Determinism just means you don't have to use statistics to approach the right answer. It's not some silver bullet that magically makes things understandable and it's not true that if it's missing from a system you can't possibly understand it.
If I use a calculator to find a logarithm, and I know what a logarithm is, then the answer the calculator gives me is perfectly useful and 100% substitutable for what I would have found if I'd calculated the logarithm myself.
If I use Claude to "build a login page", it will definitely build me a login page. But there's a very real chance that what it generated contains a security issue. If I'm an experienced engineer I can take a quick look and validate whether it does or whether it doesn't, but if I'm not, I've introduced real risk to my application.
Those two tasks are just very different. In one world you have provided a complete specification, such as 1 + 1, for which the calculator responds with some answer and both you and the machine have a decidable procedure for judging answers. In another world you have engaged in a declaration for which the are many right and wrong answers, and thus even the boundaries of error are in question.
It's equivalent to asking your friend to pick you up, and they arrive in a big vs small car. Maybe you needed a big car because you were going to move furniture, or maybe you don't care, oops either way.
Furthermore, it is possible to build a precise mathematical formula to produce a desired solution
It is not possible to be nearly as precise when describing a desired solution to an LLM, because natural languages are simply not capable of that level of precision... Which is the entire reason coding languages exist in the first place
Is anyone pretending like models are not vulnerable to prompt injection? My understanding was that Anthropic has been pretty open about admitting this and saying "give access to important stuff at your own risk".
Now, do I think that they sometimes encourage people to use Claude in dangerous ways despite this? Yeah, but it's not like this is news to anyone. I wouldn't consider this jailbreaking, this is just how LLMs work.
Vibecession is such a stupid, patronizing term. It’s been so obvious for so long that basic needs like housing are becoming more expensive, and yet economists can’t stop talking about their “basket of goods” as if the way that’s decided upon isn’t just vibes
- Comments as directives[0]. Nobody finds this intuitive. I've never met anyone that saw what directives were doing and thought to change a comment.
- Comments as commands for the compiler[1]
- The state of go linting[2]. There are 30 different formatting tools that all frequently conflict with each other. It got so complicated that one project exists to manage installations of all the other ones (golangci-lint). Only difficulty is that most IDEs use gofmt and if your golangci-lint uses a different gofmt version than your IDE, you end up getting different formatting when you save vs. when you commit. This is only a problem because golangci-lint can't be installed using the go toolchain[3], so you can't just have dependency resolution solve this for you.
> I think people in general, themselves, are just less interested in the counter cultural ethos.
Gen Z is less patriotic than any other generation, so the counter-culture of their generation is really just... culture. Everyone kind of just agrees that patriotism is a joke, politics are a joke, taking any of this seriously or contributing to it more than necessary is a joke. Gen Z protests as much as any previous generation. The fact that it's not taken seriously in traditional politics is just another signal for them to opt out.
The issue is not that there's no counter-culture, it's that we've designed a system of governance that can withstand it without budging (or at least pretends like it can). Long term, the system will starve. Good luck finding anyone competent to join the military, engage passionately with their jobs, or contribute to civil service. It's not gonna happen. The american dream is now to be on the winning side of a scam.
It might take some time for something else to arise from the ashes of all this, but the first step is already occurring.
> there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on.
You've clearly never been through childbirth. Women go through incredible amounts of pain, and good parents make incredible sacrifices for their kids. They're not doing that because they're guaranteed some payoff.
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