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justsocrateasin commented on OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly   techcrunch.com/2025/10/27... · Posted by u/jnord
ThrowawayTestr · 2 months ago
How can I trust a therapist that has a financial incentive to keep me seeing them?
justsocrateasin · 2 months ago
Over the last five years I've been in and out of therapy and 2/3 of my therapists have "graduated me" at some point in time, stating that their practice didn't see permanent therapy as a good solution. I don't think all therapists view it this way.
justsocrateasin commented on Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code   codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
senordevnyc · 3 months ago
We do have fully self-driving cars. You can go to a number of American cities and take a nap in the backseat of one while it drives you around safely.
justsocrateasin · 3 months ago
But it's not fully self driving. SF Waymo can't bring you to the airport. You missed OPs point, which was that the last few percentage points are the hardest.
justsocrateasin commented on Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code   codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
jf22 · 3 months ago
It's easy to avoid overly complex solutions with LLMs.

First, your prompts should be direct enough to the LLM doesn't wander around producing complexity for no reason.

Second, you should add rules/learning/context to always solve problems in the simplest way possible.

Lastly, after generation, you can prompt the LLM to reduce the complexity of the solution.

justsocrateasin · 3 months ago
Okay how about this situation that one of my junior devs hit recently:

Coding in an obj oriented language in an enormous code base (big tech). Junior dev is making a new class and they start it off with LLM generation. LLM adds in three separate abstract classes to the inheritance structure, for a total of seven inherited classes. Each of these inherited classes ultimately comes with several required classes that are trivial to add but end up requiring another hundred lines of code, mostly boilerplate.

Tell me how you, without knowing the code base, get the LLM to not add these classes? Our language model is already trained on our code base, and it just so happens that these are the most common classes a new class tends to inherit. Junior dev doesn't know that the classes should only be used in specific instances.

Sure, you could go line by line and say "what does this inherited class do, do I need it?" and actually, the dev did that. It cut down the inherited classes from three to two, but missed two of them because it didn't understand on a product side why they weren't needed.

Fast forward a year, these abstract classes are still inherited, no one knows why or how because there's no comprehension but we want to refactor the model.

justsocrateasin commented on My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth   gatesnotes.com/home/home-... · Posted by u/nrvn
justsocrateasin · 8 months ago
did you even read the article? He talks about how he has/will continue to invest significant resources into alzheimers research.
justsocrateasin commented on Study finds that budget cuts to public R&D would significantly hurt the economy   impa.american.edu/costs-o... · Posted by u/geox
olalonde · 8 months ago
I'm no fan of Trump, but it's important to approach studies like this with a healthy dose of skepticism. Macroeconomics isn’t an exact science, and studies like these often rely on dubious assumptions and extrapolations. For example, what are the odds that current public R&D spending is really at an optimal theoretical level? Do these models account for potential substitution by private industry if government funding is reduced? etc.
justsocrateasin · 8 months ago
Private industries are not incentivized to pursue the same kind of research as the public sector. An excellent example of this is antibiotics (or antifungal drugs). Pharma companies do not put forth a large budget for research like this, because it isn't profitable. But, if we were to see a super bug crop up in the next 10 years (unfortunately this is not a crazy "if" due to trends in antibiotic resistance), then you would quickly see the public sector's research paying enormous dividends in terms of missed economic hardship. These economic benefits would not affect the private sector in the same way, because a pharma company would not see, let's say, $50b in profits from helping ease an equivalent $50b in economic hardship caused by hospital bills/suffering/lost productivity.

On top of this, let's just look at the current private sector and what they spend R&D dollars in: can you really say that $1b spent by Google, Meta, Amazon etc. actually ends up being better worthwhile than $1b spent by NASA? see this list of inventions NASA has inadvertently created: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...

In general, public sector research is already so strapped for cash. Their budgets are not large. Their salaries are lower than the private sector. I agree that public R&D spending is likely not at a "theoretical optimal level", but would you argue that private sector R&D spending is?

justsocrateasin commented on GitHub reveals how software engineers are purging federal databases   404media.co/forbidden-wor... · Posted by u/josefresco
readthenotes1 · a year ago
To you maybe.

I worked with a woman whose relatives didn't make it out of Auschwitz.

She objected to us initializing System Services.

Silly?

justsocrateasin · a year ago
I also had relatives that didn't make it out of Auschwitz. I could not care less.
justsocrateasin commented on Ask HN: I don't want to code anymore. What else can I do?    · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
jf · a year ago
I presume that you are familiar with it already, but in the off chance that you are not. Check out the Recurse Center
justsocrateasin · a year ago
Second this, I know several close friends who have done the Recurse center and they say it's a phenomenal experience, one of the best things they've ever done. Generally speaking the job placement afterwards is also not all that bad if you decide to go back into the workforce.
justsocrateasin commented on What Is a Staff Engineer?   nishtahir.com/what-is-a-s... · Posted by u/CarefreeCrayon
justsocrateasin · a year ago
This article feels a little bit pointless to me. ryandvm said it perfectly - a staff engineer is just what happens when you have a senior engineer who deserves a promotion, but wants to be a technical leader not a people leader. How that actually fits into the company varies heavily company to company, specifically size and maturity.

I feel like this article wants to talk about the performance matrix through the lens of four pillars, and just arbitrarily chose "staff" as the role to talk about since it's a very senior engineer.

justsocrateasin commented on What Is a Staff Engineer?   nishtahir.com/what-is-a-s... · Posted by u/CarefreeCrayon
MartinMond · a year ago
I like that, but then what is a senior engineer?
justsocrateasin · a year ago
An engineer that makes less impact than a staff engineer but more impact than a junior engineer.

u/justsocrateasin

KarmaCake day474January 14, 2022View Original