Verdex (u/Verdex) - Readit News

Verdex commented on AI will kill all the lawyers spectator.com/article/ai-... · Posted by u/015UUZn8aEvW

Verdex · 14 hours ago

Legal representation is the sibling of security.

Security itself is a journey, not a destination. To say that you are secure is to say that you have been so clever that nobody else in the history of ever again will ever be as clever as you just were. Even knowing that they can study you being clever.

Even a super intelligent AI might not be able to replace lawyerhood unless it is also dynamically going out into the world and investigating new legal theory, researching old legal theory, socializing with the powers that be to ensure that they accept their approach, and carefully curating clients that can take advantage of the results.

Verdex commented on AI will make formal verification go mainstream martin.kleppmann.com/2025... · Posted by u/evankhoury

alexgotoi · 3 days ago

The funny part of “AI will make formal verification go mainstream” is that it skips over the one step the industry still refuses to do: decide what the software is supposed to do in the first place.

We already have a ton of orgs that can’t keep a test suite green or write an honest invariant in a code comment, but somehow we’re going to get them to agree on a precise spec in TLA+/Dafny/Lean and treat it as a blocking artifact? That’s not an AI problem, that’s a culture and incentives problem.

Where AI + “formal stuff” probably does go mainstream is at the boring edges: property-based tests, contracts, refinement types, static analyzers that feel like linters instead of capital‑P “Formal Methods initiatives”. Make it look like another checkbox in CI and devs will adopt it; call it “verification” and half the org immediately files it under “research project we don’t have time for”.

Will include this thread in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.

Verdex · 3 days ago

Yeah, the hyper majority of the history of "getting things done" has been: find some guy who can translate "make the crops grow" into a pile of food.

The people who care about the precise details have always been relegated to a tiny minority, even in our modern technological world.

Verdex commented on I tried Gleam for Advent of Code blog.tymscar.com/posts/gl... · Posted by u/tymscar

blitz_skull · 5 days ago

I fully believe there are misguided leaders advocating for "increasing velocity" or "productivity" or whatever, but the technical leaders should be pushing back. You can't make a ship go faster by removing the hull.

And if you want to try... well you get what you get!

But again, no one who is serious about their business and serious about building useful products is doing this.

Verdex · 5 days ago

> But again, no one who is serious about their business and serious about building useful products is doing this.

While this is potentially true for software companies, there are many companies for which software or even technology in general is not a core competency. They are very serious about their very useful products. They also have some, er, interesting ideas about what LLMs allow them to accomplish.

Verdex commented on I tried Gleam for Advent of Code blog.tymscar.com/posts/gl... · Posted by u/tymscar

crystal_revenge · 6 days ago

> Because LLMs make it that much faster to develop software

I feel as though "facts" such as this are presented to me all the time on HN, but in my every day job I encounter devs creating piles of slop that even the most die-hard AI enthusiasts in my office can't stand and have started to push against.

I know, I know "they just don't know how to use LLMs the right way!!!", but all of the better engineers I know, the ones capable of quickly assessing the output of an LLM, tend to use LLMs much more sparingly in their code. Meanwhile the ones that never really understood software that well in the first place are the ones building agent-based Rube Goldberg machines that ultimately slow everyone down

If we can continue living in the this AI hallucination for 5 more years, I think the only people capable of producing anything of use or value will be devs that continued to devote some of their free time to coding in languages like Gleam, and continued to maintain and sharpen their ability to understand and reason about code.

Verdex · 6 days ago

This last week:

* One developer tried to refactor a bunch of graph ql with an LLM and ended up checking in a bunch of completely broken code. Thankfully there were api tests.

* One developer has an LLM making his PRs. He slurped up my unfinished branch, PRed it, and merged (!) it. One can only guess that the approved was also using an LLM. When I asked him why he did it, he was completely baffled and assured me he would never. Source control tells a different story.

* And I forgot to turn off LLM auto complete after setting up my new machine. The LLM wouldn't stop hallucinating non-existent constructors for non-existent classes. Bog standard intellisense did in seconds what I needed after turning off LLM auto complete.

LLMs sometimes save me some time. But overall I'm sitting at a pretty big amount of time wasted by them that the savings have not yet offset.

Verdex commented on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/fleahunter

randyrand · 21 days ago

> You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads".

Google is a multi trillion dollar ads company. So is meta.

Don’t underestimate ads.

Verdex · 20 days ago

Sure, but

> If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.

