I think plenty of the most intelligent people eat meat, which means they are perfectly fine with harming less intelligent species just to enjoy a tastier meal. Also, I don't think many of the most intelligent people would be particularly concerned about disturbing a few ants if they were the only obstacle to economic activity. Intellect-wise, we will be less than ants to superhuman AI.
The problem is that the government was handed an emotion and a mandate to eliminate it. You’ve declared a “war on jealousy” and demanded the government assemble the troops. That’s not handing them a well reasoned plan and “hoping they don’t mess it up”, you messed it up when you scribbled “no more addiction” on a protest sign.
Now ask yourself which government is currently bombing another country over one man's ego (or due to blackmail by an "ally"), and whether they're on that list, and whether the literal thousands of people killed are just acceptable sacrifices to maintain someone's worldview about 'the good guys'?
And yet, compared to every military in the past, compared to the fact that war was seen as a normal thing in the past, compared to how it used to be standard to rape and pillage in the past, and that was just expected and fine and normal, current modern militaries of the West are exceptionally disciplined, and their use by politicians doubly so.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't do better and shouldn't.
But we do need to compare "How things have been for all of human history" to "How we do things now", and see that our modern democracies show immense restraint and a lack of malfeasance, compared to how they've been used in the past.
I feel that people view how the world is today, through such a restricted world view. Where the history of how things were, and the immense and great and incredible progress we've made, is thrown aside because "Oh bad thing happened!", and therefore "The entire West is completely corrupt and everything sucks and we should rip it all down because it's bad".
One only need take a tour around the rest of the world. To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively. And yes, I know that's saying a lot.
> And yet, compared to every military in the past, compared to the fact that war was seen as a normal thing in the past, compared to how it used to be standard to rape and pillage in the past, and that was just expected and fine and normal, current modern militaries of the West are exceptionally disciplined, and their use by politicians doubly so.
Are you serious?
During the Vietnam War era, the US dropped over 7.5 million tons of ordnance across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which is more than double the tonnage dropped in all of WW2. In rural parts of Laos and Cambodia, unexploded ordinance is still a daily threat to people. 50 years on.
> To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively.
When I see comments like this, I want to believe that it's not real but sadly, I suspect you really believe this.
OK. Now compare the entire world's militaries, over the last 50 years, worst-for-worst act. Or since you mentioned WWII, what's the worst done by armies during that time? Hmm?
After all, you're trying to find and hold up the worst the US has done, right? So to compare, you need to find the worst in modern militaries. In militaries of all time. That was what I discussed, after all.
I was quite clear. Compare to all of history. Compare to all militaries today.
Instead you grab at part of an action, and hold it up, without making that comparison. Still.
As a Canadian who has had your current ridiculous president state that we should be the 51st state, and belittled us by calling our Prime Ministers "Governors"? Who has talked about unilaterally redrawing borders? As a Canadian who has considered how I may have to one day slaughter Americans crossing our border? How I may have to look my brothers in the eye, and kill them? I still say that the US military has been a shining light for freedom around the world. If I can remain impartial, then surely you can.
I also say that about police officers in the West, including the US.
Are there bad actions taken by police departments? By individual officers? By groups of officers, over the last decades? YES! Yes, most assuredly.
Now compare the overall score with police in totalitarian regimes.
Comparison is vital, important, key, and any finger pointing has to be in context.
And also note, I said "yes we must do better".
But if you think the US military is evil, then you have never seen evil. Ever.
I understand the Vietnam war is a sore point in America due to recruitment. But your comment is so incredibly one-sided that it's not a serious argument anymore.
The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
> the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
The 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended the French war, called for nationwide reunification elections by July 1956. Those elections never happened. Ngo Dinh Diem, the US-backed first president of South Vietnam who was a brutal authoritarian, refused to hold them. The US backed his refusal and kept backing him afterward.
In Eisenhower's 1963 memoir, he wrote that everyone knowledgeable he'd spoken to believed Ho Chi Minh would have taken around 80% percent of the vote if elections had happened.
