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krisoft commented on Writing with LLM is not a shame   reflexions.florianernotte... · Posted by u/flornt
amiga386 · 17 hours ago
> Expecting people to read unverified machine output is rude.

Quite. Its the attention economy, you've demanded people's attention, and then you shove crap that even you didn't spend time reading in their face.

Even if you're using it as an editor... you know that editors vary in quality, right? You wouldn't accept a random editor just because they're cheap or free. Prose has a lot in it, not just syntax, spelling and semantics, but style, tone, depth... and you'd want competent feedback on all of that. Ideally insightful feedback. Unless you yourself don't care about your craft.

But perhaps you don't care about your craft. And if that's the case... why should anyone else care or waste their time on it?

krisoft · 9 hours ago
> You wouldn't accept a random editor just because they're cheap or free.

If the alternative is no editor then yeah i would. Most of what i write receives no checks by anyone other than me. A very small percentage of my output gets a second set of eyes. And it is usually a coworker or a friend (depending on the context of what is being written.) Their qualification is usually that they were available and amenable.

> Unless you yourself don't care about your craft.

This is a tad bit elitist. I care about my craft and would love if a competent, and insightfull editor would go over every piece of writing i put out for others to read. It would cost too much, and would be to hard to arrange. I just simply can’t afford it. On the other hand I can afford to send my writings through an LLM, and improve it here and there occasionaly. Not because i don’t care about my craft, but precisely because I do.

krisoft commented on Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers   pistachioapp.com/blog/cop... · Posted by u/Sayrus
scott_w · 5 days ago
> I don't understand why you think tracking user access rights would be infeasible and would not scale.

Allow me to try to inject my understanding of how these agents work vs regular applications.

A regular SaaS will have an API endpoint that has permissions attached. Before the endpoint processes anything, the user making the request has their permissions checked against the endpoint itself. Once this request succeeds, anything that endpoint collects is considered "ok" ship to the user.

AI Agents, instead, directly access the database, completely bypassing this layer. That means you need to embed the access permissions into the individual rows, rather than at the URL/API layer. It's much more complex as a result.

For your bank analogy: they actually work in a similar way to how I described above. A temporary access is granted to the resources but, once it's granted, any data included in those screens is assumed to be ok. They won't see something like a blank box somewhere because there's info they're not supposed to see.

DISCLAIMER: I'm making an assumption on how these AI Agents work, I could be wrong.

krisoft · 5 days ago
> AI Agents, instead, directly access the database, completely bypassing this layer.

If so, then as the wise man says: "well, there‘s your problem!"

I don't doubt there are implementations like that out there, but we should not judge the potential of a technology by the mistakes of the most boneheaded implementation.

Doing the same in the bank analogy would be like giving root SQL access to the phone operators and then asking them pretty please to be careful with it.

krisoft commented on Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers   pistachioapp.com/blog/cop... · Posted by u/Sayrus
planb · 5 days ago
I am assigned to develop a company internal chatbot that accesses confidential documents and I am having a really hard time communicating this problem to executives:

As long as not ALL the data the agent hat access too is checked against the rights of the current user placing the request, there WILL be ways to leak data. This means Vector databases, Search Indexes or fancy "AI Search Databases" would be required on a per user basis or track the access rights along with the content, which is infeasible and does not scale.

And as access rights are complex and can change at any given moment, that would still be prone to race conditions.

krisoft · 5 days ago
> This means Vector databases, Search Indexes or fancy "AI Search Databases" would be required on a per user basis or track the access rights along with the content, which is infeasible and does not scale.

I don't understand why you think tracking user access rights would be infeasible and would not scale. There is a query. You search for matching documents in your vector database / index. Once you have found the potentially relevant list of documents you check which ones can the current user access. You only pass the ones over to the LLM which the user can see.

This is very similar to how banks provide phone based services. The operator on the other side of the line can only see your account details once you have authenticated yourself. They can't accidentally tell you someone else's account balance, because they themselves don't have access to it unless they typed in all the information you provide them to authenticate yourself. You can't trick the operator to provide you with someone else's account balance because they can't see the account balance of anyone without authenticating first.

krisoft commented on Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32   svendewaerhert.com/blog/t... · Posted by u/waerhert
artgship · 6 days ago
I love this so much. Is there any open-source software that calculates where a given planet or star might be (based on your coordinates) and automatically finds the star / planet and then follows it? Can these mounts be used with such software if it exists?
krisoft · 6 days ago
> Is there any open-source software that calculates where a given planet or star might be (based on your coordinates)

Sure. Skyfield is a python library to calculate that (among others). Right on the front page is an example how to calculate the azimuth and elevation of Mars: https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/

krisoft commented on Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library   openculture.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/Anon84
rpastuszak · 9 days ago
Here's a picture that lives in my head rent free:

- programming is alchemy: combine, transmute

- prompt engineering is demonic evocation: bend the demon to your will through language play and gotchas

krisoft · 9 days ago
Coding with an LLM certainly feels like being a malconvoker.
krisoft commented on Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial   trial.medpath.com/news/5c... · Posted by u/amichail
gryn · 19 days ago
I'm a late adopter to most things.

my estimate would bigger than others and I would put it at 30-50years.

