It sounds like you believe that the Russian practice of setting up buffer states was a US lie.

Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and errrrm East Germany. They might have a different opinion on Russian peacefulness, and for at least some of us, there was a reason that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was set up.

Europe is pretty clear - they don't like us. Maybe Europe should consider rejuvenating the Warsaw pact, or more accurately the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance. Sounds like a much nicer deal.

Awesome. I'm with you - the US should;d get out of Europe today, and if you become buffer states for Russia, I believe that is exactly what EU citizens want. You deserve it, and get your Cyrillic dictionary out.

I mean - what should the USA protect countries that hate us? In fact, rathe than fight a war with Russia, why don't you just surrender peacefully and then you will be happy. I'm with you - US pull out of all Europe, and let what happens happen.

Well, as the EU becomes buffer states of Russia, will the US need to help? It is apparent that the EU and its citizens believe that the US is a backwater country, full of fat stupid people who are the most evil humans on th planet. We are treated every day to EU supremacy, where any topic about Rooshia or China gets turned into our fault or a whataboutism within a few posts.

You will come a buffer state, and you will be happier, because the US will leave you alone. You won!, You are no longer under the heels of the worst country on earth. I suggest learning Cyrillic, you'll need it.

The problem is that the LLM only does one trick. When you start integrating other software with it, the other software's input has to be fed in the same way as your other tokens. As the last paragraph of TFS says, "every clock check consumes space in the model's context window" and that's because it's just more data being fed in. But the model doesn't actually ever know what time it is, even for a second; the current time is just mixed into the stew and cooked with everything else. It doesn't have a concept of the current time because it doesn't have a concept of anything.

You could have a traditional system interpreting the time, and checking the LLM's output to determine whether what it said made sense. But now that system has to be complicated enough to determine that, and since the LLM is capable of so much complexity of output it can never really be reliable either. You can check the LLM with another LLM, and that's better than not checking its output at all, but the output checking is subject to the same kinds of failures as the initial processing.

So yeah, we can do that, but it won't eliminate the [class of] problem.

Every tech company needs at least three things to start with: The business guy, the brain, and the lawyer. Ideally there should also be a marketing guy, but you can add them in later. Also, none of them have to be male, I just like saying "guy", buddy.

Yes and no, depending. If you are building an application in Excel, yes, all you said is true. If you are using one, no, none of it is. Spreadsheets can be set up such that the user just stuffs data into them where they are supposed to, then clicks a button to get results. Or maybe they don't even have to hit a button.

For the simplest useful example I can think of, I put together a spreadsheet which produces a table we use for asset valuation. This spreadsheet changes every year. If you load my spreadsheet, it will be correct for the current year. No user has to think about that at all, they just load it and get a correct table. You can extrapolate this to basically any level of complexity because Excel has VBA and you can script everything. The user just follows instructions, and they aren't even allowed to edit any cells which could break anything.

In case anyone is going this far down the hole, it turned out great. Even though the item was shipped from the US, because the seller didn't respond I got a refund without having to return it.

So far Aliexpress has been responsive to 100% of my issues and I only have needed to be a little patient and not expect everything to be solved immediately or arrive immediately.

I agree that a database-backed application is the right way to go for that much data. However, Finance used Excel because they could. We all like to talk about how bad an idea it is to do that, but Excel brought financial computations on large data sets to people who can't write any code. It has enabled thousands upon thousands of businesses to do things they couldn't do before without paying a programmer to develop a solution they cannot maintain. The fact that other spreadsheets regularly crater when handed data that Excel has no trouble with is exactly why we have so much Excel.

I like to use Drupal to rapidly create database applications which can handle a lot of data without writing code. But I wouldn't expect someone in accounting to be able to do that at all, and that just shifts the problem domain. Instead of getting stuck with Excel, now I'm getting stuck with Drupal. All of the logic just winds up in a different system that you can't trivially transfer it out of, so you have the same exact maintainability problem, except more people know how to work with Excel.

Every time I see this advice, I can't help but think the person giving the advice hasn't worked with very many junior developers.

Auditors check exactly what you ask them to check, no more no less. They can see all kinds of problems, but if you didn't ask them to check that, then they won't mention it. They don't get paid to do that, and won't be thanked for doing it.

Gas powered cars don't explode, but they definitely burn sometimes.

You must have read a lot of Slashdot: there's no elemental lithium in lithium batteries. The stuff that burns is the electrolyte, which is basically an oil.

I really want you to explain why you know better than the MIT researchers quoted in the summary who determined you are wrong. Most jobs can't be replaced by current LLM, that's what they found. Why do you disagree with it?

If a FedEx airplane hits a utility pole, yes there would be an FAA investigation. I'm not sure why this would be surprising to anyone with even a passing familiarity of aerospace regulation.

She'll be right mate!

I said this:

You responded by saying rocks can think. Strong example of cognitive bias.