Jensson (u/Jensson) - Readit News

Jensson commented on Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/atte... · Posted by u/jger15

mooreds · 18 hours ago

... "and bloom" is a key missing part of the title.

I find that 90% of the time the more you pay attention to something, the more interesting it gets.

Jensson · an hour ago

No, you get bored with it. Tetris is fun for an hour, but then you get bored, it didn't get more fun after an hour, and people get even more bored after 10 hours. A very small subset of people continue after that and get ever more obsessed with it, that is not normal.

Jensson commented on We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that thenexus.media/your-phone... · Posted by u/natalie3p

inglor_cz · a day ago

Sweden supports Chat Control on European level, even though the very principle of Chat Control is anathema to basic civic rights.

Is widespread surveillance of private communications popular with Swedish electorate, or do people like Ylva Johansson support and even push such abominable things regardless of what actual Swedes think?

If the latter, it is not that different from what McCarthy once did, and our entire continent is in danger that this sort of paranoid dystopia gets codified into law approximately forever. At least McCarthy's era was short.

Jensson · 2 hours ago

Yes they are trying to change the laws to be more oppressive which I don't like, but at least they aren't doing that illegally.

I feel the EU level is not very democratic since its more removed from voters, similar to the US federal level, I see the same kinds of problems in both. As long as the EU doesn't get the same level of power as the US federals I am happy though since local lawmakers can fix things.

Jensson commented on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline publichealthpolicyjournal... · Posted by u/cainxinth

tuesdaynight · 2 days ago

Sorry for the bluntness, but you sound like you have a lot of opinions about LLM performance for someone who says that doesn't use them. It's okay if you are against them, but if have used them 3 years ago, you have no idea if there were improvements or not.

Jensson · 2 days ago

You can see what people built with LLM 3 years ago and what they build with LLM today and compare the two.

That is a very natural and efficient way to do it, and also more reliable than using your own experience since you are just a single data point with feelings.

You don't have to drive a car to see where cars were 20 years ago, see where cars are today, and say: "it doesn't look like cars will start flying anytime soon".

Jensson commented on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline publichealthpolicyjournal... · Posted by u/cainxinth

robenkleene · 2 days ago

One argument for abstraction being different from delegation, is when a programmer uses an abstraction, I'd expect the programmer to be able to work without the abstraction, if necessary, and also be able to build their own abstractions. I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation.

Jensson · 2 days ago

> I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation.

Managers tend to hire sub managers to manage their people. You can see this with LLM as well, people see "Oh this prompting is a lot of work, lets make the LLM prompt the LLM".

Jensson commented on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline publichealthpolicyjournal... · Posted by u/cainxinth

theptip · 2 days ago

Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy. It was said that compilers would produce a generation of programmers unable to understand the workings of their programs. In some sense, this is true! But, almost nobody thinks it really matters for the actual project of building things.

If you stop thinking, then of course you will learn less.

If instead you think about the next level of abstraction up, then perhaps the details don’t always matter.

The whole problem with college is that there is no “next level up”, it’s a hand-curated sequence of ideas that have been demonstrated to induce some knowledge transfer. It’s not the same as starting a company and trying to build something, where freeing up your time will let you tackle bigger problems.

And of course this might not work for all PhDs; maybe learning the details is what matters in some fields - though with how specialized we’ve become, I could easily see this being a net win.

Jensson · 2 days ago

> Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy

All previous programming abstractions kept correctness, a python program produce no less reliable results than a C program running the same algorithm, it just took more time.

LLM doesn't keep correctness, I can write a correct prompt and get incorrect results. Then you are no longer programming, you are a manager over a senior programmer suffering from extreme dementia so they forget what they were doing a few minutes ago and you try to convince him to write what you want before he forgets about that as well and restart the argument.

Jensson commented on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline publichealthpolicyjournal... · Posted by u/cainxinth

elAhmo · 2 days ago

I would bet a significant amount of money that many LLM users don’t check the output. And as tools improve, this will only increase.

The number of users actually checking the output of a compiler is nonexistent. You just trust it.

