I love C. I came up on C. But C does not tell you a story. It tells you about the machine. It tells you how to keep the machine happy. It tells you how to translate problems into machine operations. It is hard to read. It takes serious effort to discern its intent.

I think any time you believe the codebase you're developing will have to be frequently modified by people unfamiliar with it, you should reach for a language which is both limiting and expressive. That is, the language states the code intent plainly in terms of the problem language and it allows a limited number of ways to do that. C#, Java (Kotlin) and maybe Python would be big votes from me.

And FYI, I came up on C. One of the first senior engineers I was tutored by in this biz loved to say, good code will tell you a story.

When you're living with a large, long lived codebase, essenti

But it seems pretty obvious to me that after decomposition and parameterization, coordination of a complex task would much better be handled by a classical AI algorithm like a planner. After all, even humans don't put into words every individual action which makes up a complex task. We do this more while first learning a task but if we had to do it for everything, we'd go insane.

And yes, the media is full of blatant and bald faced lies but is that worse than the credulous and uncritical way the media basically endorsed the war in Iraq?

I get that it's a joke but the joke kinda only works if there's some truth behind it. And I just don't think there is here. I think people are lamenting old media now, not because the information sphere is genuinely worse today but because it was a comfort to have a consensus in public opinion regardless of how true that consensus was.

That goal was incepted by a human but I don’t see that as really mattering. We’re this AI given access to a machine which could synthesize things and a few other tools it might be able to act in a dangerous manner despite its limited form of will.

A computer doing something heinous because it is misguided isn’t much better than one doing so out of some intrinsic malice.

For example, we have certain films to thank for an escalation in the tactics used by bank robbers which influenced the creation of SWAT which in turn influenced films like Heat and so on.

Let's look at the chain of argument. The poster was countering an assertion that humans have created massive ecological turmoil by seeking to fundamentally reshape the Earth. Their counter was that Europe was once forest and swamp. I can only assume they meant that we take for granted that the present condition of Europe is good and because it was once mostly "just" forest and swamp that Europe demonstrates that these transformations are acceptable or even preferable and therefore we should do them.

I think this is a bad argument because it contains many assumptions and implications which I think are false.

Assumptions: #1 The magnitude of exploitation of Europe was necessary to achieve modern life.

#2 The development of modern European life occurred on an ideal or preferable timeline and things would not be better if this process had been gentler to the environment and taken an additional 1,000 years.

#3 The ecosystems of the American West are not more unique or prized than the temperate forests of Europe and their loss represents a similar loss therefore justifying the trade off.

#4 Wilderness, despite its increasing scarcity is not more valuable today than it was 1,000 years ago.

#5 Exploitation of the American West would have a similar economic and developmental impact as the exploitation of primeval Europe and therefore represents a worthwhile trade off.

I don't think any of the above should be taken for granted.

The point is that we do not need this land. There is plenty of land all around the United States that is "habitable". And given the trend of birth rates and urbanization there is virtually no reason to go destroying fragile and unique ecosystems just so people can satisfy some compulsion for a manifest destiny of occupying every available square foot of this planet.

Desert Solitaire https://a.co/d/16MZLfL

Looking at other forms of chemistry we don't see much as naturally varying as carbon. Though I have heard some chemists and biologists hypothesize about sikicon based life. At high temperatures it forms the kinds of dynamic connections that carbon does.

It's just too arrogant to think we currently can place odds on all the important events necessary for us or something like us to come into being. At the time this equation was devised, I'm not even sure they understood how crazy lucky the development of mitochondria was.

In reality, we just don't know the many factors that might've affected our outcome. Also, it's just pure lottery falacy to reason about the statics that specifically "we" exist. If the odds for some strange reason settled out around about 1 of there being a single sentient species in our universe, that species would come to reason about itself and produce the same long odds of their existence. It's a longshot that a specific someone wins the lottery twice. It is a statistical inevitability that someone will win twice.

Whoever they are, they can't alienate themselves from being the one despite all the statistical huffing and puffing they can conjure. We will only know how special we are when we find another or once we have surveyed enough planets in depth.

The LLM is like another user. And it can surprise you just like a user can. All the things you've done over the years to sanitize user input apply to LLM responses.

There is power beyond the conversational aspects of LLMs. Always ask, do you need to pass the actual text back to your user or can you leverage the LLM and constrain what you return?

LLMs are the best tool we've ever had for understanding user intent. They obsolete the hierarchies of decision trees and spaghetti logic we've written for years to classify user input into discrete tasks (realizing this and throwing away so much code has been the joy of the last year of my work).

Being concise is key and these things suck at it.

If you leave a user alone with the LLM, some users will break it. No matter what you do.