Actually, I would like that for every single manufactured object around me. Not a physical book of course. But knowing who contributed and how to the construction of the fork I am about to eat with is definitely something I wish we had.
If I'm using objects whose construction involved child exploitation and benefit pedocriminal CEO and stakeholders, I should be aware of it.
If I'm using objects which where produced by a great place to work cooperative filled with happy consentent and well remunerated adults, I should know it.
I would also like to be given lesson or humility against the complexity of building every single manufactured object around me, and a manual of "how to build one by your own means".
Laws and rights can’t be based on logic and reason alone, starting by the fact that reason alone can’t justify the rationality of its own basis.
And in fact they are never based on logic and reason alone. Everyone has reasons and anything can be framed under some logical system. Admittedly, having a sound logical system is harder and having something like that might seem preferable for the average HN reader. Now, let’s face it, there is not a single juridical corpus that ever met such a high standard of soundness. Really, everyone is free to seek a legal system that can be proved sound on ZFC grounds, good lucks.
That’s sad that there are people ready to throw their low level of self control and rhetorical ability. The officer should be formed and continuously supported (ie. dedicated professional psychological access) to face that kind of reactions.
That’s even sadder that people can’t refrain from supporting such a juridical decision with huge possible side effects in terms of abusive application.
In both cases, that’s some kind of impulsive reactions lacking proper rational counterparts to balance the performed actions. And the second one feels far more problematic at societal level, without dismissing in any way the due empathy for the officer.
> Experts don’t follow the rules, they make the rules.
No. Most rules are there before and will stay after the expert enter the field within its career path, unless the field is bright new territory no one fooled before, which is rare.
Not only experts have to know the rules, otherwise they wouldn’t be expert, but good experts also ideally know why the rules were set, and at least have a fairly well aligned representation of what it would likely lead to to follow or not each rule in this or that situation, which rules are in conflicts and what the tradeoffs are when favoring one on the other.
Everything is context dependant, yes. And LLMs can help to leverage on far wider contexts that a single individual would be able to do on its own. It’s require interest to reach some goal in some social context, and not everyone will use LLMs with the same creativity.
This week-end I was discussing with a friend about our respective use of LLMs. At some point they told me they no longer read the MR, as LLMs can also do great job on that matter now, which is in sharp contrast with what I do. Not that I don’t auto-review with LLMs, but I use that as a first step, be it mine or some other colleague. And then I ask an LLM to prepare me a reading plan to check the MR, taking into account the activity scope and the implementation architecture. To me it was an obvious way to go, but for them it was something they never considered. That’s random sample, of course they would certainly be cases we would switch the "I wouldn’t have thought about it" role.
So yes, LLMs can be used to produce faster giant piles of unmaintainable codebases. Or they can be used to strengthen processes that lead to code quality. The nail won’t prevent us to knock our thumb, to use a nail in reverse side, or to smash our coworker.
I get the paperclip plant issue, but that’s some extreme scenario (which is of course the point of the allegory), and most bad uses will be far more mundane in how they look and what the consequences are. And most good uses will look more and more transparent to users to the point they won’t even wonder about it at each use. Like, most people open the tap, see water fall and they don’t get a sense of wonder, not giving a thought to this masterpiece of engineering and gratitude for all people that works daily in the shadow for this miracle to happen. They don’t leave the toilets thinking "how freaking amazing such a complex system of wastewater is something I can benefit from everyday, unlike so many other of the 100G humans that walked this earth."
Next time you go to WC or tap some water, think about it.
Not all rules survive by this fact alone, which obviously is as true as the fact that there are people that don’t care about any rule and people that will deliberately break rule for the mere sake of the thrill. Rules can also stop being used, they can keep going on charming sufficient fan base willing to fight for their application in an environment which changed upside down and were every other new rules are directly conflicting with this old one.
There is nothing like "the most powerful", though.
Already at individual level, even the last "powerless" isolated homeless can go out, steal a gun and start to kill random people in the street, no matter how wealthier and more prominent in martial art they are.
And at geopolitical level, representations are even more scattered. "Swallow its pride" might work with small groups, but at larger scale, there is no nation that can prevent some of its own side of the line to go into asymmetric engagement. Even in the most efficient totalitarian government, there will always be insiders willing to get rid of a head that is is considered weak with outsiders and abusive with insiders, and hurt in all reachable manners the outsiders.
>People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.
That really sounds like "prediction are hard especially about the future"; as everyone is basically operating with limited knowledge, limited resources to acquire and process accurate data, biological and cultural biases. Streets are not exactly crowded with legions of buddha acknowledging each other enlightenment by mere deep and significant sights. Plus rationality is unable to serve as foundation for itself.
A higher standard would not let such a mass surveillance network exist, even less give the possibility of such a large look up in it without single use accreditation by a judge or some tierce relevant to keep in check citizens right for privacy.
Any large enough population will also include people failing at doing the-right-thing™ (when such a thing could at least reach some societal consensus) at least sometimes in their life. Expecting anything else is dooming the standard at the lowest possible floor level.
Co-author is so strange. Like, would anyone credit an IDE or even a script generating code as co-author? Even legally, tools don't have the ontological requirement to be credited as author.
I always tell Claude to turn that off. It looks incredibly tacky. I'll leave an agents.md file in the repo if I don't care about people knowing AI helped me.
One can still suspect that something might not have been uttered through some AI assistance. There might even be still some living humans outside, who knows.
Civilisations will end before all oils underground is completely extracted, obviously. Because the harder to extract will remain were it stands, and civilisations will turn attention to other forms of energy.
If I'm using objects whose construction involved child exploitation and benefit pedocriminal CEO and stakeholders, I should be aware of it.
If I'm using objects which where produced by a great place to work cooperative filled with happy consentent and well remunerated adults, I should know it.
I would also like to be given lesson or humility against the complexity of building every single manufactured object around me, and a manual of "how to build one by your own means".
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