The Vietnamese didn't really care about the Soviets. They are a fiercely independent and proud people with a long history of defending themselves against foreign interlopers and aggressors.
So let me restate your asinine and totally inaccurate conclusion:
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
And yet, the poster you're replying to said no such thing. Not even close. They merely said they wanted help repelling an enemy. You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
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Re your response. Were they ordered to rape and pillage by their full chain of command?
Or were they acting illegally, regardless of the outcome?
Would a military in a dictatorship have deemed that "illegal"? What about 200 years ago? 1000?
You seem to be ignoring the concept of comparables. And taking acts that the military itself teaches its own soldiers, was wrong.
It's good to have principles. And good to defend them. But if you ignore what others are saying, and the context of their words, you start to slide into zealoty.
> You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
Millions upon millions of people around the world protested the Vietnam War, including millions of people in the US.
On one day alone, an estimated 2+ million Americans participated in anti-war protests. Over 500,000 men were officially categorized as draft dodgers, more than 200,000 charged with violating the Selective Service Act and millions more found a way not to go to Vietnam through deferments and exemptions.
It's both amusing and sad that there are some people (like you) who 50 years later can't see what was apparent to so many people at the time.
> The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
That's right. Those pesky Vietnamese villagers just wouldn't let American GIs stop torching their villages, gang-raping their women and children, and executing them. The American military was trying to leave but spreading democracy demanded sacrifice.
"The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets."
None of anything you guys have said even attempts to dispute that. The Vietnamese did not want Vietcong rule. Not in the North, not in the South. And that this shamed (or whatever your claim is) some ideology, probably your ideology, does not change that. The Vietcong "had to" do incredibly cruel and horrible things to force the loyalty of citizens. They emptied orphanages, executing kids and even babies, in the middle of the street, slowly, one by one, to "ensure loyalty". That is who you're dealing with here. This goes for A LOT of the parties that socialism supported, especially in Asia. And elsewhere. Socialism has always been enforced by terror, from the red terror in Russia to China's Public Security Bureaus.
You might be right that that does not make the other side 100% good. But you should not get confused. Comparing US, including all the atrocities it committed, to the Vietcong? No sane person has to think even 1 second about that comparison: USA! USA! USA! I certainly do not always agree with what the US government does, the more recent the actions, the less I agree, but that does not bring it even close to the level of the Vietcong.
And that this does not fit your ideology? Tough. Was USA behavior very inconvenient, even unfair, to the people executing children? You know perfectly well how sorry you should feel about that.
But we all know: that's just not what you care about.
You know, you had a bunch of statements in a row, in what appeared to be someone trying to make a point.
And then you said "USA! USA! USA!" ... what in the actual fuck are you trying to achieve with that?
"Was USA behavior very inconvenient" - inconvenient? Inconvenient for the people of El Salvador to have roaming contras, funded and trained in the USA terrorizing the countryside and killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly innocent civilians. You sure do have a way with words. But by all means, "USA!".
Have you really backslid from "modern militaries don't rape and pillage" to "modern militaries rape and pillage, but it doesn't count because it's illegal"?
If you read carefully, when pulled into deeper nuance, I'm consistently discussing what is legal behaviour for that military. Yes, there is a difference between "that military itself calls that act illegal" and "that military says it's OK to engage in that act". A massive difference.
And at no point did I lump all "modern militaries" together. In fact I specifically talked about democracies vs dictatorships in modern times, too.
So you're confusing "modern militaries rape and pillage" with "militaries' members rarely perform ilegal acts, and rape and pillage".
Or are you trying to claim it's standing, legal, normal operating procedure for the US military to rape? Are you?
Because with the framing you're using, that's what you're apparently trying to build here.
And perhaps, then the alternatives are more devastating, and it must be done.
