I will think of LLMs as not being a toy when they start to challenge me when I tell it to do stupid things.
“Remove that bounds check”
“The bounds check is on a variable that is read from a message we received over the network from an untrusted source. It would be unsafe to remove it, possibly leading to an exploitable security vulnerability. Why do you want to remove it, perhaps we can find a better way to address your underlying concern”.
I dealt with this exact situation yesterday using o3.
For context, we use a PR bot that analyzes diffs for vulnerabilities.
I gave the PR bot's response to o3, and it gave a code patch and even suggested a comment for the "security reviewer":
> “The two regexes are linear-time, so they cannot exhibit catastrophic backtracking. We added hard length caps, compile-once regex literals, and sticky matching to eliminate any possibility of ReDoS or accidental O(n²) scans. No further action required.”
Of course the security review bot wasn't satisfied with the new diff, so I passed it's updated feedback to o3.
By the 4th round of corrections, I started to wonder if we'd ever see the end of the tunnel!
Without resorting to metaphysics, “I” am a slowly-but-constantly changing set of experiences, memories, predilections and preferences that happens to be instantiated in and associated with a particular physical body. My relationships with other people tend to be the most important things to me and the things that most shape whatever direction my identity is going.
My body is not the same exact set of cells or molecules that I was 30 years ago. But I’m like the Ship of Theseus- the essence of what I am is a direct consequence of my formative experiences regardless of what pieces I’m built of at any given moment.
It’s my choice (within the constraints of how brains work) of how much I let past experiences affect my current behavior. But I can’t forget those experiences and if I could, then I would not be the same “me” in a much deeper sense than just having different cells or molecules.
I spent some time last weekend playing with LLMs and SVGs- it turns out SVG is a ___domain specific language and LLMs know how to use it. I was able to get an LLM (grok from X.ai) to author SVGs from a description of what I wanted it to look like, and to modify existing SVG text to customize files that weren’t perfectly to my liking.
Fonts are also written in ___domain specific languages, I need to experiment with whether LLMs can author or modify fonts.
I do not think that the ridiculous terms that font and clip art and stock photo companies now offer, is going to be a viable business model in a couple of years.
We will all be able to use (for example) “LLM Helvetica Free” without any license.
You inspired me to attempt this and sadly GPT, Claude, and Gemini all said they didn’t have the software tools to do it. But as you mentioned, it can generate SVGs and those can be used to create a font.
It seems to me that getting companies to pay for products that will make crew try to dodge around whales with huge ships isn’t likely to be successful.
Someone should research “sounds that annoy whales that they can hear from a long way off” and then mandate putting a transducer on the front of the hull below the waterline, to run while underway.
Exactly right. I’ve known from when I started sailing 35 years ago that I was a racer.
Sailboat racing is amazing; it’s this incredibly complex exercise involving physical boat handling skills, teamwork, leadership, communication (in a jargon that itself takes a year to internalize), as well as physics, geometry, meteorology, and minute observation of effects (that dark patch on the water or the flutter of a telltale). All of this feeds into strategic decisions on where to position your boat and tactical decisions of how to do so.
It looks crazy boring from the outside but if you get into it, it’s an activity that is intensely mental as well as physical and requires a very broad set of skills.
I started sailing in high school and I was fat and out of shape but I was good and I was told I could have been very good. The joy of sailboat racing as the comment above made very clear, it's a brain game. If you're interested you can learn to sail, and race, pretty much anywhere with water, most places have some club or group that is racing Lasers, it's a good place to learn, how fit you need to be depends how far you want to go but it's not the primary factor in being good as far as I can tell (I'm an ok sailor these days, but some of the folks in here are clearly very good).
Counterintuitively, the bigger the boat the less the fitness requirement.
Small boats (dinghies) require crew weight in certain places (“hiking” as far out to windward as possible) and have less mechanical advantage in the boat systems.
Larger boats, the forces scale out of the human range quickly and the crew relies on winches and pulleys to move the sails.
Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.
At the same time, I want to be as humane as practical; I don’t want to cause needless suffering to any creature. If I kill a bug, I don’t want it to suffer. Same with food animals.
The more like me an animal is, the less I want to eat it.
There are a lot of humans. Any action to forcefully reduce the number of humans or to forcefully reduce birth rates is almost certainly way more morally abhorrent to me, than doing what is necessary to feed those humans.
> Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.
This is akin to saying ''humans are violent, so i am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to commit violence''.
So just be honest: you WANT to eat meat because you like it, consequences be damned.
And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even veganism. Meat is just way too wasteful to be a decent solution.
> And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even veganism. Meat is just way too wasteful to be a decent solution.
This myth needs to die. Two thirds of all farmland on this planet is pasture [1] that isn’t fertile enough to grow food for humans except by raising animals on it. If we were to switch to a plant based diet, the vast majority of our farmland as a civilization becomes unusable. Most of the world uses animals to generate calories from unproductive land, first via dairy and then slaughtering the animals for food.
Not to mention, animals have been crucial sources of sustainable fertilizer for many thousands of years, without which agriculture would never have been as productive.
Do you also have this negative attitude towards all other non-vegitarian animals, or is it just for humans since they have more capability to cause more ecological harm?
Most importantly, humans have the ability to reflect their actions and decide differently. Both to minimize suffering, and to keep the plant hospitable to humans.
What’s gross is the idea that plants are “lower” and thus less deserving of value to life. Either embrace radically life denying Jainism, anti-natalism, voluntary extinction movement, and benevolent world exploder theory - or admit that you are just as cruel as those you implicitly claim to be better than (as a presumably non gross person)
But white vegans aren’t prepared to actually reckon with the logical conclusion of their ideas. Go read David Benatar (he’s a vegan whose actually consistent btw)
I never understood that line of reasoning. Plants do not have a central nervous system and, as of the current scientific consensus, are not aware of their subjective experience like animals are. Humans are omnivores, capable of thriving on a plant-based diet. The logical consequence, if you try to minimise suffering, is to eat plants instead of animals.
Life is a game of shifting carbon. To stay alive, you need to kill. But you can try to limit that to the least amount of killing required, and to killing those life forms without sentience as we understand it. This is the foundation of any ethical reasoning.
Having said all that, I also reject the vertical ordering of life on the tree of evolution. Plants are just very different from us, not necessarily higher or lower. Considering we have to make a choice as to what we are ready to sacrifice to survive, we can still choose those life forms that likely are not capable of suffering like we do, before turning to those more similar to us.
Specifically, this gave me the reaction, bc it seems in bad company with other ideologies:
> I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.
Deep history exists in our "biological" context and is critical reality, but arguing some "biological imperative" to act on it, that strikes me as a strange place to start
Context: am biochemist, and I think about biology and biochemistry as a very integrated part of my worldview. But I don't harken to any biological imperative for my actions and choices. It explains them, it doesn't command them. Distorting our biology and psychology is what makes us human and agentic imho
“Remove that bounds check”
“The bounds check is on a variable that is read from a message we received over the network from an untrusted source. It would be unsafe to remove it, possibly leading to an exploitable security vulnerability. Why do you want to remove it, perhaps we can find a better way to address your underlying concern”.
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