ExFed

This is probably going to be an unpopular comment… but these articles are all super misleading. The physical books are getting destroyed, but their content is getting digitized. Is that a loss? Absolutely. But is there a benefit? Also yes.

The biggest loss is probably the fact that destroying the physical books removes them from circulation, making them essentially permanent additions to these companies’ book collections.

The current economic regime is less like “capitalism” and more like “feudalism with corporations.”

The thing that gets me is when car designers make a car that’s trying to be something it’s not. It’s an EV, not an ICE vehicle. If anything, amplify the motor hum under load (accelerating). Don’t simulate engine sounds. We’re tired of living in a simulation.

We’ve kinda somewhat seriously talked about this at my office … A lot of very boring report writing goes away if you feed an LLM a log of daily activities (chats, commits, issue tickets, etc) across the team.

As someone who started writing software over 20 years ago (yikes I feel old), I feel like a lot of the best practices I’ve come to appreciate are really just strategies for mitigating future pain or boring/uninspiring work. When you eliminate most of the cost of rewriting everything from scratch by a machine that feels nothing, then “best practices” kinda lose their meaning.

Edit: confusing sentence order.

Fair enough; the Internet is a silly place full of distracted, armchair philosophers. However, my entire point was that an LLM doesn’t rely on machinery in the same way that a human brain does. That doesn’t make AI “worse” or “better” overall, but it does make it an awful replacement for humans.

Being married to a pollinator ecologist has taught me at least one thing: honeybees are overrated. Native bees are waaay cooler.

I’m glad the article said something about the impact to native bee populations, and I expect the same, but it would’ve been much nicer if the paper said something about them. For now we’re stuck with speculation…

I understand the sentiment and don’t generally disagree… But in most places around the world, Western honeybees (apis mellifera) are an introduced, agricultural livestock, like cattle, and don’t really belong in the natural ecosystem. This is akin to farmers providing grain feed to their cows; they don’t have to exclusively rely on pasture grass which didn’t evolve to withstand hundreds of hungry herbivores mowing them to the ground every day. Also, honeybees are mediocre pollinators for most native plants. If native bees don’t have to compete for resources with honeybees, that’s a good thing for both the native bees and the plants that coevolved with them.

Introverts exist, and are… very often fine with solitude, prefer it generally over socializing.

Definitely! I am one :) but I still desire the presence of friends from time to time (and usually in small groups).

A person can outwardly appear to be healthy… and actually not be.

Yup! There’s always a nonzero chance you’re not as healthy as you think you are (let’s call it the quantum theory of health: everyone is in a superposition of being both healthy and unhealthy at the same time), especially as we change due to age, making us unfamiliar with our own bodies… I’d tell you about my own challenges here, but that’d be TMI.

And, yes, that’s why we go to regular checkups with someone who has a better perspective to judge “healthiness” (side note: doctors aren’t perfect, so visiting them too frequently can be worse than never at all; there’s a “healthy” cadence to checkups).

Therapy can give otherwise healthy people a method of exploring their inner selves more fully or more consistently…

This boils down to the definition of “healthy”. It even becomes a philosophical question that’s really hard to answer… Is it healthy to live a sedentary lifestyle? Is it healthy to exercise too much? Is it healthy to not know TIPP, in case you (or a loved one) gets a panic attack? Is it healthy to ignore yourself? Ignore others? Is it healthy to mention quantum superposition in a conversation about health? ;)

But, yes, I agree. Life’s as messy and diverse and as hard to sum up as everybody whose ever lived, but yet we carry on … I hope that’s healthy.

Edit: typo, and missing a hint that I’m making a joke about me over-generalizing physics concepts

Hah, okay, you got me there. From my understanding, though, that’s mostly because kids are still figuring out what’s “normal”, so their fear instinct isn’t nearly as strong. I guess I should’ve stuck to the more instinctive sources of fear…

Regardless, that’s not really my point. My point is an LLM doesn’t rely on machinery in the same way that a human brain does. That doesn’t make AI “worse” or “better” overall, but it does make it an awful replacement for other humans.

What am I implying? That their machinery is abnormal and they likely need assistance to live normal, healthy lives. That’s literally why the fields of psychiatry and psychology exist: healthy people don’t need doctors and therapists. Do you disagree?

It could also be that it lacks the machinery to feel any emotions at all. You don’t (normally) have to train people to be afraid of bears or heights or loneliness or boredom. You also don’t (normally) have to train people to have empathy or compassion.

I argue that our obsession with AI is, itself, a misalignment with our environment; it disproportionately tickles psychological reward centers which evolved under unrecognizably different circumstances.

One of my favorite papers! On a similar note, I recently started reading A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. Although it’s a lot more recent (2018), I’d argue it’s required reading in light of the LLM hype craze.

Absolutely, the author needs to be able to reason about their changes, no matter what. However, the reason why I think the two situations are fundamentally different, though, is that it’s a lot easier to validate the existence of features than it is the non-existence of bugs or malicious behavior. The biggest risk to removing code is breaking preexisting features, whereas the biggest risk to adding code is introducing malicious behavior.

Agreed. I have a sense that, eventually, development communities will figure out etiquette and policies to govern LLM usage. But how do you enforce that kind of policy? Right now, it’s essentially a judgement call by the maintainers. It’s hard to catch sneaky LLM usage.

On the other hand, I think there are objectively good ways to use LLMs for software:

• High-level design and planning
• Technical Research (although this tends towards the most popular tech)
• POCs & rapid prototyping
• “Textbook” solutions
• TDD Red/Green development (where the LLM generates failing tests based on the high-level spec, and the programmer writes the implementation)

25kLOC delta in a single PR should be cause for instant rejection

Not to pick at nits, but it would be VERY different if it was 1k lines added and 24k lines removed. There’s something extremely satisfying about removing 10k+ lines of unnecessary code.

Let’s call it by it’s proper name: Daylight Stealing Time

Has “performance” or “merit” meant much to Trump for anything else?

This Pentagon has now indicated they’re willing to abuse the “supply-chain risk” label for political reasons, casting doubt over all future, legitimate uses of the label.

That’s a massive mistake and we’re all far less safe because of it.

OpenAI made a statement agreeing with Anthropic’s “red lines”. Google has yet to do the same, although there’s been quite a lot of chatter from employees about it.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5758898-altman-backs-anthropic-pentagon-stand/

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/27/employees-at-google-and-openai-support-anthropics-pentagon-stand-in-open-letter/