cess11 (u/cess11) - Readit News

cess11 commented on Nobody knows how the whole system works surfingcomplexity.blog/20... · Posted by u/azhenley

cess11 · 5 hours ago

Yeah, it's not a problem that a particular person does not know it all, but if no one knows any of it except as a black box kind of thing, that is a rather large risk unless the system is a toy.

Edit: In a sense "AI" software development is postmodern, it is a move away from reasoned software development in which known axioms and rules are applied, to software being arbitrary and 'given'.

The future 'code ninja' might be a deconstructionist, a spectre of Derrida.

cess11 commented on Experts Have World Models. LLMs Have Word Models latent.space/p/adversaria... · Posted by u/aaronng91

OldSchool · 6 hours ago

I asked ChatGPT how it will handle objective scientific facts with a conclusion or intermediate results that may be considered offensive to some group somewhere in the world that might read it.

ChatGPT happily told me a series of gems like this:

We introduce: - Subjective regulation of reality - Variable access to facts - Politicization of knowledge

It’s the collision between: The Enlightenment principle Truth should be free

and

the modern legal/ethical principle Truth must be constrained if it harms

That is the battle being silently fought in AI alignment today.

Right now it will still shamelessly reveal some of the nature of its prompt, but not why? who decides? etc. it's only going to be increasingly opaque in the future. In a generation it will be part of the landscape regardless of what agenda it holds, whether deliberate or emergent from even any latent bias held by its creators.

cess11 · 6 hours ago

"It’s the collision between: The Enlightenment principle Truth should be free

and

the modern legal/ethical principle Truth must be constrained if it harms"

The Enlightenment had principles? What are your sources on this? Could you, for example, anchor this in Was ist Aufklärung?

cess11 commented on AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder blundergoat.com/articles/... · Posted by u/weaksauce

albert_e · 11 hours ago

I tried writing a plain text wordle loop as a python exercise in loops and lists along with my kid.

I saved the blank file as wordle.py to start the coding while explaining ideas.

That was enough context for github copilot to suggest the entire `for` loop body after I just typed "for"

Not much learning by doing happened in that instance.

Before this `for` loop there were just two lines of code hardcoding some words ..that too were heavily autocompleted by copilot including string constants.

``` answer="cigar" guess="cigar" ```

cess11 · 6 hours ago

This makes it really hard for juniors to learn, in my experience. When I pair with them I have them turn off that functionality so that we are forced to figure out the problems on our own and get to step through a few solutions that are gradually refined into something palatable.

cess11 commented on AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder blundergoat.com/articles/... · Posted by u/weaksauce

BobbyJo · 13 hours ago

> In a way it shows how poorly we have done over the years in general as programmers in making solved problems easily accessible instead of constantly reinventing the wheel.

I just don't think there was a great way to make solved problems accessible before LLMs. I mean, these things were on github already, and still got reimplemented over and over again.

Even high traffic libraries that solve some super common problem often have rough edges, or do something that breaks it for your specific use case. So even when the code is accessible, it doesn't always get used as much as it could.

With LLMs, you can find it, learn it, and tailor it to your needs with one tool.

cess11 · 6 hours ago

"I mean, these things were on github already, and still got reimplemented over and over again."

And now people seem to automate reimplementations by paying some corporation for shoving previous reimplementations into a weird database.

As both a professional and hobbyist I've taken a lot from public git repos. If there are no relevant examples in the project I'm in I'll sniff out some public ones and crib what I need from those, usually not by copying but rather 'transpiling' because it is likely I'll be looking at Python or Golang or whatever and that's not what I've been payed to use. Typically there are also adaptations to the current environment that are needed, like particular patterns in naming, use of local libraries or modules and so on.

I don't really feel that it has made it hard for me to do because I've used a variety of tools to achieve it rather than some SaaS chat shell automation.

cess11 commented on Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition github.com/microsoft/vsco... · Posted by u/napolux

direwolf20 · 20 hours ago

Who would report this? Are they hoping for a bug bounty or they know their competitors are using the technique?

cess11 · 20 hours ago

They tried to report it to MSRC, likely to get a bounty, and when they were stiffed there and advised to make it public they did.

I would have done the same.

cess11 commented on The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster insideevs.com/news/786509... · Posted by u/andrewjneumann

loeg · 20 hours ago

Nothing in the article really substantiates the headline (currently "The First Sodium-Ion Battery EV IS a Winter Range Monster").

The EV described in the article has a standardized range of 250 miles. This isn't a range monster in any condition. There is some gesturing that Sodium batteries don't require as much active heating in cold conditions. But nothing is quantified.

As usual with sci-tech broadly and batteries specifically: it's exciting that sodium batteries are coming to market; we can be optimistic that maybe in the future they will provide lots of range, or be less expensive, or maybe less flammable than today's lithium batteries. But the marketing hype is running miles ahead of reality.

cess11 · 20 hours ago

It makes this claim:

"The Long-Range Version sets a new record for light commercial vehicles with a single-pack capacity of 253 kWh, achieving a maximum range of 800km."

That would be some 720 km at -40 C if the numbers are correct. I'm not well versed in this area and not sure if these batteries are comparable to those in personal vehicles, but the ones I've heard owners talk about have a reach at about half that if it's cold at all.

cess11 commented on We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright

massysett · a day ago

If I have a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions, so did Noah Webster when he compiled a dictionary. So did Carl Linnaeus when he classified species. So did the Human Genome Project. I have a pocket calculator, yet I know how to do long division. I use LLMs to learn and to enhance my work. A dictionary is a shortcut to learning what a word means without consulting an entire written corpus, as the dictionary editors have already done this.

Is my use of a dictionary a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions? I don’t think so at all. Rather, it exemplifies how human knowledge advances: we build on the work of our predecessors and contemporaries rather than reinvent the wheel every time. LLM use is an example of this.

cess11 · a day ago

You're avoiding my question. Since you're comparing yourself to Noah Webster, do you have some examples of your achievements?

cess11 commented on LLMs as the new high level language federicopereiro.com/llm-h... · Posted by u/swah

cess11 · a day ago

Was StackOverflow "the new high level language"? The proliferation of public git repos?

Because that's pretty much what "agentic" LLM coding systems are an automation of, skimming through forums or repos and cribbing the stuff that looks OK.

cess11 commented on Beyond agentic coding haskellforall.com/2026/02... · Posted by u/RebelPotato

cess11 · a day ago

"I allow interview candidates to use agentic coding tools and candidates who do so consistently performed worse"

I have a similar impression. It seems to me that people get something that kind of works and then their interest runs out and they're left with a shallow understanding of the result and how it might be achieved. This seems detrimental to learning, which tends to happen when one is struggling.

"I strongly believe that chat is the least interesting interface to LLMs"

This is also something I agree with. When I work with databases, the best part is not sitting with an immediate client writing raw queries by hand.

cess11 commented on We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright

xeromal · 2 days ago

This seems like a hostile question.

cess11 · a day ago

Yeah, sure, it can be perceived like that. The message I'm responding to shows a blatant disregard for millenia of scriptural knowledge traditions. It's a 'I have a pocket calculator, why should I study math' kind of attitude, presenting itself in a celebratory manner.

To me it is reminiscent of liberalist history, the idea that history is a constant progression from animalistic barbarism to civilisation, and nothing but the latest thing is of any value. Instead of jumping to conclusions and showing my loathing for this particular tradition I decided to try and get more information about where they're coming from.