LLMs are moving that direction, whether we like it or not

Jensson · 2 days ago

> The number of users actually checking the output of a compiler is nonexistent. You just trust it.

Quite a few who work on low level systems do this. I have done this a few times to debug build issues: this one time a single file suddenly made compile times go up by orders of magnitude, the compiler inlined a big sort procedure in an unrolled loop, so it added the sorting code hundreds of times over in a single function and created a gigantic binary that took ages to compile since it tried to optimize that giant function.

That is slow both in runtime and compile time, so I added a tag to not inline the sort there, and all the issues disappeared. The sort didn't have a tag to inline it, so the compiler just made an error here, it shouldn't have inlined such a large function in an unrolled loop.

Jensson commented on We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that thenexus.media/your-phone... · Posted by u/natalie3p

chasd00 · 2 days ago

> Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular.

isn't this democracy at work? will of the people and all that?

Jensson · 2 days ago

Democracy? Yes. Liberal democracy? No.

A core part to liberal democracy is that the government must follow the law. If the government doesn't follow the law due to checks and balances failing then its not a liberal democracy.

Jensson commented on We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that thenexus.media/your-phone... · Posted by u/natalie3p

inglor_cz · 2 days ago

I would argue that in that case, liberal democracy is an oxymoron.

Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution. (Most countries have something like 3/5 supermajority requirements for changing constitutions, which is a lot more practical than the basically-as-of-now-impossible US procedure.)

At this moment, if you want to keep "liberal" character of the country, your "checks and balances" institutions have to act in a fairly authoritarian ways and invalidate laws which attracted supermajority support. What is then stopping such institutions to just rule as they see fit? Even checks and balances need checks and balances.

Nevertheless, I would say that "liberal democracy" isn't one that can always prevent illiberal policies from being enacted. I would say that it is one that can later correct them.

Note that historically, most obvious executive encroachments of liberty (Guantanamo etc.) in the US were later overturned by new administrations.

Jensson · 2 days ago

> Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution

McCarthyism didn't have that much support from voters, so this isn't the issue, it didn't become law. The issue is that the elected representatives didn't do anything to stop it until it started having massive disapproval from voters.

Voters needing to massively disapprove of government abuse for the "checks and balances" to do their job means the democracy isn't working as it should, the government doesn't need to change the constitution they just need to keep disapproval low enough to continue with their illegal actions. In a true liberal democracy the checks and balances works, ministers who perform illegal acts are investigated and relieved of their duties without needing elected representatives to start that procedure.

I live in Sweden and I can't even find examples of a politician that blatantly ignores laws and procedures that get to stay for years here. I think the two party system is the biggest culprit, then you need support from both parties to remove criminal politicians, but that is very difficult to get when people have to vote against their own. In a multi party system each party is a minority, and allied parties are not friendly to each other, they gladly sink an ally to absorb their votes since the issue was the party and not the alliance, people wont move to the other block over such a thing.

Jensson commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine

questionableans · 2 days ago

That’s an unusual definition of superstars. It sounds like you’re talking about very lopsided people who are experts at one thing?

Jensson · 2 days ago

That is what people typically mean with superstar, a person exceptionally good at a thing. A superstar basketball player doesn't necessarily come with a good attitude, same with movie stars, they don't always deliver great results if they are unhappy with their role.

What do you think superstar means? That they are good at everything? Nobody is good at everything. A superstar programmer is probably not a superstar manager etc, not is he a superstar football player.

Also the more sought after you are the harder it is to stand bullshit, so generally superstars are more fickle than average workers. They don't get more irritated, they just don't hide it as much because they have less reasons to.

This means if your job involves a lot of bullshit then a superstar will likely perform worse than an average worker and will quit soon, since superstars tolerate less bullshit. That doesn't mean they are not a superstar, tolerating bullshit is generally not a part of being a superstar in most peoples definitions.

Jensson commented on We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that thenexus.media/your-phone... · Posted by u/natalie3p

SlightlyLeftPad · 2 days ago

Or popularity rather.

Jensson · 2 days ago

Yeah, so not exactly liberal democracy. It is a democracy, but doesn't seem very liberal if the checks and balances doesn't work against popular policies.