While I generally agree with you, this "LLM is a human" comparisons really are tiresome I feel. It hasn't been proven and I don't know how many other legal issued could have solved if adding "like a human" made it okay. Google v Oracle? "oh, you've never learned an API??!?" or take the original Google Books controversy - "its reading books and memorizing them, like humans can". I do agree its different but I don't like this line of argument at all.
I agree, that's why I was trying to point out that saying "if a person did that we'd have a word for them" is useless. They are not people, and people don't behave like that anyway. It adds nothing to the discussion.
There is one near Naples in Florida I go to often just for the insane drink discounts compared to the Publix or Wawa or the Walmart Neighborhood Market thing across the street.
> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM.
Years ago I had to spend many months building nothing but Models (as in MVC) for a huge data import / ingest the company I worked on was rewriting. It was just messy enough that it couldn't be automated. I almost lost my mind from the dull monotony and started even having attendance issues. I know today that could have been done with an LLM in minutes. Almost crazy how much time I put into that project compared to if I did it today.
The issue is that it might look good but an LLM often inserts weird mistakes.
Or ellipses.
Or overindex on the training data.
If someone is not careful it is easy to completely wreck the codebase by piling on seemingly innocuous commits.
So far I have developed a good sense for when I need to push the llm to avoid sloppy code. It is all in the details.
But a junior engineer would never find/anticipate those issues.
I am a bit concerned. Because the kind of software I am making, a llm would never prompt on its own.
A junior cannot make it, it requires research and programming experience that they do not have.
But I know that if I were a junior today, I would probably try to use llms as much as possible and would probably know less programming over time.
So it seems to me that we are likely to have worse software over time.
Perhaps a boon for senior engineers but how do we train junior devs in that environment? Force them to build slowly, without llms? Is it aligned with business incentives?
Do we create APIs expecting the code to be generated by LLMs or written by hand?
Because the impact of verbosity is not necessarily the same.
LLMs don't get tired as fast as humans.
> So it seems to me that we are likely to have worse software over time.
IMO, it's already happening. I had to change some personal information on a bunch of online services recently, and two out of seven of them were down. One of them is still down, a week later. This is the website of a major utilities company. When I call them, they acknowledge that it's down, but say my timing is just bad. That combined with all the recent outages has left me with the impression that software has been getting (even more) unreliable, recently.
They are trained on code people had to make sacrifices for: deadlines, shortcuts, etc. And code people were simply too ignorant to be writing in the first place. Lots of code with hardly any coding standards.
So of course it’s going to generate code that has non-obvious bugs in it.
Ever play the Undefined Behaviour Game? Humans are bad at being compilers and catching mistakes.
I’d hoped… maybe still do, that the future of programming isn’t a shrug and, “good enough.” I hope we’ll keep developing languages and tools that let us better specify programs and optimize them.
If it's such a mind numbing problem it's easy to check it though, and the checking you do after the LLM will be much smaller than you writing every field (implicitly "checking" it when you write it).
Obviously if it's anything even minorly complex you can't trust the LLM hasn't found a new way to fool you.
True. The counterpoint being that back in the days, they could have decided to write a parser if the data was structured and they would have then learnt things that they will never learn by relying on AI.
For a junior in the learning phase that can be useful time spent.
Then again, I agree that at times certain menial code tasks are not worth doing and llms are helpful.
It's a bit like a kid not spending time memorizing their time tables since they can use a calculator. They are less likely to become a great mathematician.
This is exactly it. There wasn't any complex logic. Just making sure the right fields were mapped, some renaming, and sometimes some more complex joins depending on the incoming data source and how it was represented (say multiple duplicate rows or a single field with comma delimited id's from somewhere else). I would have much rather scanned the LLM output line by line (and most would be simple, not very indented) then hand writing from scratch. I do admit it would take some time to review and cross reference, but I have no doubt it would have been a fraction of the time and effort.
Half the article was about the extensive software codependency between TPU's, Borb, lilpunet, their optical switching network, etc. How much of that is manufacturing and not just software and engineering experience, which won't be so easy to copy?
Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address) by a in-person SOS visit and $15 a plate. I've always thought this should be PII and shouldn't be allowed on reddit, for example, where PII is banned. Post a driver with plate in Michigan and you may have doxxed them.
