I don't know either for most code that I use, but I do have reason to trust that the author does know. I don't really trust any code itself, only the people and processes (organizational, not computer) that generated it.
I have no reason to trust that ai generated code is doing the correct thing. I know enough about the way code works to know that merely observing it seem to work in a test case means absolutely nothing at all. Multiply that zero by a million more test cases and it's the same zero.
The only thing I trust is that someone actually understood a problem they were trying to solve, and cares about avoiding edge cases, and tries to develop logic to make unintended outcomes impossible etc...
It's not possible for an ai to do any of that regardless what the prompts are. But what they can do is emit stuff that some person once wrote which did exhibit these qualities, and so looks ok, and causes idiots to think they found the cheat code to life, and worse, foist that shit off on everyone else.
My mom does not have my awareness that any of this is going on. She's just out there in the world running into this crap blindly as an unwitting end-user who has no idea how badly she's being served these days when she uses basically any app or service. Thanks for that vibe coders of the world.
Because the part of the job it automates is simple, and can be tested. I cannot overstate how simple the tools I am thinking of are. Think tipping calculator. Neither new nor creative nor complex. The real value here is being familiar with the problem.
You are missing the point here. I am talking about people who were not served at all by software developers. The alternative is not craftsmanship, but at best duct taping wordpress plugins together.
In any other context when someone tries to demand the impossible from me, I just say "you show me how to do it". But all the time politicians prestidigitate directives without any clue how it might be actually done. It's like that guy that tried to decree that pi=3.
The irony is that the pi == 3 argument comes from failing to read correctly/follow directions accurately for 1 Kings 7:23 --- the ratio of 3 to the diameter is for the _inner_ circumference --- when one includes the thickness of the wall, then it comes out to 3.14 which is a workable approximation.
Not only the source, but the specific repoprting has been refuted already by others.
So you have failed to present an argument, and then continued to fail to support it. So all you have done is express an opinion. Those are fine and allowed, but of no significance to anyone else.
They said exactly that they do not think these are double bad.
They are presenting them as examples of things that a lot of people do say, and many laws are written this way, and many cops, prosecutors, & judges treat them as double bad.
It's not interesting because it's not representative. Pair this with some stat that shows it happens the same way most of the time and then it's interesting.
Everything with the power to protect the innocent, also has exactly the same power to protect the guilty. The two facets are inseperable.
Observing only the negative side, or only the positive side, is a null argument. The fact that a tool can be used for bad is exactly cancelled out by the fact that it can be used for good. Neither is a valid basis for any kind of policy.
Except that on balance, it's better for everyone that we have tools and capabilities and knowledge than not.
It's better that we have knowledge of say, poisons, than not, even though some people apply the knowledge to do harm.
This manifests in at least a couple different dimensions. The simplest one: there are more good or neutral people using knowledge and tools for good things than not. A less direct way: It's better for you to have options to help yourself and others deal with problems and meet needs than not.
Even if someone can use a tool against you, you are still better off having a lot of useful tools at your disposal in general than not, including to counter the one going against you, which zeros that out, and then also to deal with everything else, which becomes a net positive.
The alternative is to be an animal. Either a wild animal totally at the whims of nature, or worse a voluntarily domesticated animal that knows that tools exist, but has abdicated all responsibility for their own welfare to some farmer claiming to take care of them. And you still have the exact same bad guy problem, only now without any ability to deal with it.
Acting like the bad side of a useful thing is the only side, or even the most important side, is simple bad math.
Aside from any other unflattering quality that results in fear of any obvious easily identified harm being one's highest priority that outweighs all other considerations.
I just like that it would mean there would be an entry right in the dictionary that links to the whole story for everyone to be reminded of for all of time.
This was the stunning one to me. Just blew my mind literally observing it run up a dead end wire and slosh and rebound like water.
Previously I was used to thinking of dead ends as simply functionally inert. That without a circuit, nothing at all happens in the dead end wire other than the potential for something to happen.
Sure I know something more than nothing actually happens since there is an elevated charge there. But still just the mental model shorthand is that no circuit = no nuthin.
