Why do you think it’s so important to get in this guy’s head, and to give him this graceful excuse of “maybe he just panicked?”
Obviously someone panicked. We can clearly see they did not line them up and actually shoot them with a firing squad.
But what is the point of this thought exercise? Where does it lead? To more “training” for the agents?
The whole thing is illegitimate and immoral. There is no need to engage with what was going on in the guy’s head. We are way, way too far past that point.
> Why do you think it’s so important to get in this guy’s head, and to give him this graceful excuse of “maybe he just panicked?”
It's not an excuse, it's an explanation. By all means throw the book at him for murder or whatever. I think it's important because understanding why things happen is important to stop them from happening. If you just stop at "they're evil murderers" then your options for fixing that are very limited.
> But what is the point of this thought exercise? Where does it lead? To more “training” for the agents?
> If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself.
Our industry is held back in so many ways by engineers clinging to black-and-white thinking.
Sometimes there isn’t a “final” answer, and sometimes there is no “right” answer. Sometimes two conflicting ideas can be “true” and “correct” simultaneously.
It would do us a world of good to get comfortable with that.
My background is in philosophy, though I am a programmer, for what it is worth. I think what I'm saying is subtly different from "black and white thinking".
The final answer can be "each of these positions has merit, and I don't know which is right." It can be "I don't understand what's going on here." It can be "I've raised some questions."
The final answer is not "the final answer that ends the discussion." Rather, it is the final statement about your current position. It can be revised in the future. It does not have to be definitive.
The problem comes when the same article says two contradictory things and does not even try to reconcile them, or try to give a careful reader an accurate picture.
And I think that the sustained argument over how to read that article shows that Yegge did a bad job of writing to make a clear point, albeit a good job of creatring hype.
> If your metric is an LLM that can copy/paste without alterations, and never hallucinate APIs, then yeah, you'll always be disappointed with them.
I struggle to take comments like this seriously - yes, it is very reasonable to expect these magical tools to copy and paste something without alterations. How on earth is that an unreasonable ask?
The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't like them for almost any reason, I'm a luddite. If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high.
I think what they're best at right now is the initial scaffolding work of projects. A lot of the annoying bootstrap shit that I hate doing is actually generally handled really well by Codex.
I agree that there's definitely some overhype to them right now. At least for the stuff I've done they have gotten considerably better though, to a point where the code it generates is often usable, if sub-optimal.
For example, about three years ago, I was trying to get ChatGPT to write me a C program to do a fairly basic ZeroMQ program. It generated something that looked correct, but it would crash pretty much immediately, because it kept trying to use a pointer after free.
I tried the same thing again with Codex about a week ago, and it worked out of the box, and I was even able to get it to do more stuff.
I think it USED to be true that you couldn't really use an LLM on a large, existing codebase. Our codebase is about 2 million LOC, and a year ago you couldn't use an LLM on it for anything but occasional small tasks. Now, probably 90% of the code I commit each week was written by Claude (and reviewed by me and other humans - and also by Copilot and ZeroPath).
It seems like just such a weird and rigid way to evaluate it? I am a somewhat reasonable human coder, but I can't copy and paste a bunch of code without alterations from memory either. Can someone still find a use for me?
For a long time, I've wanted to write a blog post on why programmers don't understand the utility of LLMs[1], whereas non-programmers easily see it. But I struggle to articulate it well.
The gist is this: Programmers view computers as deterministic. They can't tolerate a tool that behaves differently from run to run. They have a very binary view of the world: If it can't satisfy this "basic" requirement, it's crap.
Programmers have made their career (and possibly life) being experts at solving problems that greatly benefit from determinism. A problem that doesn't - well either that needs to be solved by sophisticated machine learning, or by a human. They're trained on essentially ignoring those problems - it's not their expertise.
And so they get really thrown off when people use computers in a nondeterministic way to solve a deterministic problem.
For everyone else, the world, and its solutions, are mostly non-deterministic. When they solve a problem, or when they pay people to solve a problem, the guarantees are much lower. They don't expect perfection every time.
When a normal human asks a programmer to make a change, they understand that communication is lossy, and even if it isn't, programmers make mistakes.
Using a tool like an LLM is like any other tool. Or like asking any other human to do something.
For programmers, it's a cardinal sin if the tool is unpredictable. So they dismiss it. For everyone else, it's just another tool. They embrace it.
[1] This, of course, is changing as they become better at coding.
I’m perfectly happy for my tooling to not be deterministic. I’m not happy for it to make up solutions that don’t exist, and get stuck in loops because of that.
I use LLMs, I code with a mix of antigravity and Claude code depending on the task, but I feel like I’m living in a different reality when the code I get out of these tools _regularly just doesn’t work, at all_. And to the parents point, I’m doing something wrong for noticing that?
