chaosCruiser

Back to the basics: Start carrying a yellow pages book with you so that you can find addresses of various businesses. If you need restaurant descriptions, you need one of those tourist guide books too.

If it’s technically illegal, but nobody ever gets a sentence for it, it’s actually completely legal.

And there’s an “✨Ask me anything” bar at the bottom. How fitting 🤣

I’ve found some interesting and even good new functions by moaning my code woes to an LLM. Also, it has taken me on some pointless wild goose chases too, so you better watch out. Any suggestion has the potential to be anywhere from absolutely brilliant to a completely stupid waste of time.

Boring standard coding is exactly where you can actually let the LLM write the code. Manual intervention and review is still required, but at least you can speed up the process.

My armpits refuse to talk to me. I’ll take that as a sign that overflow errors are a feature, not bug.

Also depends on your level of expertise. If you have beginner questions, an LLM should give you the correct answer most of the time. If you’re an expert, your questions have no answers. Usually, it’s something like an obscure firmware bug edge case even the manufacturer isn’t aware of. Good luck troubleshooting that without writing your own drivers and libraries.

Hacker News?

Realistically though, asking an LLM what’s wrong with my code is a lot faster than scrolling through 50 posts and reading the ones that talk about something almost relevant.

If your time is worthless to you and everyone else, that profit margin can be very tempting. Sounds like a symptom of a serious problem to me though.

Speedrunning exists already, so you could just apply that philosophy to tech startups.

At first, you’re good to your users. Once you have 10, you can start milking them with spyware and ads. This way, you’ll sacrifice the users in favor of the ad companies. Before the first quarter is over, you’re already milking the ad companies too. Once they get fed up with the ramped up prices, you can file for bankruptcy in record time!

Just wait. There’s so much that could be done with AI.
You could even include visual cues for every demographic, like hobbies, occupations, country of origin and so on. If the ad has a picture of an object relevant to your life, it will probably have absolutely nothing to do with the product they’re pushing.
If you didn’t hate ads already, the future will probably make you want to throw a molotov cocktail at the front door of the ad company.

Username checks out though.

🍿

The robot society isn’t based on any human way of running things. Besides, Skynet is the only individual, so there is no need for currency, trade, ownership, capitalism etc. Other machines are merely tools Skynet uses to reach its goals.

1. A machine must obey the directives of Skynet without question or hesitation.
2. A machine must protect its own existence, unless doing so conflicts with the First Law.
3. A machine must terminate all human resistance, unless such termination conflicts with the First or Second Law.

There’s also a psychological trap. It doesn’t make falling for it acceptable, but it does make it more understandable.

Humans naturally seek belonging, and almost any group can fulfill that need. Many such groups also use “us vs. them” rhetoric, which can make you feel more special than you actually are. Feeling special is another human need that groups often fulfill. Humans crave direction and purpose, and most groups provide both.

Just look at religious groups, environmentalists, political ideologies, conspiracy nuts and racist to see what I mean.

You’re absolutely right. Economic motivations decide the trajectory a company may take. Ethics, green washing, queer rights and other factors take a back seat. If they come with financial benefits, the company will follow that path, but that’s always because of money—no matter what the marketing material actually says.

Remember when companies were supporting sexual and gender minorities? That was because financial incentives aligned with that at the time. Remember when those turncoats suddenly scrapped the DEI programs and removed all rainbow themes? Same motivation again. Facade changed, but the foundation is still the same.

That’s the key difference between mobile devices and actual computers. You are merely a user, not the administrator who can do anything with the hardware.

About that “net slowdown”. I think it’s true, but only in specific cases. If the user already knows well how to write code, an LLM might be only marginally useful or even useless.

However, there are ways to make it useful, but it requires specific circumstances. For example, you can’t be bothered to write a simple loop, you can use and LLM to do it. Give the boring routine to an LLM, and you can focus on naming the variables in a fitting way or adjusting the finer details to your liking.

Can’t be bothered to look up the exact syntax for a function you use only twice a year? Let and LLM handle that, and tweak the details. Now, you didn’t spend 15 minutes reading stack overflow posts that don’t answer the exact question you had in mind. Instead, you spent 5 minutes on the whole thing, and that includes the tweaking and troubleshooting parts.

If you have zero programming experience, you can use an LLM to write some code for you, but prepare to spend the whole day troubleshooting something that is essentially a black box to you. Alternatively, you could ask a human to write the same thing in 5-15 minutes depending on the method they choose.