What worries me about it is how it applies very broadly, so it would mean stuff like the reddit piracy megathread could be prohibited, and make it actually more difficult for people to find or discuss places to safely pirate things

When I open my task manager I see flatpak-session-helper near the top of the list for ram usage and am suspicious

Literally billions of instances of censorship every year, the DMCA is such an awful law

To me it seems fine, especially if there’s still a free version that’s basically the same or it gets released after a delay. I don’t think I’d pay for something like this myself, and maybe they’re taking some legal risk, but if the money lets them spend time making media accessible, how is there a problem that outweighs the good?

What you confuse here is doing something that can benefit from applying logical thinking with doing science.

I’m not confusing that. Effective programming requires and consists of small scale application of the scientific method to the systems you work with.

the argument has become “but it seems to be thinking to me”

I wasn’t making that argument so I don’t know what you’re getting at with this. For the purposes of this discussion I think it doesn’t matter at all how it was written or whether what wrote it is truly intelligent, the important thing is the code that is the end result, whether it does what it is intended to and nothing harmful, and whether the programmer working with it is able to accurately determine if it does what it is intended to.

The central point of it is that, by the very nature of LKMs to produce statistically plausible output, self-experimenting with them subjects one to very strong psychological biases because of the Barnum effect and therefore it is, first, not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-exoerimentation(!) , and second, it is even harmful because these effects lead to self-reinforcing and harmful beliefs.

I feel like “not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-exoerimentation(!)” is necessarily a claim that reading and testing code is something no one can do, which is absurd. If the output is often correct, then the means of creating it is likely useful, and you can tell if the output is correct by evaluating it in the same way you evaluate any computer program, without needing to directly evaluate the LLM itself. It should be obvious that this is a possible thing to do. Saying not to do it seems kind of like some “don’t look up” stuff.

Are you saying that it is not possible to use scientific methods to systematically and objectively compare programming tools and methods?

No, I’m saying the opposite, and I’m offended at what the author seems to be suggesting, that this should only be attempted by academics, and that programmers should only defer to them and refrain from attempting this to inform their own work and what tools will be useful to them. An absolutely insane idea given that the task of systematic evaluation and seeking greater objectivity is at the core of what programmers do. A programmer should obviously be using their experience writing and testing both typing systems to decide which is right for their project, they should not assume they are incapable of objective judgment and defer their thinking to computer science researchers who don’t directly deal with the same things they do and aren’t considering the same questions.

This was given as an example of someone falling for manipulative trickery:

A recent example was an experiment by a CloudFlare engineer at using an “AI agent” to build an auth library from scratch.

From the project repository page:

I was an AI skeptic. I thought LLMs were glorified Markov chain generators that didn’t actually understand code and couldn’t produce anything novel. I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at. And then, uh… the code actually looked pretty good. Not perfect, but I just told the AI to fix things, and it did. I was shocked.

But understanding and testing code is not (necessarily) guesswork. There is no reason to assume this person is incapable of it, and no reason to justify the idea that it should never be attempted by ordinary programmers when that is the main task of programming.

The problem, though, with responding to blog posts like that, as I did here (unfortunately), is that they aren’t made to debate or arrive at a truth, but to reinforce belief. The author is simultaneously putting himself on the record as having hardline opinions and putting himself in the position of having to defend them. Both are very effective at reinforcing those beliefs.

A very useful question to ask yourself when reading anything (fiction, non-fiction, blogs, books, whatever) is “what does the author want to believe is true?”

Because a lot of writing is just as much about the author convincing themselves as it is about them addressing the reader. …

There is no winning in a debate with somebody who is deliberately not paying attention.

This is all also a great argument against the many articles claiming that LLMs are useless for coding, in which the authors all seem to have a very strong bias. I can agree that it’s a very good idea to distrust what people are saying about how programming should be done, including mistrusting claims about how AI can and should be used for it.

We need science #

Our only recourse as a field is the same as with naturopathy: scientific studies by impartial researchers. That takes time, which means we have a responsibility to hold off as research plays out

This on the other hand is pure bullshit. Writing code is itself a process of scientific exploration; you think about what will happen, and then you test it, from different angles, to confirm or falsify your assumptions. The author seems to be saying that both evaluating correctness of LLM output and the use of Typescript is comparable to falling for homeopathy by misattributing the cause of recovering from illness. The idea that programmers should not use their own judgment or do their own experimentation, that they have no way of telling if code works or is good, to me seems like a wholesale rejection of programming as a craft. If someone is avoiding self experimentation as suggested I don’t know how they can even say that programming is something they do.

The big advantage of paper for voting is the same as the reason the naive think replacing it would be an improvement; it requires the involvement of more people processing it, actually looking at all the votes. No matter what technological protections you put in place, you can’t replace the difficulty of getting a large diverse group of people in on a conspiracy and keeping quiet, there will always be some way to cheat with a computer, which is inherently complex and opaque.

Doesn’t that game already have a “behavior score”?

Just like old web forums, how nostalgic

Sure but, if it’s between setting up a bunch of laptops for people to proxy through or whatever, or running a VPN server from your home they can use instead, that would be the same IP.

During this time she hosted computers for overseas IT workers — who were posing as American citizens and residents — to ensure the devices had local IP addresses, making them appear to be in the US.

Why would you need physical laptops for this? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just have a server hosting a VPN?

Complex requirements for social media websites to verify the identity of users, respond to spurious automated takedown requests, provide authorities with backdoors, etc. I think instead of explicit bans, it’s more likely they pass a regulations that are made for large websites with lawyers and algorithmic moderation, which are in practice not something fediverse instance operators can safely deal with and go against the basic values of the open internet.

Open source code doesn’t mean open API though. Bluesky seems to have made a whole thing out of their technical architecture, and I get the arguments that it’s centralized in practice, but wouldn’t it mean basically scrapping the whole thing to lock down third party clients? Even if that didn’t mean anything I think multiclients could be a good idea anyway, if people were using those and there was a Reddit situation, some portion of users would want to stay with the same clients rather than using whatever proprietary app they try to push.

So they get extradited to the US to face charges for a massive crypto mining fraud, are prohibited from leaving, and then

“DHS is terminating your parole,” read the letters sent to both men separately, first reported by Law360. “Do not attempt to remain in the United States — the federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.”

“Although there is nothing Ivan and Sergei would want more than to immediately go home, they understood that they are also under Court order to remain in King County,” the attorneys said.

I don’t use these so maybe I’m missing something, but why would you have to choose? Bluesky is centralized but it seems like its design is committed enough to open technology that it would take them a long time to walk it back, and in the meantime there shouldn’t be barriers to using unified clients that put content from both in the same interface, and possibly override any opinionated content algorithm from the company (not sure if that’s feasible or not).

No, I try to treat that machine like a quarantine zone, I have a two PC setup and that’s part of the reason for it. So basically I don’t log into online accounts on that one (except relatively unimportant accounts for convenience, like Steam), and I don’t do important stuff on it

Any details you could share about how you obtained and processed the data? It seems like there’s a lot of interesting things that could be done with this but I’m not sure where the best place to start would be

Well, this is what the relevant part of the video says:

USAGM disbursed $7.5M to these entities, in “what seemed to be an effort to delay the hearing or woo the judge”. Regardless, the latter has sided against USAGM, and just a few days ago, the agency has decided to back off and release the funds for the 2025 fiscal year.

So I guess funds were cut, but then the courts ruled the president doesn’t have authority to do this himself since the funds were allocated by congress, and so as of now they have been restored, although congress needs to approve them every year and there’s concern they might not do so for next year.