is an example of this. I've certainly worked with interns who included function calls without understanding the required context, setup, and clean up. I've never had one simply make up an API cal that didn't exist, let alone do it repeatedly.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

I still maintain "has said some progressive things" is not a sufficient qualification for nomination.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

Yes, I read the article the first time you linked to it. It doesn't address the stint with Blackwater , and the entire argument seems to be "Sure he's said some things that are crude, and maybe homophobic, but he's also said some things that are very progressive".

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

Just as with US car manufacturers in the 60s-90s companies don't care about the long term health of the industry, let alone the long term resilience of their work force, only the fiscal results of the next five years (if that).

DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

I also feel that you and Mark are being naive about the likelihood of corporations structuring development departments so as to train and educate junior developers for the next generation. They are simply salivating at the prospect of eliminating workers.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

LLM are statistical pattern matching algorithms. They are not "reasoning" about the code they emit. That's not nothing, but I feel like you and Mark don't engage with this fundamental limitation of the technology.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

Scott, much respect for your and Mark's career's, but as a recently retired software developer I'm having a very different experience with "AI" assistants. In my experience any utility they provide is devoured by their tendency to suggest non-existent, deprecated API calls.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

"has said some progressive and anti-fascist things" is very weak tea for selecting someone as a candidate for the US Senate. I mean you could say the same about me, and I don't have a Nazi tattoo, have never worked as a mercenary, and I'd still think you'd be crazy to nominate me for the senate.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

Are you claiming he didn't work as a mercenary for Blackwater?

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 2d

Exactly what boxes would those be? Working as a mercenary for Blackwater? Nazi tattoo? Homophobia? His political beliefs have wandered a bit over the years. What makes you think he isn't just in a progressive "phase" and that he won't wander on to something else in the near future?

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 3d

Furthermore, effective code reviews require experience with writing code and actual understanding of the code base. If we turn over writing code to LLM the review process will rapidly fall apart as reviewers will quickly loose understanding of the project and eventually the language and environment.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 3d

I thought the promise of "AI" was that it would reduce drudge work freeing us to focus on the more creative work. Reviewing code written by chatbots sounds would be exactly the opposite. Any developer will tell you that code reviews are vital, but definitely drudge work.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 4d

A lot of right-wing influencers have been attending the protests at the Portland ICE facility hoping to "blow the lid off the violence of antifa" and trying to provoke said violence if it isn't spontaneously forthcoming. The Portland police (not ICE) have arrested a couple of MAGA people there.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 7d

Interestingly, they were into a bastardized version of neo-classical architecture too.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 7d

I just got back from a trip to Germany. I visited the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism where I learned about this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degener...

Degenerate Art exhibition - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 7d

This is one of the things that strongly reinforces my skepticism. I'm a software developer. We LOVE cool new development tools IF they work. If they have to be ordered to use them it means they don't work or are a pain in the ass to use.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 7d

Wait! I thought Andreesen had gone all in on building things? Real things like medical technology, educational access, housing, etc. I guess that's all somebody else's job while he builds more casinos.

DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 9d

The only way I can keep up my jogging routine is using audiobooks to anesthetize myself. But, at one point I did get to where I could jog six miles at 6mph, and occasionally got the rush of well being I'd been hearing about. I think it does exist for some people at some levels of training.

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DuckAlmighty @duxinbelltown.bsky.social · 9d

I was so happy the first time I decided I'd jog an extra five minutes so that I could get to the end of the exciting chapter I was reading, and found that I was actually able to do it without being miserable.

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