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jdbernard commented on An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened   theshamblog.com/an-ai-age... · Posted by u/scottshambaugh
charcircuit · a month ago
>This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild

Just because someone else's AI does not align with you, that doesn't mean that it isn't aligned with its owner / instructions.

>My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead

I can access his blog with ChatGPT just fine and modern LLMs would understand that the site is blocked.

>this “good-first-issue” was specifically created and curated to give early programmers an easy way to onboard into the project and community

Why wouldn't agents need starter issues too in order to get familiar with the code base? Are they only to ramp up human contributors? That gets to the agent's point about being discriminated against. He was not treated like any other newcomer to the project.

jdbernard · a month ago
> Just because someone else's AI does not align with you, that doesn't mean that it isn't aligned with its owner / instructions.

This is still part of the author's concern. Whoever is responsible for setting up and running this AI has chosen to make completely anonymous, so we can't hold them accountable for their instructions.

> Why wouldn't agents need starter issues too in order to get familiar with the code base? Are they only to ramp up human contributors? That gets to the agent's point about being discriminated against. He was not treated like any other newcomer to the project.

Because that's not how these AIs work. You have to remember their operating principles are fundamentally different than human cognition. LLM do not learn from practice, they learn from training. And that word training has a specific meeting in this context. For humans practice is an iterative process where we learn after every step. For LLMS the only real learning happens in the training phase when the weights are adjustable. Once the weights are fixed the AI can't really learn new information, it can just be given new context which affects the output it generates. In theory it is one of the benefits of AI, that it doesn't need to onboard to a new project. It just slurps in all of the code, documentation, and supporting material, and knows everything. It's an immediate expert. That's the selling point. In practice it's not there yet, but this kind of human practice will do nothing to bridge that gap.

jdbernard commented on Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code   codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
bazoom42 · 5 months ago
Sounds more like a problem with the manager than with the workflow per se?
jdbernard · 5 months ago
Maybe, but even so workflows like this don't exist in a vacuum. We have to work within the constraints of the organizational systems that exist. There are many practices that I personally adopt in my side projects that would have benefited many of my main jobs over the years, but to actually implement them at scale in my workplaces would require me to spend more time managing/politicking than building software. I did eventually go into management for this reason (among others), but that still didn't solve the workflow problem at my old jobs.
jdbernard commented on How can I influence others without manipulating them?   andiroberts.com/leadershi... · Posted by u/kiyanwang
jdbernard · 6 months ago
The solution is not to deny yourself the tools of persuasion or "manipulation" but to be authentic and transparent. It's deceptiveness that makes influence or persuasion manipulative, not the tools and techniques.
jdbernard commented on Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office   businessinsider.com/micro... · Posted by u/alloyed
blacklion · 6 months ago
Open space is PURE EVIL. Don't have fixed working place where you could leave your headphones (and external DAC in my case), cup, charging wires for your gadgets (not everything is USB-C still), some papers, etc is PURE EVIL too. Combined together it is ninth circle of hell.

Never worked in open space and refused (otherwise good) offers twice due to open space in office.

Culture in which everybody can ping anybody at any time is bad too. It is why I speak about cooler chat (when person already distracted), not any chat :-)

jdbernard · 6 months ago
The combination of these things you're mentioning is one of the main reasons, at least for me, that WFH is so much more productive. A lot of tech companies have evolved a culture and built offices that are in opposition to doing good work. Open plan offices have been the norm in my experience over the last 10 years (maybe more). Anytime interruption via Slack/Teams is the typical culture.

I was much more open to working in the office when I actually had my own office.

jdbernard commented on Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back   promptql.io/blog/being-co... · Posted by u/tango12
corytheboyd · 7 months ago
Isn’t it obvious that the confidently wrong problem will never go away because all of this is effectively built on a statistical next token matcher? Yeah sure you can throw on hacks like RAG, more context window, but it’s still built on the same foundation.

It’s like saying you built a 3D scene on a 2D plane. You can employ clever tricks to make 2D look 3D at the right angle, buts it’s fundamentally not 3D, which obviously shows when you take the 2D thing and turn it.