If it were terrible, you wouldn't use them, right? Isn't the fact that you continue to use AI coding tools a sign that you find them a net positive? Or is it being imposed on you?
> And to the parents point, I’m doing something wrong for noticing that?
There's nothing wrong pointing out your experience. What the OP was implying was he expects them to be able to copy/paste reliably almost 100% of the time, and not hallucinate. I was merely pointing out that he'll never get that with LLMs, and that their inability to do so isn't a barrier to getting productive use out of them.
I was the person who said it can't copy from examples without making up APIs but.
> he'll never get that with LLMs, and that their inability to do so isn't a barrier to getting productive use out of them.
This is _exactly_ what the comment thread we're in said - and I agree with him.
> The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't like them for almost any reason, I'm a luddite. If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high.
> If it were terrible, you wouldn't use them, right? Isn't the fact that you continue to use AI coding tools a sign that you find them a net positive? Or is it being imposed on you?
You're putting words in my mouth here - I'm not saying that they're terrible, I'm saying they're way, way, way overhyped, their abilities are overblown, (look at this post and the replies of people saying they're writing 90% of code with claude and using AI tools to review it), but when we challenge that, we're wrong.
My problem isn't lack of determinism, it's that it's solution frequently has basic errors that prevent it from working. I asked ChatGPT for a program to remove the background of an image. The resulting image was blue. When I pointed this out to ChatGPT it identified this as a common error in RGB ordering in OpenCV and told me the code to change. The whole process did not take very long, but this is not a cycle that is anything I want to be part of. (That, and it does not help me much to give me a basic usage of OpenCV that does not work for the complex background I wanted to remove)
Then there are the cases where I just cannot get it do what I ask. Ask Gemini to remove the background of an image and you get a JPEG with a backed in checkerboard background, even when you tell it to produce an RGBA PNG. Again, I don't have any use for that.
But it does know a lot of things, and sometimes it informs me of solutions I was not aware of. The code isn't great, but if I were non-technical (or not very good), this would be fantastic and better than I could do.
> And so they get really thrown off when people use computers in a nondeterministic way to solve a deterministic problem
Ah, no. This is wildly off the mark, but I think a lot of people don't understand what SWEs actually do.
We don't get paid to write code. We get paid to solve problems. We're knowledge workers like lawyers or doctors or other engineers, meaning we're the ones making the judgement calls and making the technical decisions.
In my current job, I tell my boss what I'm going to be working on, not the other way around. That's not always true, but it's mostly true for most SWEs.
The flip side of that is I'm also held responsible. If I write ass code and deploy it to prod, it's my ass that's gonna get paged for it. If I take prod down and cause a major incident, the blame comes to me. It's not hard to come up with scenarios where your bad choices end up costing the company enormous sums of money. Millions of dollars for large companies. Fines.
So no, it has nothing to do with non-determinism lol. We deal with that all the time. (Machine learning is decades old, after all.)
It's evaluating things, weighing the benefits against the risks and failure modes, and making a judgement call that it's ass.
Also good for manufacturing consent in Reddit and other places. Intelligence services busy with certain country now, bots using LLMs to pump out insane amounts of content to mold the information atmosphere.
Its strong enough to replace humans at their jobs and weak enough that it cant do basic things. Its a paradox. Just learn to be productive with them. Pay $200/month and work around with its little quirks. /s
> The more surprising part is the unusual reactions of the other people getting a better picture and context of what I’m explaining without the usual back and forth - which has landed me my fair share of complaints of having to hear mini lectures, but not more than people appreciative of the fuller picture.
It’s not surprising to me at all. People don’t tend to appreciate being lectured at - especially in a conversational context. Moreover, people really don’t like being spoken to as if they’re robots (which is something I’ve started to notice happening more and more in my professional life).
The fact that the author considers these reactions surprising and “unusual” betrays a misunderstanding of (some of) the purposes of communication. Notably, the more “human” purposes.
> The fact that the author considers these reactions surprising and “unusual” betrays a misunderstanding of (some of) the purposes of communication. Notably, the more “human” purposes.
Guess that's what early access to the internet and a pandemic during the final school years does to a person, ah well haha
You keep saying “nullification”. Can you explain precisely what you mean by that?
Because as far as I’m aware, immigration law is not a concern of the state, and what folks typically mean when they say “nullification” in this context is “the state isn’t doing the fed’s job for them.”
You also brought up warrants to enter private property. What do you make of the incident a few days ago where an agent hopped a fence to arrest someone, without a warrant? Should we just ignore those violations of our rights?
>Because as far as I’m aware, immigration law is not a concern of the state, and what folks typically mean when they say “nullification” in this context is “the state isn’t doing the fed’s job for them.”
It's not just immigration law, it's any federal law. States have the right to ignore federal law if they like. This is called nullification. However, it very, very rarely happens because its inherently undemocratic. It especially rarely happens to the extent that cities and states pass explicit laws that order state law enforcement to ignore federal laws, and even work against the federal government's interests.
It's happened recently with marijuana legalization, with success. Where the federal government did some raids, but marijuana legalization is politically popular, so they backed off... and there has even been talk in some years of ending the illegality of marijuana federally.
State nullification has been somewhat unsuccessful with illegal immigration. These raids are the result of the federal government going its own way to enforce the law without cooperation of the states. The last time we saw this level of federal enforcement against state objection is after Brown v Board of Education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
I good comparison to the seriousness of nullification as an act that is inherently an escalation is gun control laws. Suppose some red states wanted to just nullify the National Firearms Act -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act -- The are perfectly in their rights to ignore federal laws and allow firearms dealers to sell unregistered, suppressed, machine guns to felons. The only way neighboring blues states -- obviously outraged that this is happening -- can do anything about this is by seeking federal enforcement, again, which would include raids, arrests, etc.
>You also brought up warrants to enter private property. What do you make of the incident a few days ago where an agent hopped a fence to arrest someone, without a warrant? Should we just ignore those violations of our rights?
I'm very much not saying ICE is always acting within the law. Like any other policing force, they're going to make mistakes (intentional or otherwise). We should be very angry about those things, especially if they're happening in bad faith. The problem I see is that when we're yelling about actually -- and unfortunately -- legal things then those serious issues are just going to look like background noise. The other serious problem is that all this crying wold literally makes the left look undemocratic. You don't like the law? Fight to change it. Don't just take the ball and go home, and then cry when the neighbors come to your house to get the ball back.
There is a world of difference between “passing a state law that directly contradicts federal law” and “declining to proactively enforce federal laws in ways that are not required by those laws.”
To drive the point home: federal immigration laws are already enforced by federal agencies. Here in IL, state and local officials cooperate to the extent required by law. There are no federal laws on the books requiring them to do the job of the federal government for them (they could pass one, but they haven’t).
Calling that “nullification” is intellectually dishonest. As you said - “if you don’t like the law, fight to change it.” Don’t pretend it’s something it’s not.
>Here in IL, state and local officials cooperate to the extent required by law.
This is clearly false in regards to most federal laws. To illustrate this, I'll take an exceptional example. If there where a serial killer who was living in IL, but had only killed anyone in other states, I suspect that IL government would likely go out of their way to assist the Feds in apprehending this killer, even though this is not required by state law.
IL would likely do the same for many, if not most, federal laws. The point of nullification is exactly when the state does not help when asked, still there are reasons for practical resources there, but it becomes very obvious nullification when the state passes laws preventing individuals who would LIKE to help, like local policed departments, from helping even if they wanted to. And this is exactly what has happened in many blue states.
Pretending that's not overt nullification is unserious.
Not assisting with enforcement acts you don't feel are worthwhile is not nullification. I'm not engaging in "nullification" when I don't call the police on a jaywalker. Or I mean maybe you think this is, but then police engage in wildcat strikes all the time, or change enforcement priorities, or whatever you want to frame it as. Calling a difference in prioritization "nullification" wrong, especially if local police in immigrant communities want to maintain good relationships with those communities. I think it's laudable that some police forces show an interest in serving their communities interests, as opposed to yearning to be fashy.
> but it becomes very obvious nullification when the state passes laws preventing individuals who would LIKE to help, like local policed departments, from helping even if they wanted to. And this is exactly what has happened in many blue states.
Can you give examples?
Keep in mind, "sanctuary city" policies are usually actually supported by local police forces, because while they may look not tough on crime (and for this reason sometimes police forces halfheartedly lobby against them), they actually make on-the-ground local policing easier, because they engender trust between the local police force and immigrant communities who otherwise might not report crimes at all.
>I’m not going to engage with you if you’re going to get in multiple threads and refer to things as “fashy.”
>It’s difficult enough to engage in a heterodox view in good faith. I don’t need to deal with slapdash bullshit.
I see we've reached the point in the discussion where you 'abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating...that the time for argument is over.'
Good fascist! Nice fascist! Late for a Bund meeting, are we?
Source:
“Never believe that anti-Semites [or in this case, fascist apologists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre[0]
> But this notion that roving bands of assassins are driving down the street looking for browns is likely an exaggeration (made worse by misinformation on social media).
Assassins? Nobody said that.
But my friend I can assure you they are, in fact, driving down the street and taking people who “look suspicious.”
(They also are doing more targeted things - both are true.)
