This makes no sense. How are dependence and usefulness interchangable? There is some overlap, sure. But are you seriously claiming that there is no meaningful distinction between using headphones and using slot machines?
Yes, there's obviously a difference between addiction and a substance use disorder. But part of a key definition of a substance use disorder is that it has to cause harm.
Something merely being addicting isn't enough for intervention. It's why nobody is bothered when coffee shops advertise the addictive nature of caffeine.
I disagree. 16 isn't necessarily the relevant N here but the number of responses is.
If you have 100 responses from 1 professor, and the AI wins 75% of the time that is very likely a true signal that the AI is better than this prof. It would be incorrect to generalize this to all profs though.
Further, if you sample 16 profs and the AI beats 10 of them you can be fairly certain that the real percentage of profs it beats isn't 10%. Further, when estimating the probability that the AI beats a random prof, it's the relative estimation error that scales with 1/sqrt N. If you have a coin and it lands heads up 16 times, that tells you something quite robust about the coin.
Reasonably estimating confidence intervals at small N and high p is not trivial. But it can be done.
A good heuristic is "add 2 successes and 2 failures" which is due to Agresti & Couli.
It's the same logic for human and for AI code: In Rust the compiler catches many bugs so you don't have to.
If the LLM gives you safe code you know there are entire classes of things you don't have to review for.
That said, I agree with you. My experience is that LLMs are great if you are highly competent in the domain in which you let them work. And it's probably easier to be competent in Go than in Rust.
Safe? No compiler is going to catch badly designed code, or intentionally backdoored code. Memory leaks as well. Compilers are the ground floor of validation and the least of your problems with AI generated code.
If the program design follows the principle of making illegal states unrepresentable (credit to Yaron Minsky), the compiler can catch much, much more than most people realize.
The process of designing a program like that itself catches a lot of "badly designed code". And such a design also naturally exposes many kinds of intentional backdoors, because security properties can quite easily be statically checked. For example, IDORs can be made literally impossible in such a design.
In discussions like this, I'm reminded of the William Gibson quote, "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."
I found it's the opposite. Thanks to LLM's whole classes of problems otherwise solved by using Rust are gone. It's now more important that the generated code is easy to read.
Relative to Go? I'm pretty sure your Go code won't be faster if you used LLMs. If you need that, Rust is still preferred.
Relative to C/C++? That'll be very interesting. Do you have some evidence that LLMs can create memory-safe code in C/C++? It'll be truly amazing if true, but given that they apparently struggle to create/maintain big codebases in already-memory-safe languages I seriously doubt it.
The amount of papers produced passed the point of being digestible by humans a long time ago.
I do think we will need to find a way to get away from publishing papers. But I thought that before the AI came along and made mediocre papers something you can produce in a day. The academic system seems utterly incapable of self-correcting on this point though. We haven't even managed to get rid of for-profit publishers. So how this all will go down is anybodies guess right now.
Yes, the C++ committee has been making some stupid decisions lately. This is not the only one.
Low level platform-specific code that needs to hot spin until an interrupt happens can use assembly for that part which it will need to do for the interrupt handler anyway.
To successfully execute that strategy you need enough resources to survive losing multiple times. This is one reason why it's not a meritocracy: Founders come overwhelmingly from upper middle class backgrounds, where one or two or three failed startups doesn't ruin your life.
Do you also suggest to make it illegal to pay someone to publish certain posts/texts? And plan on enforcing this somehow worldwide? Because otherwise, if I have the money to make someone post my opinions, I already have twice the influence of everyone who doesn't have that money. And there are people who have the resources of entire nation states at their disposal and have a big incentive to influence public discourse in their favour.
There are a lot of unexamined assumptions in what you write...
This is so blindingly obvious just by looking at what is happening...
It's like the believe that markets are inherently efficient and we just need to get rid of all the government interference that distorts the free market.
There is no evidence for it, the theoretical argument is so flimsy it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, the various ways in which markets are inefficient are several entire subfield of economics. Yet the idea persists...
The notion that you just need a proper free market of ideas and then the best ideas will automatically win, and we just need to get rid of everything that interferes with this free market of ideas is cut from the same cloth...
Maybe it has the same attraction as "blame the immigrants". It gives you an immediate automatic scapegoat for everything you see in society that you don't like.
The belief isn't unjustified though. One of the defining elements of a government is aggression. Spending resources to force someone (specially with violence) to something is more wasteful than if they were to do it by themselves. Furthermore, most, if not all, cited inefficiencies are linked somewhere to distortions created by government action.
That being said, I do agree that there's a dangerous apathy about how the free markets work. The free market, being the product of voluntary action, is anything but automatic.
But I don't see how that is a scapegoating mechanism for "anything you don't like". Anymore than apathy is, at least. I see human rights (specially the right to live and private ownership) being used as scapegoats much more often.
You don't actually engage with the point of the article at all.
Why is that a desirable goal? What are the societal implications of this? What implicit assumptions is your framing hiding, and are they true? (All communication is good! All opposition to communication is oppression!)
I don't want a world where everyone can send me any ad they want without my consent. Where Billionaires and Autocrats can use their money and power to amplify their lies. Where utterances that no court has ever recognized as protected speech dominate all carefully stated opinions.
Just retreating to exactly the catchphrases and naivete of the 90s is not cutting it anymore.
You already live in a world where anyone can send you any ad they want without your consent, paid for by your tax dollars. The postal service had been trafficking ads direct to your door since before Twitter was a thing.
Billionaires and Autocrats by the very nature of having massive amounts of money can use their money and power to amplify their lies no matter how easy or not it is for normal people to also amplify their own lies. Again, Disney was buying swamp land in Florida through shell companies long before the internet decided forcing Elon Musk to buy twitter would be funny. Or see also that insider trading is illegal for you and me, but if you're a congressman, that's just a perk of the job.
As far as "utterances that no court has ever recognized as speech", I'd be interested in what you think qualifies here, because the recent history (where by recent I mean over the course of the 1900's) has been an ever expansive definition of what sort of things constitute speech. Tinker v. Des Moines found wearing a black arm band is speech. Texas v. Johnson found burning a flag was speech. Brandenburg v. Ohio found advocacy of force and law violations was broadly speech, leaving only a small exception against speech that would induce "imminent lawless action". Hustler V. Falwell found parody of public figures even when that parody intends to cause emotional distress of the person being parodied were speech. Snyder v. Phelps found posters saying things like "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "God Hates Fags" outside of a funeral were speech. And let's not forget National Socialist Party v. Skokie, finding that a literal Nazi rally was speech.
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