*head bangs in approval*

Well I don't know, I am not a lawyer. I know that there ARE laws that penalize malicious code, like the Computer Fraud and Abuse act, and that there is a legal concept of "protestware" that draws a distinction between a bug that causes data loss and intentional sabotage. And there are also license terms that disavow responsibility for any damages that may or may not hold up if intentional sabotage is established.

But all of this is outside of my domain. I was speaking generally, that there are laws against malicious software writing/distribution in general.

Based on what I read of this story, it sure sounds like intentional sabotage to me. An instruction to an AI that orders it to destroy data sounds like a "weaponized prompt" to me. It's one thing to say "this software might have bugs or not even work at all, and those bugs might cause harm, so that's your risk to take." It is quite another to deliberately code malicious prompts as a trap with the intent of harming those who fall into it. I don't think someone can do that and say "well my hands are clean because I said you use this software at your own risk." Even if the law is gray in this area because AI is new and emerging, the social principle here is pretty clear.

Please, no. Often when writing code I need the API reference and only the API reference. I know what I want to do and how to do it, I just need a quick check of the exact order of arguments or exact symbol names. I don't need to try to sift that out of commentary. Likewise when I'm learning how to use the library I'm more interested in the overall view. I don't need to know the exact names of the options for a call, only what the options are for. I expect the code in the user's guide to be accurate, but I don't want the same things out of it that I want out of the API reference.

Oh, forgot to link the dry density for you: here you go. 341kcal/100g. Aka 3,41kcal/g.

Which, like I said, should be obvious, since they're almost entirely carbs (~4kcal/g) and protein (~4kcal/g), and they're, as noted, dry (12-16% moisture). It would be quite the trick indeed to get something that is dry and and is almost entirely comprised of things that are 4kcal/g to be 1,38kcal/g! ;)

Just in case you need help:

Your calculation: 195g (dry weight) × 1.38 kcal/g = 269 calories per pound of cooked beans.
Correction: Because you used 1.38 kcal/g (the cooked density) as if it were the dry density, you essentially diluted the calories twice.
The Actual Math: 195g of dry beans * 3.4 kcal/g (actual dry density) = 663 kcal.

When those 195g of dry beans absorb water to weigh 454g (1 pound), they still contain those same 663 calories (since water has zero calories).

Canned beans are ALREADY COOKED. *facepalm*. You can eat them straight out of the can.

which is waaaay more than I would want to eat at a sitting.

I can't think of a single ingredient - any ingredient - that I would want to eat exclusively as my diet, so this is a really stupid argument.

Except for the bit where it does that caching for a loop where each lookup only occurs once. Because everybody caches lookups, so that must be the right thing to do (it's the most likely thing to happen) in a case where the cache is never used. Riiiiight...

Something critical to note: intent is the most important thing to document when it comes to software. You can see what it does by reading the code, that's straightforward. What I need to know most, both when writing software and maintaining it later, is why it's doing that. What's it supposed to be doing? Why is it doing it in that way? What were the alternatives and why weren't they chosen? How is it supposed to be used by code that calls it? An LLM can't generate any of that just from the code.

This is why traditionally software libraries have had two separate pieces of documentation: an API reference that details every call and it's arguments and results, and a user's guide that lays out how and why to use the library.

When I saw a clip of a baby Yoda slinging the force around willy nilly I realized that Lucasfilm had literally no clue about their own lore any more and had just compromised the whole concept of the force worse than even midi-chlorians ever did. The force requires both discipline and Purpose. They compromised the whole concept of the force for a cheap sight gag.

Besides, the whole story line blowing Boba Fett up into an anti-hero and then building a whole race around the concept was just another case of the tail wagging the dog.

For both reasons I will never watch an episode of the Mandalorian, and definitely not any movie based on it.

And how does the AARP, or NRA, or anyone end up endorsing a candidate? They get a nice bite out of the campaign budget, and come to the realization that candidate x is indeed the best choice. Money spent, votes gained.

If voters decided elections, Sanders would have been president.

But you are missing my point. Who wins does not even matter. Every candidate who will be allowed to get anywhere works for the same donors, and will be delivering essentially the same policy. Your choices are candidates x, y, and z, all with the same policy, differing only in spiel, and possibly, in the pecking order of their donors.