But it's not. It's actually like a pipe with a little bit of air to allow for some compression, and even the dead end has a small flow that travels to the end and builds up against it, then rebounds back and eventially levels out at some homogenious but now higher pressure.
Maybe we need a display that just shows each user approximately what they cost.
Not a wikipedia banner. No guilt verbiage. No unrelatable total site/year numbers like "2.6M out of 5M goal" etc.
Just like some little bit of ui in a corner somewhere that passively just sits there and shows it's state like a red/yellow/green light or a battery meter or something. And what it shows is some at-a-glance representation of what you are costing the service, positive or negative.
If the org is open and low profit or even non profit, or even reasonable profit but organized as a co-op, this can be a totally honest number, which will probably be suprisingly small.
(and if any full-profit type services don't like having that kind of info made quite so public because it makes it hard to explain their own prices, well golly that sure sounds awful)
This will obviously have no effect on some people.
But I know that something like that will absolutely eat at some people until they decide they will feel better if they make that dot turn green.
And everyone else who just wants to take something for free and doesn't like being reminded of it, has no basis for complaining or claiming to be outraged at being nagged or browbeaten. It's a totally passive out of the way bit of display making no demands at all and not even hindering or speedbumping anything.
Even when you click on it for more info and the links to how to donate etc, the verbiage is careful not to make kids or drive-by laypeople or anyone else without real means feel bad or feel obligated. We don't need your soup money, don't sweat it.
Maybe even include some stories about how we all wound up in our high paying IT jobs because of the availability of stuff other people wrote and let us use for free when we were kids or former truck drivers etc, and so that's how you can understand and believe we really are ok with you now using this for free.
Can't possibly get any lighter touch than that.
And yet the fact that the little thing is just there all the time in view, that alone will make it like a voluntary itch that if you know you can afford it, you should make that light green. It's like a totally wholesome use of gamification psychology.
I guess it will also have to somehow show not just what you cost yourself, but also what all the non-paying users are costing and what your fraction of that would be to cover those. At least some payers would need to pay significantly more than what they cost.
But I'd be real curious to see just how bad that skew is after a while if a lot of individuals do end up paying at least for themselves, where today most of them pay nothing.
That may make the need for whales much reduced and really no whales, just a bunch that only pay like twice what they cost. Or even less, a heavy user that costs more might be able to totally cover the entire cost of 10 other light users with only 10% more than their own cost. It could eventually smooth out to being no real burden at all even for the biggest payers.
That's getting to be a bit much info to display all in a single colored dot or something without text or some complicated graphic, but I think this much could be shown and still be simple and elegant. Even a simple dot can have several dimensions all at once. size, hue, saturation, brightness, let alone any more detail like an outline or more complex shape.
About the only thing I can see that is a bad thing is I bet this is a recipe for unfairly taxing women more than men. You just know that far more women will make that light green even if it's not easy, and far more men will happily let it ride forever even though they could afford it effortlessly, just to spend that $3 on a half of a coffee instead.
How do you know it ever does the job?
I don't know either for most code that I use, but I do have reason to trust that the author does know. I don't really trust any code itself, only the people and processes (organizational, not computer) that generated it.
I have no reason to trust that ai generated code is doing the correct thing. I know enough about the way code works to know that merely observing it seem to work in a test case means absolutely nothing at all. Multiply that zero by a million more test cases and it's the same zero.
The only thing I trust is that someone actually understood a problem they were trying to solve, and cares about avoiding edge cases, and tries to develop logic to make unintended outcomes impossible etc...
It's not possible for an ai to do any of that regardless what the prompts are. But what they can do is emit stuff that some person once wrote which did exhibit these qualities, and so looks ok, and causes idiots to think they found the cheat code to life, and worse, foist that shit off on everyone else.
My mom does not have my awareness that any of this is going on. She's just out there in the world running into this crap blindly as an unwitting end-user who has no idea how badly she's being served these days when she uses basically any app or service. Thanks for that vibe coders of the world.
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