So if your code is spaghetti and that makes it impossible to add new features (happens easy, especially if you let an LLM loose on it), the refactoring to fix it would never happen and the engineers who stay or are willing to be hired will just be those clueless enough not to know they won’t be able to achieve anything.

That certainly happens. On the other hand, engineers are typically way too eager to claim a spaghetti code. We need to rewrite the whole thing. After long experience, I've concluded most cases of people complaining that something needs to be written because of spaghetti code are really just somebody other than me wrote it and I disagree with some design decisions without understanding why those decisions were made in the first place and I think I can do better. I was involved with the very large rewrite some years ago. The code is now in production for 10 years, and so we call it successful. On the other hand, most of what we learned along the way of doing the rewrite was why the original code was designed that way in the first place, and so a lot of design decisions that we thought we were going to be able to rethink were designed that way for good reason in the first place. Even the places where we did make a big improvement because of what we still believe was a bad design decision in the first place. Not only could we have refactored in place to the new design but also the new design I can now say in hindsight was also a terrible idea. We're now trying to figure how to refactor in place to a third option which only time will tell if this is a good idea but we know for a fact two different ways to design this part that are not a good idea.

I'm skeptical of your claim that an LLM is really going to add more Spaghetti for Code. Now, certainly, especially the LLMs of last year did a terrible job of designing code. However, they have gotten much better just in the course of one year. But even at that, most of the problem, I think, is you are not taking the time to understand what the LLM is doing in the first place. An LLM is by definition code that was not written by you and therefore it is a lot of boring and tedious effort to understand it. However, if you take the time to actually read the code, it often is perfectly understandable and just as good as code any other human right. But that other human is also not you and so if another human wrote it you would also call it spaghetti code.

Good part of LMS is they are very good at refactoring code. Whether they wrote it or a human wrote it, they can do a lot of changes for you that would be tedious or take a long time to do by hand.

Part 1: Everything was turned into social User Generated Content to reduce editorial costs. Part 2: Predatory third parties ranging from nation states to SEO agencies started mass filling UGC with anxiety inducing brain rot. Part 3: the brainrot generation is automated by AI and it silences any real people or voices. Part 4: People go outside to touch grass and Part 5: That leaves opportunities for platforms for real people with good culture

All AI images, a robot with no arms. Please improve on both. I will happily train one to pick things up and away with and after kids.

Just use the beak?

I would like it to pick up shoes, clothes etc. Not sure the beak would work, it would block the camera and prevent the bot from walking forward. Presumably, it could walk backwards and drag clothes, but anything rigid might block the camera.

As with Cursor it's the data - all the prompts and responses that can be used to train AI models. Getting a head start on that at the pace of current development costs.

VPN is what a smart person uses when they are at an internet cafe or somewhere else with public internet where you can’t trust that the traffic isn’t sniffed by someone for giggles and your bank credentials are going to leak.

How would your banking credentials leak? Every banking app uses encryption. In fact, I'd wager every app uses encryption nowadays.

Let’s say a hacker hooks up the hotel internet to a firewalla and opens a free wifi spot. You log in and it sees from your traffic that you’re a customer of ABC bank and Gmail and ATT from the traffic - next thing you know you get a text message from your “bank” that someone has stolen your credentials in “XYZ Arizona” and you have yourself a phishing attack. The exposure scenarios are only limited by the imagination of humans and modern LLMs.

This doesn't seem novel in any way, given the amount of data available online you can already be targeted by fake bank texts, no need for the free wifi hotspot.

I've also argued this on the past, it just seems redundant, but people eat the VPN ads like they were gospel.

I just use my home router as VPN to not care if the 100 apps om my phone have a working encryption. I also use it to access my home services so that they are not exposed to the internet. I also use it to limit exposure on my VMs on a cloud hoster.

Not only that, but the iOS and Android APIs for HTTP requests make it really difficult to accidentally use unencrypted HTTP:

* By default, only secure connections are allowed

* You have to enumerate allowed exceptions to this policy in your app manifest XML / Info.plist

* Exceptions are only permitted for specific use cases where mandatory encryption is infeasible, like browsers, podcast players, embedded device clients (which will also require the local network access permission), etc. If you're shipping a banking app and you exempt your own site from encryption, App Review will tear you a new one.

thats why we have https and certs. VPN is redundant

Redundancy is not detrimental to security and privacy. On the contrary, having more layers would protect you in case one of them fails (zero-day, bugs, etc.)

If there's a zero-day in TLS there would be a huge amount of problems that a VPN wouldn't protect you against. Even if you're using a VPN (or just a trusted ISP from your home), as soon as your data leaves their hands it would be vulnerable.

Like, suppose I want to send a physical letter to my bank. I can either ensure it can't be opened (using TLS), or I can get a trusted mailman to bring it to the mail central (using a VPN or trused ISP), but only one of those measures are going to protect me against a malicious mailman carrying it from the mail central to the bank.

I’d expect the mail carrier who goes from the mail center to the bank to be slightly more trustworthy than the one who visits me off in the middle of nowhere. Or at least, if that carrier is untrustworthy, it is a big problem for a lot of rich people who have the time and money to think about this sort of stuff.

