The thread started out off the rails. Contrary to the claims of youre-wrong3, garbage collection is not a particularly high paying job and has no real trouble getting new hires.
> When asking people to write code in a language, these restrictions could be onerous. But LLMs don't care, and the less expressivity you trust them with, the better.
But LLMs very much do care. They are measurably worse when writing code in languages with non-standard or non-existent operator precedence. This is not surprising given how they learn programmming.
> I have noticed that only white people commit to living in the UK without becoming citizens.
Alas, you've not discovered a hidden pattern, except maybe a hidden pattern in the kinds of people you socialize with. Chinese nationals cannot hold dual citizenship, and renouncing their Chinese citizenship creates very serious complications, including around property and inheritance when parents die, which you would be aware of if you knew any Chinese person well enough to have had this conversation with them.
Based on gov.uk immigration system statistics data and tables, among those with indefinite leave to remain, the most likely to seek citizenship are British Overseas Citizens, Austrians and Lithuanians. The least likely are Moroccans and Venezuelans.
Weird in the Venezuelans case, as there is no restrictions for double nationality and having only Venezuelan citizenship doesn't have many advantages. I would guess that it is because most Venezuelans living there already have an European passport due to parents/grandparent, so no need/can't get a third
Cannot only if the other European country does not allow dual nationality.
If they are permanently settled in the UK surely it would be better to have British citizenship rather than that of a country they do not live in?
The nationalities listed are all very small groups in the UK. maybe they are not really permanently settled? Someone who moves somewhere for work might end up living there a decade (and in the UK that would mean getting indefinite leave to remain) and then returning.
I admit not knowing a lot of Chinese nationals, but I do know a very wide range of people. Of course, issues with property and inheritance only apply to people who have sufficient for it to be a major issue.
Could you link to the stats showing that? What about all the other countries? What is the position of BNOs?
Indefinite leave to remain is not the same as permanently settled - there is a difference between long term and the rest of your life.
What if you asked your favorite AI agent to produce mathematics at the level of Vladimir Voevodsky, Fields Medal-winning, foundation-shaking work but directed toward something the legendary Nikolaj Bjørner (co-creator of Z3) could actually use?
Well, you'd get this embarrassing mess, apparently.
Thanks for sharing this, I found your list very relatable. Here are some more:
- I used to be able to buy a phone I could back up. Right now, in the name of privacy, I can no longer do this, except if I share all my data with Google via their cloud option.
- I used to be able to afford media players that presented the internal storage as a USB stick. Nowadays, not even mobile phones can do that!
- I used to be able to search for a term, and get a cached web page displaying a site at a time it definitely had the search term. Now, nobody offers a similar service.
> My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI.
We replaced the chess board in the park with an app that compares the Elo score of you and your opponent, and probabilistically declares a winner.
But don't worry, if you were a good chess player before we introduced the app, chances are you will remain a good one with the app. The app just makes things faster and cheaper.
My advice to the players is to quit mourning the loss of the tension, laughter and shared moments that got them into chess in the first place.
Good news, AI coding assistants aren't a magic button that give you the final result without having to play the game at all. You'll still need to make plenty of moves on your own at your job, and you're free to use or not use them as much as you want outside them. Your job was never to play chess though in this analogy though, which is where it misses pretty hard; you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it.
> you were being paid to produce software, and the process was incidental to it.
Yes, the people who write articles like the one in this post understand this. Previously, they could do it and get paid while doing a thing they loved.
Now that process is no longer economically viable: they can get paid, or they can do the thing they loved. They lost something, so they mourn the loss. At least they would, but a bunch of tone-deaf people keep interrupting them to explain why they shouldn't.
Responding to a blog post that was linked on an external forum with a different viewpoint isn't interrupting; it's kind of the whole point of having a comment section. They're sad, other people don't think it makes sense for them to be sad. You can respond to that disagreement with an analogy, and I can respond that I don't think the analogy makes sense. There's no obligation for people to only respond to an article with viewpoints that agree with it, and sometimes lots of people will think that the take is out of touch for some reason.
I don't see anyone interrupting anyone here. It's people sharing their experiences and thoughts on a public forum. Invariably people will agree or disagree with the point presented in the original post (or comment). That's every HN discussion ever.
Nothing stops people from mourning the loss of their job essentially changing from before their eyes and they no longer love it. That's a valid reason to be sad. Mourn it! Share your sadness with others. But don't be surprised when people who are experiencing the same thing are not sad and share their experiences.