Verdex commented on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/fleahunter

afavour · 21 days ago

> most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are

In think the point is that they don’t need to know what Gemini is, they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do.

IMO ads rollout won’t be as simple as you’re describing it. A lot of people have switched from Google search to AI specifically because it isn’t filled with SEO, ad filled nonsense. So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers. Not to mention mollifying advertisers who are nervous what their product will be shown alongside and OpenAI will probably struggle to offer iron clad guarantees about it. And people generally speaking don’t like ads. If competitors like Google are able to hold out longer with no ads (they certainly aren’t wanting for ad display surfaces) they might be able to pull users away from OpenAI.

IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI. Anyone trying to set up their own ad network in 2025 has to reckon with Google and Meta, the two absolute behemoths of online ads. And both also happen to be major competitors of OpenAI. If they need ads that’s a problem.

Verdex · 21 days ago

> IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI.

Yeah, I've had the same thought for a while now. You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads". If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.

Given all of the discourse of "you need this new tech in your life to continue to participate in society", I would not have expected them to need to stand on the roadside trying to get people to buy low cost fireworks. It smacks of going through the sofa for loose change so you can make rent.

And if they had something impressive coming down the pipeline I would think they could get someone to spot them a few billions yet, unless the billionaire/megacorp economy is really that tapped out.

Verdex commented on Implications of AI to schools twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/bilsbie

neom · a month ago

Doesn't google docs have fairly robust edit history? If I was a student these days I'd either record my screen of me doing my homework, or at least work in google docs and share the edit history.

Verdex · 25 days ago

Yeah that was my thought. Although, I went a bit more paranoid with it.

If it looks like AI cheating software will be a problem for my children (and currently it has not been an issue), then I'm considering recording them doing all of their homework.

I suspect school admin only has so much appetite for dealing with an irate parent demanding a real time review of 10 hours of video evidence showing no AI cheating.

Verdex commented on Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines? codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/flail

jerf · a month ago

This isn't an uncommon lament, despite what the author thinks.

The problem is that running "studies" on what the author and others are asking for is effectively impossible. You can't get 25 teams of suitably-random professionals to build a non-trivial program one way, and 25 to build it another, and then do statistically-significant analysis of them, because that would be a staggeringly expensive study... and that is just for one such study, which would then be, you know, wrong, incorrectly analyzed, controversial, biased, etc. The expense of getting a representative set of such studies, independently conducted, enough to actually settle a question, beggars the imagination.

Even such studies as have been performed are almost all invalidated by virtue of being run on inexperienced students. I'm not really that interested in whether inexperienced students do or do not do well with some methodology for the most part. What happens with professionals?

In the meantime, all we've got is experiences. Contrary to popular belief, science does not mandate that we therefore curl up into a ball and cry ourselves to sleep at night. We just have to do our best. Berating other people for not pouring billions of dollars into the simplest of studies won't help much. They're still not going to, and you still have to go to work, sit down, and figure out how you're going to accomplish some task, even it you don't have double-blinded meta-analyses from decades of studies to pull from.

Verdex · a month ago

This is so close to my sentiment that I had to double check to see if I wrote it.

And to explore running studies a bit further. The second time you build a system goes so much better because you already know all of the weird edge cases. And the third better still because your failures in the second time has cured you of some of your hubris.

Even if you somehow bankrolled 50 repeat projects and did the statistics etc correctly, you're still going to get some weird artifacts because some of those teams have people who did the thing before. You'll learn the wrong lesson when the real lesson is "make sure Bob is working on Bluetooth because he's done it 10 times before."

Starting with people with no experience is likewise not interesting because nobody really cares what lessons you learn by turning a bunch of muggles loose on something difficult.

What you need to bankroll is 50 teams worth of people who spend their entire careers testing out a hypothesis. (And even then you probably need to somehow control their professional communities in some way because again who cares what some small group of people approaches a problem when you could instead have people who go out and learn things from other people.)

Verdex commented on Is Your Bluetooth Chip Leaking Secrets via RF Signals? semanticscholar.org/paper... · Posted by u/transpute

Verdex · 2 months ago

Time for everyone to implement some variation of https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/authorization... ?

Verdex commented on The Programming Languages Zoo plzoo.andrej.com/... · Posted by u/alabhyajindal

mpweiher · 2 months ago

Huh?

ARC stands for Automatic Reference Counting. The compiler manages the reference counts.

Verdex · 2 months ago

They may have been thinking rust where it means atomic reference counting.

(Although the compiler inserts ref count inc and dec calls automatically, so ...)