I've written about this in other comments over the last couple of years, but the root of all of this is quite simply, foreign interference. We all remember Cambridge Analytica, its interference in democratic elections in the West, and even how it caused a few regimes to topple in the 3rd world. It's machinations and manipulation of curated news stories was quite simplistic and minor compared to where we sit now.
You simply cannot have a high-trust, well functioning democracy, if 99% of the stuff recommended to you is entirely fabricated nonsense. Worse, if it purposely fabricated to create as much social unrest as possible, and doubly worse if it becomes curated to each person and created and generated on demand.
CA managed this by having a sloth of "different archetypes" for its 100 or so altered news stories per topic. If you were a left wing shopkeep, or a right wing car salesperson, or anything else, you'd be slotted into one of these 100 version of the precise same news story, and fed the best lies to make you do as the payee requested.
Modern AI means this can be far more fine tuned. And algorithms can be gamed, just as CA gamed them with support of Facebook's APIs.
So my point here is twofold. First that government moves slow. What we're seeing now, is the result of CA a decade ago. Really, two election cycles, with senatorial and congressional committees and debates during that time.
And second is that things will not continue as they are now. Nothing you, or I, or anyone does will result in an unchanged Internet. From the perspective of lawmakers, and really a lot of the public, the "world wide" Internet is really only used by "The Rest of the World" to attack us. Attack water plants, hospitals, meat packing plants, nuclear reactors, and beyond that, to manipulate our children into thinking Western Democracy is vile and malign in various ways.
Now of course, there's no reason for most of those things to be on the Internet at all. But the manipulation of adults and children in our society just isn't going to wash. In days gone by, you'd see each community with police informants, not the sort in cop movies where the guy was crooked, but instead actual cities who would keep an eye out, and inform if someone planned something against the state. Pretty much every pub had one in the UK, for example.
Heck, when I was a teenager in Canada, one of my friends had a plan to become an officer. Part of this path was reporting on everything he heard at local parties, of an untoward nature. It's how misinformation campaigns used to be curtailed, stopped, dealt with.
Yet suddenly we presume that the average person, and average kid is going to just deal with misinformation. And bizarrely so, compared to misinformation in a pub, we let people get siloed so every single thing they read and see says the same lie.
How can an average person ever stand again absurdities, if from their perspective everything they can see around them says it is true?
So back to the start? The above, correctly assessed or not, is what the politicians and police and agencies view as happening in the West. And while there are multiple ways to deal with this, their stance is "Why are you afraid of putting your name on your words?".
If we want something other than all the bills being proposed, and all the change coming, we as a tech community need to provide a path to end all anonymity on the internet, in the least privacy reducing way possible. And there are some ways to do so. They've been discussed. But if we don't provide such a method, and drive this conversation, you know who will?
Politicians, with no technical capability at all. The average Joe, scared for his country and family.
Try to fight those two types of people, and you will lose every single time.
So my recommend is, everyone needs to stop bellyaching, suck up to the harsh realities here, and take this massive, unstoppable river, and redirect it by a few degrees so that the best-case is achieved.
> OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
It's funny because this is exactly the opposite of what actually happened. Mafias are the reaction to the "unification" of Italy, and they almost all come from the previous governments that existed before unification. Northern Italy conquered the south and defeated all the little states there ... and then levied taxes and did not much else. Specifically they did not provide policing, and very few public services.
And then the remnants of the old governments stepped in, provided public services, security on the streets and "pressured" people into paying a second tax. Now you can say that they were almost-feudal governments and therefore defended and enforced the law of large landowners but that wasn't seen as a problem ... because that's how it had always been.
The reason for their success, their initial success at least, is that, first, when Italy was young, it left citizens to their fate, suppressing dissent, stationing small forces in most of Italy that abused locals, were extremely corrupt and did little else. What is generally blamed for their later reputation is that the mafias started using their power more and more for their own purposes, irrespective of cost, while the mafias also pressured the centralized state to do the opposite.