If you want to join an AI/anti-AI echo chamber, there's plenty of places on the Internet that will gladly agree with your opinion and you can have shared joy or sadness. HN isn't that place, nor do I ever want it to become an echo-chamber.
Sure. And since the comment I originally responded to is "giving advice" to these people without taking the effort to understand their position, I feel alright reminding them that they're tone-deaf.
Doesn't mean I want an echo chamber, we're all having fun here. But those who wish to give advice should understand the position of those they're advising, otherwise they'll just embarrass themselves.
Sometimes I like playing chess at the park with strangers or friends. Sometimes I like playing chess online with friends in another country.
Sometimes I like to play games online with my siblings. Sometimes I like to invite people over to play video games with me on the couch.
Sometimes I wanna watch a movie in the theater. Sometimes I wanna fire up Netflix and watch that same movie, but on my couch.
Sometimes I wanna vibe code an entire app in a weekend. Sometimes I wanna play code golf to solve a puzzle, where LLM usage defeats the purpose.
None of these are being replaced in my life despite having more "advanced" options. If anything, I get to enjoy things more because I have more options and ways to enjoy them.
Just a heads-up: this is not the first time somebody has to explain Markov chains to famouswaffles on HN, and I'm pretty sure it won't be the last. Engaging further might not be worth it.
I did not even remember you and had to dig to find out what you were on about. Just a heads up, if you've had a previous argument and you want to bring that up later then just speak plainly. Why act like "somebody" is anyone but you?
My response to both of you is the same.
LLMs do depend on previous events, but you say they don't because you've redefined state to include previous events. It's a circular argument. In a Markov chain, state is well defined, not something you can insert any property you want to or redefine as you wish.
It's not my fault neither of you understand what the Markov property is.
By that definition n-gram Markov chain text generators also include previous state because you always put the last n grams. :) It's exactly the same situation as LLMs, just with higher, but still fixed n.
We've been through this. The context of a LLM is not fixed. Context windows =/ n gram orders.
They don't because n gram orders are too small and rigid to include the history in the general case.
I think srean's comment up the thread is spot on. This current situation where the state can be anything you want it to be just does not make a productive conversation.
> As far as anybody can tell, mathematics is way older than literature.
That depends what you mean by "literature". If you want it to be written down, then it's very recent because writing is very recent.
But it would be normal to consider cultural products to be literature regardless of whether they're written down. Writing is a medium of transmission. You wouldn't study the epic of Gilgamesh because it's written down. You study it to see what the Sumerians thought about the topics it covers, or to see which god some iconography that you found represents, or... anything that it might plausibly tell you. But the fact that it was written down is only the reason you can study it, not the reason you want to.
No, the argument is even dumber than that. The person who writes a poem hasn't created any literature.
The person who hears that poem in circulation and records it in his notes has created literature; an anthology is literature but an original work isn't.
> No, the argument is even dumber than that. The person who writes a poem hasn't created any literature.
Sure they have, by virtue of writing it down. It becomes literature when it hits the paper (or computer screen, as it were).
(Unless you mean to imply that formulating an original poem in your mind counts as "writing", in which case I guess we illustrate the overarching point of value in shared symbols and language and the waste of time in stating our original definitions for every statement we want to make)
> Unless you mean to imply that formulating an original poem in your mind counts as "writing"
You're close. I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem.
Here's a quote from the fantasy novel The Way of Kings that always appealed to me:
>> "Many of our nuatoma -- this thing, it is the same as your lighteyes, only their eyes are not light--"
>> "How can you be a lighteyes without light eyes?" Teft said with a scowl.
>> "By having dark eyes," Rock said, as if it were obvious. "We do not pick our leaders this way. Is complicated. But do not interrupt story."
For an example from reality, I am forced to tell people who ask me that the English translation of 姓 is "last name", despite the fact that the 姓 comes first.
Similarly, the word for writing a poem is "write", whether this creates a written artifact or not. And the poem is literature whether a written artifact currently exists, used to exist, or never existed.
(Though you've made me curious: if the Iliad wasn't literature until someone wrote it down, do you symmetrically believe that Sophocles' Sisyphus is no longer literature because it is no longer written down?)
> I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem.
You literally used another perfectly acceptable verb in modern English besides “writing” for the act of creating a poem in the very sentence making this claim, which somewhat undermines the claim.
> Literature, by definition, appeared later than writing.
Literature, by strict defintion, appeared no earlier than writing, but it is only a tentative conclusion from which surviving writing has been found and understood that it appeared later than writing.
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