I take smoking as a cautionary tale, in the beginning it was pushed as not just a recreational thing but a healthy activity that bring benefits with papers published to sing praises about it. my parents were even nudged by their teachers/doctors/etc when they were young to try smoking.

now we all know that smoking is beyond bad and all that early "research" was just people paid off by big companies to promote it.

krisoft · 19 days ago
> I take smoking as a cautionary tale, in the beginning it was pushed as not just a recreational thing but a healthy activity

While i agree the gist of what you are saying, also important to mention that humans started cultivating tobaco when mamoths still roamed the Earth. There was indeed a concentrated pro-smoking publicity campaign by tobaco manufacturers in the 1930s, but it was hardly “in the beginning” of our tobaco use.

krisoft commented on A Carnival Attraction That Saved Premature Babies (2016)   smithsonianmag.com/histor... · Posted by u/pr337h4m
opwieurposiu · 20 days ago
I think 6,500 alive babies is probably a better credential then a diploma on a wall.
krisoft · 19 days ago
That is the “competent” part from the “competent quack”.

Obviously if we can believe his numbers, that is.

krisoft commented on A Carnival Attraction That Saved Premature Babies (2016)   smithsonianmag.com/histor... · Posted by u/pr337h4m
myself248 · 20 days ago
I don't think he was a quack, he wasn't selling anything counterfactual or deceptive. He was outside the mainstream, but more in the sense of a specialist than a fraudster. And his novel funding model allowed care when none else could be afforded.
krisoft · 20 days ago
> he wasn't selling anything counterfactual or deceptive

He was saying he is a physician, and by all evidence he wasn't. That's both deceptive and counterfactual.

krisoft commented on Why doctors hate their computers (2018)   newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/mitchbob
dotancohen · 21 days ago
I'm not talking about programming. I'm talking about basic use of a keyboard and mouse. You just expected other people will know how, yet have no basic knowledge of other professions, even those that are arguably more important.

Do you have basic knowledge of your own body? Anatomy, for instance? I recently tore a rotator cuff, none of the four muscles mentioned I had ever heard of in my life. It would have helped me immensely had I not had to spend an evening googling what are actually basic medical facts.

Or how many people who drive know what a catalytic converter is, or what symptoms are typical of it failing? Or even what to do when certain idiot lights light up on their dashboard? The check engine light comes on, do you stop on the side of the road or can you continue to your destination? Or can you continue, but just to a garage? Do you have to do so at reduced speed? How about if the oil light comes on? How about if the low tire pressure light comes on? How about if the airbag light comes on? How about if the battery light comes on? How about if the light with an exclamation mark inside a triangle comes on? How about the light that looks like a profile of the car with skid marks under it? How about the light with the cryptic three letters ABS?

krisoft · 21 days ago
> I'm talking about basic use of a keyboard and mouse. You just expected other people will know how, yet have no basic knowledge of other professions, even those that are arguably more important.

I'm a bit confused about what you are saying. Basic use of a keyboard and mouse is not exclusively part of the software engineering or IT profession. It is in fact part of every job where as part of your job you use a computer. Which is almost every job nowadays.

Same as writers are not the only people who are taught how to write, and accountants are not the only people who are taught arithmetics.

> I recently tore a rotator cuff, none of the four muscles mentioned I had ever heard of in my life. It would have helped me immensely had I not had to spend an evening googling what are actually basic medical facts.

Sorry to hear that, and I hope you are feeling better. Not really sure though what is your point. Are you saying doctors should not know about basic use of a keyboard and mouse because you haven't heard of the rotator cuff? Or are you saying that people should be also taught about the rotator cuff who are not doctors? I just don't really understand your point.

> Or how many people who drive know what a catalytic converter is, [...] How about the light with the cryptic three letters ABS?

I'm really not sure what your point is.

krisoft commented on Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%   science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/sxv
kazinator · a month ago
The problem with your reasoning is that some humans cannot solve the problem even without the irrelevant info about cats.

We can easily cherry pick our humans to fit any hypothesis about humans, because there are dumb humans.

The issue is that AI models which, on the surface, appear to be similar to the smarter quantile of humans in solving certain problems, become confused in ways that humans in that problem-solving class would not be.

That's obviously because the language model is not generally intelligent it's just retrieving tokens from a high-dimensional statistically fit function. The extra info injects noise into the calculation which confounds it.

krisoft · a month ago
> We can easily cherry pick our humans to fit any hypothesis about humans, because there are dumb humans.

Nah. You would take a large number of humans, make half of them take the test with distractions and half without distracting statements and then you would compare their results statistically. