I’ve started seeing people make paperwork with explicit carve-outs for prompt use (merely referred to as “AI” with no explicit definition, so …. gonna be fun when the lawsuits start)
that sucks hard, I'm sorry. mine recently too, went from "looking a bit off" to "have to put 'em down" in less than a month. still hits me like a truck
a couple weeks back I had a many-rounds support ticket with a network vendor, querying exactly the details of their regex implementation. docs all said PCRE, actual usage attempt indicated….something very much else. and indeed it was because of . that I found it
In my experience even simple LLM changes are wrong somewhere around half the time. Often in disturbingly subtle ways that take an expert to spot.
I just want to add: sailor’s reference to “expert” here is no joke. the amount of wild and subtle UB (undefined behaviour) you get in the C family is extremely high-knowledge stuff. it’s the sort of stuff that has in recent years become fashionable to describe as “cursed”, and often with good reason
LLMs being bad at precision and detail is as perfect an antithesis in that picture as I am capable of conceiving. so any thought of a project like this that pairs LLMs (or, more broadly, any of the current generative family of nonsense) as a dependency in it’s implementation is just damn wild to me
(and just incase: this post is not an opportunity to quibble about PLT and about what be or become possible.)
I became a member this year! and then immediately got to notice how it’s oozing out every pore
what’s kinda wild for me is that there’s also an ethics pledge involved, and I do not understand how they square that with the mass theft all LLM services and progress are/is based on
them automatically fucking with authors’ papers….ew
(An aside — In their official docs, Apple refers to the menu bar always in lowercase, because it’s just a menu bar. The ‘desktop’ is the same way. This is interesting, because we live in an era where everything is a branded product whose name is a proper noun– see the Dock– and we are not allowed to merely use things, we are forced to experience using them and you legally can’t ‘experience’ a regular ‘ol noun. Everybody knows it’s gotta be a proper noun in order to be experienced. The Las Vegas Demon Orb Experience. The Microsoft Windows Desktop Experience. The ESPN Experience Brought To You By Sports Gambling. The 6th Street Hostel Bathroom Experience. But our friends “menu bar” and “desktop” are just two things, average, normal, unobtrusive. This says something about how the people who created these things thought about them.)
I learned yesterday that Helsinki’s uni is also on the list: prompts not only tolerated, but encouraged
been starting to wonder whether these are like the google etc plays there: “suuuuure you can get a sweetheart deal for our systems” [5y later and much storage on the expensive rentabox] “hey btw we’re renewing prices, your contracts are going up 400%. oh and also taking data out of the system is $20/TB. just..in case you wanted to try”
we can mock the orange man and his dancing circus of pliant sycophants and wannabe successors without having to become complicit propagators of their bullshit
besides, a good novel joke has wit and nuance. maybe a dash of historical insight. why on earth would I want to go to the averaging-everything-prior machine if I wanted something new?
I’ve started seeing people make paperwork with explicit carve-outs for prompt use (merely referred to as “AI” with no explicit definition, so …. gonna be fun when the lawsuits start)