The difference in your candidate choices:

How much do you support the genocide? A) A lot B) Very much indeed

Who should be go to war against? A) Russia B) China C) Iran

How big of a tax cut do you want for rich people? A) $4T B) $5T

Jobs? A) See previous

Actual health care? A) No B) Fuck no!

Social security, education, salaries, vacations? A) What are you, communist?

Who would you like us to pretend we care about? A) White people B) Minorities

Yeah, good luck with that.

Party primaries are in the $1B range now. This money comes from the same donors, not the voters, not the party, and in exactly the same way as presidentials. Sell the voters and the country out to the donors, get financing, create messaging, advertise, get votes. The same goes for all elections big or small. It's turtles all the way down.

Principles, yeah there you are just repeating what I said.

Nope, voters are secondary. Before you ever get to vote, the candidates on the ballot have been voted for with their wallets by campaign contributors, who do not contribute if there is no clear ROI for them. No contributors means no advertising means no votes. So the primary concern of any politician is to make and keep promises to the donors, and only then to figure out how to woo the voters.

Now the thing is, the interests of the donors and of the voters are often in conflict, so you usually can not keep both of the promises you made. If you break your promises to the donors, your career will be over, you will never have a campaign budget again. If however you break your promises to the voters, well as we have seen again and again, they will vote for you anyway. The more work you do for the donors, the bigger your pay. However little work you do for the voters, you can still win them over again with campaign ads.

The donor work is easy, all you have to do is pass the laws that were written by and handed to you by the donors. But even if someone wanted to do something for the voters, the thing is, voter problems are complicated, and there's pretty much no one with a chance of getting elected who has any idea what to do about any of them. You only have to listen to the average critter talk about things, there's zero understanding of how the world works, zero understanding of the problems the voters face, and zero original thought about anything, all you hear is the same old party approved mass media soundbites that you have heard for decades, the same you will probably recite as answers to the same questions yourself if you don't pay attention. So who would want to get their hands dirty with any of that? Better to just ignore the voter problems, and maintain them so they can be used to get them to vote for you next time too.

In any case, where democracy is these days, the same contributors finance almost everyone and anyone across the party lines. They do not care who wins, they know that after the financing, whoever gets to the office will be working for them, not for the voters. Trump donors are the same as Biden donors are the same as Hillary donors are the same as Obama donors are the same as GWB donors and so on. Whoever wins, the donors laugh all the way to the bank.

But when there arrives a politician who looks like he will actually work for the voters and change things, the whole system will rise up against them. In the UK there was Corbyn, who got smeared with constant baseless antisemitism accusations until everyone believed them. In the US there was Sanders who got ignored by the media while polling way ahead of Hillary, and then was betrayed by his own party in favour of her, and again, in favour of Joe.

Sometimes we also have weird flashes like AOC or Mamdani, who maybe did start out with principles, but once they got established, ended up being exactly the same spineless slime as everyone else.

For tl;dr take a look at this study from Cambridge https://doi.org/10.1017/S15375... voter preference has no correlation with policy outcomes in the US. But money does.

The original star wars movies had many elements that drew in audiences at the time, including a plot about a mystical force that was guiding a new hero on a path to save the galaxy from overwhelmingly oppressive tyranny. The events were significant and the family-tie shockers injected some drama and so they were good.

But "Star Wars: The Last Flop" lost the thread. Instead of a plot that was even more epic and had even more galactic significance, it just doubled-down on the family drama and kind of lumbered around, getting us nowhere new. There was plenty more to dislike in terms of how they ruined character arks and pushed a political agenda that did not sit well with much of the audience.

Ever since then, the franchise has been sliding downhill. I read summaries of the other movies and shows and they all sounded equivalently vapid. I think I am not alone in this opinion.

You are familiar with the idea that the tool should match the job? And in particular, that some tools are very poor fits for some jobs, but that doesn't make them bad tools (since they are intended for a different job)?

MongoDB exists solely to remind us that some tools are not right for any job.

As it turns out, there are laws against deploying malicious code, too.

And for similar reasons.