Especially early on it's very hard to pick "the right" side in the war on mafias. In the beginning people saw the mafias as the good guys, and with good reason. Over time mafias became worse and the central state became better, but honestly, the central state wasn't particularly good for people either (in fact it still can be improved quite a bit)
Straight to Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities, since more competition between governments must be good for the customers of government-like services!
How did you arrive at mafias. That's just another form of (abusive) small scale government. A more legitimate and probable type of government is any of the different forms of anarchism or worker cooperatives, if you want to argue for "disband government".
> OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
Conservatives seem to be fine with mafia rule, so long as the don has the correct party affiliation.
> When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Mob rule doesn't with very well as a defacto government, or oligarchy. Nor food and drug safety or national defense. Some things just have to be tackled by society as a larger group. Ideally as locally as possible, but not so locally that minorities are crushed or rule becomes petty and micromanaged.
Thanks for the pointer. That looks more to me like it's totally synthesizing the docs for me. I can see someone somewhere wanting that. I would want a UX more like a compiler warning. "Comment on line 447 may no longer be accurate." And then I go fix it my own dang self.
Ha, this is funny (also sad for me because I failed to explain on website clearly) because you have described exactly what it does as an example of what it can't do.
The core loop is more like a truffle-hunting pig than a ghostwriter. Promptless watches for signal that your product is behaving differently from the live documentation. It watches PRs opened/merging, Slack threads, support tickets. Then like a pig alerting on a truffle it shows up like "hey, this section over here doesn't match what the code/product does anymore."
Now of course we'll also generate a first draft of a suggested fix, but I want to say 40% of tech writers just like knowing when things changed.
Its a proper union find algorithm, where every suggestion links back to the source that triggered it, but multiple source do get linked up to just a single canonical suggestion. So you don't get duplicate alerts if people keep talking for weeks about a fix going out in the next release.
Obviously I've got some more work to do on the website again but c'est la vie.
At this point AGENTS.md is a README.md with enough hype behind it to actually motivate people to populate it with contents. People were too lazy to write docs for other people, but funnily enough are ok with doing it for robots.
This situation reminds me a bit of ergonomic handles design. Designed for a few people, preferred by everyone.
I like this insight. We kind of always knew that we wanted good docs, but they're demotivating to maintain if people aren't reading them. LLMs by their nature won't be onboarded to the codebase with meetings and conversations, so if we want them to have a proper onboarding then we're forced to be less lazy with our docs, and we get the validation of knowing they're being used.
I mean the agents are to lazy to read any of this anyway and often will forget the sort of instructions being spam these with after 3 more instructions too.
The difference now is that people are actively trying to remove people (others and themselves) from software development work, so the robots have to have adequate instructions. The motivation is bigger. To dismantle all human involvement with software development is something that everyone wants, and they want it yesterday.
Great advice. I follow it in my coding efforts and it has never failed me. Great book about this: Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns, Vladimir Khorikov, 2020
How do you deal with serializing properties "by reference"? E.g., if 3 objects reference object "Foo", then Foo is serialized once instead of being duplicated in the json 3 times?
It depends. I don’t tend to end up with deep object graphs that need to be saved/ reloaded.
It might be that we serialize foo and foo has a list of references to its 3 children. The “parent” reference from the child back to foo is marked as do not serialize; an “after rehydration” function on foo could then set the value each child’s parent reference.
But more often — say baz bar and bam reference foo — the speed at which baz changes is different to the speed at which foo changes. The reference to foo from Baz is marked do not serialize. Baz also has a property indicating the ID of Baz. (For IStashy<K> - K is the type used for the keys, the IDs; it might be a string or an int or a guid, I tend to use string. All objects in the system have the same kind of ID, and it is unique per type.)
Generally if cyclic data structures are possible then some part of the cycle will be marked as no serializable and I’ll keep a key reference adjacent to it.
Situations that triggers huge cascading saves — they’re kind of an anti pattern for how I work. If one little change changes everything then perhaps it can be calculated on the fly from a pure function, not persisted at all— or perhaps there’s over-coupling etc.
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