Those of you who have never had a visual migraine, it looks like an oscillating rainbow arc or irregular circle that starts small and then spreads outwards through your field of vision. It takes about 15-20 minutes to pass but may have multiple cycles. There are no good medical explanations of causes, triggers, or treatment (last I checked). Mostly, it's "lie down and wait for it to pass" kind of event.

@corbet i know. First time is "oh, god, am I having a stroke?"

Have you ever had a visual migraine?

Visual migraines are the #1 thing that makes me think we live in a simulation. "Here's a rainbow interference pattern in your visual field that looks like analog reception problems. No big. It'll pass."

@hzulla Okay, it's not quite fair to compare LLMs to face-id or auto-targeting computers (they are not gen-ai, they are matching/recognition AI, which existed long before LLMs).

@lhk Yes, that summarizes it pretty much.

PS: but thank you for removing all nuance nonetheless.

@hzulla Yes, we're in the "cheerfully promote cocaine as your key ingredient" stage of things. We do this with every new thing we discover, largely because we are who we are as a species and because our predominant economic model encourages it.

@tiredbun Yes, for sure, depending on it is very bad. I worry that our immediate future will be filled with footage of black smoke billowing out from datacentres, as political stability in the world deteriorates further.

@hzulla True, but also not very different from the old "you don't need full time employees -- our team of contractors will get it done for a fraction of a cost"

@hzulla No argument there, but it's also not exactly new or unique. There are whole swaths of the gaming industry where addiction and preying on addiction is rampant, from microtransactions to weird Fallout companion mods.

@benjamineskola @krans I'm sorry I don't pass the purity test you were hoping to hold me up to.

@hzulla Dude, it's *exactly* the same. Having a team of contractors is precisely the "I need this fixed ASAP and I'm too highly paid to deal with this myself" kind of energy you get from typing in "hey, I'm getting this crash when running my code, can you fix it" into a Claude prompt.

@benjamineskola @krans I believe we're now rehashing the arguments from the last season of "Good Place."

@hzulla
> And an enticing, literally addicitive tool that inserts obscure bugs into large codebases that you as a software developer are incapable to detect due to hubris, human nature and employee productivity rewarding KPIs like LOC is definitely a problem for our craft.

In other words, exactly like a team of contractors.

@benjamineskola @krans The moment I get up in the morning and start work, I have to overcome the ethical concern that I'm just sitting in a cozy apartment while someone somewhere is getting bombed -- probably even someone I know -- and I'm doing nothing to help them. I pick battles where I can do most good with what I have.

@tiredbun Yes, for sure -- kinda like when you need to send $10 to your coworker for lunch. You will be using a hugely corrupt banking industry that is consuming huge amounts of energy for sustaining itself and corrupting more institutions around the world.

@krans Our whole industrty is ethical concerns! The cleanest, most FOSS version of android you can run is still built on code produced by offshore contractors who were greatly underpaid for their work, probably running on a device built in a factory that had bars on windows to stop people from jumping out and killing themselves.

It's the "and yet you participate in society" kind of argument.

"For the people saying things like “I’m a PhD from xyz uni and I’m telling your LLMs are just stochastic tools that make everything up and the world will fall apart if you use them”, I’m here to tell you that you are out of date. The world of software engineering has changed dramatically in the last few months."
https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0

Thank you for voicing that, Tridge. Yes, I do a 100% agree that, as an industry, we're painting ourselves into a weird/dangerous corner where we're starting to depend on proprietary providers that produce code we don't have the bandwidth to fully own and understand. And yeah, pretty sure that $99 that I pay for a personal subscription is really more like $2000+ in real costs and is clearly not sustainable long-term. And yeah, all the other criticism for a technofascist utopia we're building around ourselves worries me greatly, too (but we've been doing that since long before LLMs).

However, anyone who claims that LLMs are not useful or produce universally bad results is just plain wrong, or are using dinky models. I've gone from yelling at junk produced by LLMs to going "yeah, okay, that's not bad." Sonnet is still crap, don't use it for anything serious. Anything you can produce on a local model running on your GPU is going to be unusable for anything serious beyond answering "how is babby formed" kinds of questions.

But let's move on from the "lolslop" kind of commentary. It's dumb.

Looks like I'll be coming back to this fall's edition of Kernel Recipes to talk about b4's review and bug-tracking features.

Last time I attended was in 2016, so apparently it's a once-a-decade sort of thing. ;)

@kernellogger @vbabka it can use lei and it has a gnome/taskbar applet you can use for quick actions, like yanking a thread.