This is intentionally not PII. You accept this burden when you decide to register a vehicle.
Keep in mind you don't need to have a license plate or to register a vehicle to drive it only on private property.
Your license plate is required to be readily visible so that it can be used to find out who the registered and, presumably, responsible party is.
Consider if you skip out on paying for parking at a garage, where you agreed to pay the fee by parking there in the first place. How is the business supposed to identify you to collect the money owed?
Otherwise, how else would automatic private toll roads know where to send the bill?
In Michigan, I believe the law only permits someone to request registration details for certain listed reasons. They don't verify that, but if you're caught submitting a fraudulent request, you can get in trouble - I don't know if it's a fine or crime. Probably depends on the circumstance.
You can screech about "not a right" all you want but there's federal law (DDPA) that limits how easily states can reveal driver's PII. Usually a documented business purpose (i.e sending spam mail) is required.
This Michigan thing sounds like it walks right up to the line if not over it.
No, because while the leasing company may own the vehicle (known as the title holder) the vehicle will be registered in the lesser's name (known as the registered owner.)
In the case of a car purchased with financing like a loan, I believe the purchaser will be both the title and registered owner, but the lender will have a lien on the vehicle until the debt is paid off.
That, or, establish a trust to own the vehicle and grant yourself permission to use it. It's not exactly trivial to do and costs some money, but it's doable.
You can do similar with an LLC, but that gets more complicated with the rules regarding using a "company" vehicle for personal purposes. IANAL
Similar things are done for things like cellphone plans, firearm ownership, homes, etc.
The only thing I am aware of that you can only do in your own name is register to vote. Almost all of the Michigan voter database can be FOIA'd. It's called the QVF - qualified voter file. Only a few fields in the database (ie, day and month of birth) as well as all voter records for victoms domestic battery are protected by statute.
Pay a thousand bucks to a Montana agent to register you an pseudoanonymous LLC and put an old 90s Corolla into an LLC with a permanent registration plate (since anything 15+ years old can have a 'perm' plate on it.
While some people do get away with this, it carries some risk.
Without using an LLC, most every state requires you to register your vehicle where you live within 30-90 days with some exceptions (ie college students).
Even with the LLC, if you catch the attention of the state, I believe you might be risking being charged with tax evasion even if your goal was to protect your privacy. This is especially true if you can't prove the LLC to be a legitimate business venture.
Yeah, the Corolla won't be mistaken for a supercar, but many states have begun cracking down on residents with Montana plates such as Georgia, Ohio, and New York.
Also, insuring a car with out of state registration can be committing insurance fraud. Rates and fees are different between states due to different regulations. Further, depending on your policy, the insurer could deny claims because the car wasn't garaged in the state it was registered.
Really, if the privacy is of sufficient priority, the best solution is to just do things properly and move to rural Montana instead.
Prime video is more than just prime content, they are more of a marketplace where you can watch competitors content as well. Like their web marketplace for tv and movies. That's why you can sign up for things like HBO and even Apple TV directly via Prime.
IIRC the Go / Now switch was due to Go being the app if you already paid for cable and wanted to watch HBO by logging into your cable provider account. Now was the pure streaming option those without cable could purchase. Took a bit to consolidate I think.
That was the given reason, and I'm sure they knew it was ridiculous and fixed it as soon as they could get all their ducks in a row, but it sure was comically bad from the outside perspective of ordinary users. Even if there had to be 2 apps for some contractual reasons I think most people would have been more tolerant if they had identical functionality and appearance after login, and were just titled "HBO Go for Cable" and "HBO Go Streaming."
I could imagine HBO Go starting off as literally their cable package "on the go" with no intent to ever charge for streaming, being able to login at others houses or on vacation to enjoy your paid package etc. Then another team / project starting up the streaming option and went with Now and I wouldn't be surprised if it was indeed all contractual reasons.
That's a measurable qualify of life decrease as well for many people. Some things they just won't be able to buy anymore. Things they may require, but you claim its ok to go without because it helps the environment. Sounds dystopian.
You're doing operations on the memory once it's been transferred to gpu memory. Either shuffling it around various caches or processors or feeding it into tensor cores or other matrix operations. You don't want to be sitting idle.
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