Mail in voting has been something that the elderly, infirmed, workers, and folks in the military have done for decades. It's remarkably secure and quite auditable. The issue the right has with it is that the folks that vote by mail (the military notwithstanding) are typically democrats.

From that perspective, it makes sense to limit "vibe-coded" projects, since they don't fit in that traditional paradigm.

Now, there are big feelings around vibe-coding and a strong aversion to change, so I can imagine this is a rather jarring experience for folks that want to vibe-code and want to have the dopamine hit of sharing that with other folks in a forum that obstensibly is meant for folks to edit code together.

If I'm reading something on the internet, I'm either reading it to learn, or I'm reading it to be persuaded. If I wanted the LLM to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask an LLM. I'm reading your website/newsletter/email because I want to hear from you.. If you can't be bothered to put your time into writing it and teaching me what you think, why should I be bothered to read it?

Seriously. It seems like there’s an issue every other week. It would historically be normal to provide post mortems, and maybe I’ve missed them but seems like there are almost weekly issues and no follow up into the core reasons why.

I bring it up because the more we tolerate that and the more we reward that behavior on HN, the more we will get that behavior.

Second, all of them.

And the idea would be to tax high net worth (HNW) individuals. Not on their salary, because part of the game is that capital is taxed less than labor, and stocks aren’t taxed until you realize a gain. So what do ultra rich folks do? They take loans against their stocks (same stocks that public sector unions use to fund their retirement pensions), and can realize just enough to pay off the loan (or roll over the loan) and they get far better interest rates on their loans than you or I do.

So we either tax them against the loans they take out against their stock, or we tax their unrealized gains at their face value, or tax those loans as income against HNW individuals.

There are several ways to ensure folks that have made billions are taxed, but right now we aren’t willing to make those policy choices to tax them — and we even give their circumstances preferential treatment, even though we’re willing to make no concessions for folks that make $30,000 a year and are fighting for their next meal.

Legitimately we should have had this day one for a whole host of reasons (not the least of which is the issue of inadvertently using output from generative AI as training data for Generative AI).

But bigger than that is that while there are folks that want to be able to have a machine do their textual output for them with as little energy on their part as possible, the rest of us have to deal with the impact of that call on their part.

The purpose of communicating with other humans is not utilitarian, psychologically it is the pathway to connection and forms a large basis of how we are able to get along without eradicating ourselves as a species. Using generative AI to replace that humanity seems unthinkable to me, and having markers that help us differentiate serves as a way to keep others from gaslighting us, which undermines trust and communication.

I realize as a stereotype technical folks see communication as a means to a utilitarian end, but it's so much more important than that, so much so that even this small action of watermarking generative AI output can keep untold disasters from occurring because humans didn't know other humans were using it.

And practically speaking, I don’t see a LLM being able to do this. Perhaps a specialized language model trained only on “good” release notes and commits, but putting that much effort into the training data goes against the whole mantra of using an off the shelf model in the first place.

I realize for folks that need to write release notes that it’s not fun, and it’s hard to write well, but using AI to do it just makes it worse.

Intelligent life-forms can generate probabilistic outputs based on inputs, but being able to generate probabilistic outputs based on inputs is not what makes us intelligent.

LLM-based “AI” is able to use its vast corpus of inputs and calculate the most statistically likely output in a given situation. It is probabilistic, and when you are dealing with probabilities in a situation where certainties, not probabilities, matter, you’re going to get dinged on credibility massively when your LLM-based “AI” gets the probabilities wrong at best, or in this case, claims a line of code generates a vulnerability when it is, in fact, a code comment.

LLMs are text-prediction engines. They are not Artificial Intelligence, and shouldn’t not be treated in any form or fashion as if they possess intelligence. What bothers me about this entire situation is that presumably the folks that relied on the LLM-based “AI” to generate these vulnerabilities knew (or should have known) enough about their tool to know this would happen, but did not.

Now, we all pay the consequence, to the tune of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of wasted productivity from teams that have to deal with the resulting fall-out of this usage of “AI”.

A human must verify everything an LLM presents as fact. Everything. If you don’t, we all pay the price. LLMs do not remove the onus of responsibility on the human being, if anything they amplify it because LLMs can generate lots more output more quickly that needs to be verified than humans can.

Edit: Incidentally news of the original strike was posted on HN 5 months ago and flagged, for whatever reason. Why would it be flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317587