TLS exists.

The historic analog most befitting AI are weapons. It provides an advantage to companies and governments in creating weapons, in surveilling people and thus gaining leverage over individuals, in controlling what individuals can do or cannot stop doing. It thus follows the laws of weapons control - the more restrictions are threatened to be imposed, the more even the smallest actors will fight to get more of it. They may not understand or know what they are getting, but they will want more of it because their potential rivals have it. Governments are the ultimate customer here - they have the money, the energy, and the appetite to consume AI infinitely in battlement against opponents - foreign and domestic. The only approximate solution is to prevent any restrictions on the use of it - a-la-2nd amendment (the upside of that is it advances the AI for future use and is thus in the interest of governments as well). Modern large models seem to be compressible and thus we may see more and more tiny sub-specialized varieties. But the push to slow the frontier in weaponry always leads to the reverse.

I think we see things similarly about the negative potential but please be careful with the framing.

AI is a printing press or a steam engine. It's not a weapon.

The framing is important. Much like 'distillation attack'. These framings are an attack on the narrative.

Printing presses at the time were seen as extremely dangerous too. For many of the same reasons cited about AI.

In both cases, the technologies were used to destablize existing power structures. And, after some hardship, make a better world for most people.

Even calling these things 'dual use' is a weird framing. Books are not 'dual use technologies' unless you want to sell fear.

A piece of wood can be used to build a house, to carve a statute, to make a bow and arrow, or to make a baseball bat. Honesty is the only way to see the problem in a way that can be tackled effectively. Framing will not help if you are dealing with large animals fighting in a cage when you are trapped in it, and it this case we all are.

> AI is a printing press or a steam engine. It's not a weapon.

I've not heard of a printing press going rogue and attacking things.

> only approximate solution is to prevent any restrictions on the use of it - a-la-2nd amendment

Not even in 'Murica do we have anything close to no restrictions.

You can't buy your own EMP or nuke, and even warring governments have been surprisingly reserved in building (at least to public knowledge) biological weapons.

Completely agree, BUT you’re not dealing with -self-preserving humans anymore. In this case what are the odds of some less competent large state actor getting a model that goes rogue and has to be mitigated against? How do you mitigate against novel weapons it creates if your models are lobotomized in that category? No single government will neuter their own models and very few if any are competent and interested enough to mitigate against them.

There is no dichotomy between preparing for the inevitable and preventing the preventable.

Painting the actions of people on the other side of the planet as "out of anybody's control" is hubris though. Humanity very well is capable of organizing on that scale and has done so regularly for a long time already.

The actual problem is the disconnect between the interests of those in charge of such organization and the well-being of the public.

Villages all over the world since ancient times would have houses with some form of a summer kitchen. During hot days the temps in the house are already uncomfortable and cooking there would make things worse, so they built basic kitchen facilities away from the main house to keep heat and smoke and smells out (that also reduced some fire risks).

Many western countries now summer-kitchen most of their uncomfortable output to corrupt poorer countries where the leadership doesn’t mind taking cash for poisoning their citizens. The naïveté is then claiming that those poorer countries are then the main polluters. Recyclables in the US and a lot of Europe are shipped off to southeast asia thus 80% of plastics in the ocean are found there. A train of plastic to be burned was even shipped to Bulgaria (a EU member) by the mafia a few years ago.

In the mean time “carbon credit” companies have their offices in Hong Kong and are guilting Disney and Adidas and Apple and any Western public brands into paying for “carbon laundering”. Forests that would have been planted anyway for lumber collect carbon credits as extra income right before selling said lumber for consumption. It takes real faith to keep believing any of the activity actually removes carbon legitimately, but the money movement in that movement is very real.

While anyone can target the source of the warming with any resource they want to dedicate, and should be free to do so. Governments need to focus on mitigating the risks to human life and that involves real fire prevention (trimming, controlled burns - maybe smart tech the smoke so it gets captured instead of irritating the noses of non-summer-kitchen citizens), clean energy generation, and installing damn air conditioning units into old European capitals so Europeans don’t end up dying in droves from preventable basic climate change consequences.

I’ve started evaluating what seem like brain “modes”. 1. Constant flow of information with disjointed context (social media, brain fracking, moving in a crowd) triggers hunter-gatherer instinct that is hard to stop. The dopamine seek in a way. Even if you stop your brain seeks it, so unless you really need this mode for work, it helps to postpone or time box these to the end of the day (kind of like some would do with drinking alcohol).

2. How you start your day after sleep creates framing of the brain and you can start iterating on frames and how you drive them depending on your needs. Maybe set a schedule of things to at need done the night before (a continuity thread) maybe boxing the activities to different types at different times. It’s all sciencing the self but the brain is definitely conditioning to things and you have to mind it.

3. ADHD meds from what i’ve read are caffeine on steroids (blocking adenosine receptors, but not really adding to executive function). From personal observation ADHD also feels like a mode one can be put into by wrong brain framing (at least for people not diagnosed).

There are non-stimulant ADHD meds. Strattera being a big one.

The content within the models might be the play. If inserting the right content for the rest of the world to consume from the models is important to them, they will give away all the content they want the world to have.