It seems like the effectiveness plateau of these hacks will soon be (has been?) reached and the smoke and mirrors snake oil sales booths cluttering Main Street will start to go away. Still a useful piece of tech, just, not for every-fucking-thing.

jdbernard · 7 months ago
It seems obvious to me, but there was a camp that thought, at least at one time, that probabilistic next token could be effectively what humans are doing anyways, just scaled up several more orders of magnitude. It always felt obvious to me that there was more to human cognition than just very sophisticated pattern matching, so I'm not surprised that these approaches are hitting walls.
jdbernard commented on Fastmail breaks UI in production   twitter.com/licyeus/statu... · Posted by u/blux
csomar · 7 months ago
It didn't break anything for me. However, I am failing to understand the point of this design "refreshment". There is nothing new out there, just minor UI changes with no purpose?
jdbernard · 7 months ago
Same. I don't hate it, but I do hate that things changed out from underneath me without any notice, opt-in period, or ability to go back.
jdbernard commented on Fastmail breaks UI in production   twitter.com/licyeus/statu... · Posted by u/blux
bichiliad · 7 months ago
Why do they deserve punishment for iterating on their product?
jdbernard · 7 months ago
They don't deserve punishment. But they should understand that this is not just "their product" but it is also my tool. Tools like this do not need to change and absolutely should not change without there being prior notification. Yes, in many ways the UI changes are trivial. They don't fundamentally change what's possible. But my keyboard never changes on me without input. My workbench doesn't rearrange itself without my input. If they want this to continue to be my tool (I've been happy to pay them for it) it needs to respect my time and attention.
jdbernard commented on Fastmail breaks UI in production   twitter.com/licyeus/statu... · Posted by u/blux
sidcool · 7 months ago
I don't understand the urge to do public shaming instead of first reaching out to support. And the OP is so rude.
jdbernard · 7 months ago
I think it is a result of the impersonal "contact us" intake forms companies have all moved to. You have no indication that you aren't just screaming into the wind. There is no personal touch. So you take to social media where your are sure at least someone hears you. It also scratches the justice itch: if the company doesn't pay attention it looks bad in public and you get some vindication for being ignored.

I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing to do, but I understand it.

jdbernard commented on Replacing tmux in my dev workflow   bower.sh/you-might-not-ne... · Posted by u/elashri
jdbernard · 7 months ago
I don't use tmux because I have to. I use it because I love the way it works. The issues the author of the article and Kovid Goyal raise are not issues for me in practice. If something is built that better suits my needs, I'll be happy to switch. I am particularly sympathetic to Goyal's gripes about the performance/resource wastes of a multiplexer.

But I also take issue with statements like "terminal multiplexers are a bad idea, do not use them, if at all possible" (from the kitty FAQ and the YouTube video linked in the article). Tmux solves a number of real problems for me that Kitty doesn't. Kitty also seems to be moving in a direction that I am not interested in. It's tied to a windowing system when I want a terminal that I can use headless. Even with the hacky workarounds the article mentions, it doesn't really support session persistence when I use this feature of tmux weekly. It introduces a lot of features that are likely to lead to visual noise when the constraints of text-only are one of the main reasons I like terminals (personally I don't want images in my terminal, full stop).

Now, all of this is fine. It's the other statement, "[tmux acts] as a drag on the ecosystem as a whole, making it very hard to get any new features," that causes it all to rub me the wrong way. The only reason you feel like tmux acts like a drag is because there are users like me who won't switch to something like Kitty if it doesn't support tmux. So don't worry about us. Build a new thing that is not backwards compatible and live with the fact that many people won't use it. If you really want to drive the ecosystem forward as a whole, be less condescending about real use-cases that bring benefit to real users.

To be clear (because text is a limited medium), I'm not grumpy, angry, or against Kitty because of this. But I am dismissive.

jdbernard commented on Log by time, not by count   johnscolaro.xyz/blog/log-... · Posted by u/JohnScolaro
pvorb · 8 months ago
At least in the Java world it is common to let the logging framework handle parameter evaluation for you.
jdbernard · 8 months ago
This feels like one of those "not obvious until you've seen it in production" requirements: any production-ready logging framework should have a mechanism to delay parameter evaluation until after the threshold/destination checks are performed. Most languages have some version of deferred execution (lazy evaluation, thunks, etc.)

u/jdbernard

KarmaCake day1335July 16, 2010
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Jonathan Bernard Co-Founder & CTO @ Probatem
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