I'm seeing more and more references to "Honest" in AI output, or AI-related comments.

The AI didn't make an "Honest" mistake. It does not have the capacity for honesty. The output from a LLM is phrased in such a manner to provoke empathy, in a similar way to how Microsoft re-jigged all their user interaction dialogs to include "We" to soften the blow of their crappy software failing the user for the 5th time today. (Side note: "Something went wrong" is the most infuriating error message ever.)

When I ask a LLM for a code review it often blurts out "Honest note:" about some shortcomings. I don't care about "honesty". I care about safe, working, robust, code. The fact that LLMs are tripping over themselves trying to be "Honest" about mistakes in their "path of most statistics" output is a concern if you care about trying to make them operate outside their sandbox in the real world.

Yesterday Claude quoted a word in backticks during an automatic git commit and my shell escaped it tried to execute it. Luckily the word was just an English word with nothing matching in my path. But this is basic, basic, basic stuff. It's been committing things to git ever since it was built, and yet, it keeps tripping over itself. In my code one of the tests keeps failing due to seed data timestamps not lining up with the datetime the test was run. I can see that. Every time Claude runs the tests, it burns up tokens going, "Oh this particular test failed I'll just dig into things and see what's going on, **$$**$$**$$** oh it's just a timestamp issue". Never once does it commit that to its memory file, so eventually I told it to remove the test, and it just added a comment to it saying "Ignore this test due to timestamp misalignment", which it could have done the very first time, if it actually had a brain.

LLMs are a very handy tool if used right. I can get huge chunks of boilerplate code out of them with just a few sentences and that's great when I'm hashing out a concept. But to promise the world (and your investors) that LLMs are ready to replace people out in the real world, where "Honest Mistakes" have Real World Repercussions, that's outright fraud at this stage.

Five years ago when I bought a car in America the manual was roughly $1000 cheaper than the automatic.

That is believable. A sole developer at a law firm will have random tasks (like, "find out what is in this dbDOS PRO database we found during discovery"). As such, a lot of your time is spent figuring out how to do things that will only have to be done once. Traditionally, you would have spent time in search engines or StackOverflow trying to figure it out. Now AI is acting as a type of advanced search engine for you.

So your work is like the ideal use case for AI.

That's not really true. Science is a tool for testing hypotheses. It doesn't really care where the hypothesis comes from. In this case, the hypothesis is that the human brain can be perfectly simulated by a Turing Machine, which is a reasonable hypothesis.

If they just accepted that as true, it would be unscientific. But if they actually test their hypothesis, it's not unscientific.

At the time when he said that, the number was closer to 90% than to half.

Now it's easier to target, and easier to figure out which advertising is wasted.

A random generator will eventually create the works of Shakespeare.

A current LLM will never create the works of Shakespeare.

> It will randomize over a surprisingly short time if it doesn't have power for data maintenance.

If you plug in a USB stick, you just power up the controller and the flash memory chip. You have to read everything and write everything to charge the cells back up again, there is no background refresh going on like in DRAM.

40% of Canada's land area is covered in forests. It is simply impossible to "manage" that much forest, and it's utterly fucking absurd to suggest otherwise. And to try to take climate change out of the equation is just a way of misdirecting away from the actual fucking cause; GHG emissions raising surface temperatures.

When will humans stop buying the most trivially fucking moronic red herrings? What a disreputable idiotic species.

wtf I had never heard of Zizians, they claim to be rationalists but seem completely insane.

NASA already has this. No need to wait 10 days.

Welp, I can assure you that when I question authority, I am not doing it to gain my own power. I am anarchist to the core.

Yeah that's true.

You are vastly underestimating the power of the US military. An occupation would be easier than Iraq OR Afghanistan, because there won't be outside funding for an insurgency, and because the vast majority of Iranians already hate their government.

Bush was worse.

I was wondering that, too. Linus is vulnerable to intimidation, we saw it when he was forced to accept a code of conduct.

Theo, on the other hand, is not beholden to anybody. If only there were more people like the Rat.

Except when he's so bad that he has to apologize and sit in time out.

Linus is a smart guy, that's why he can explain his reasoning and we are smart enough that we can understand it. No need to blindly believe him because he is Linus (a logical fallacy btw).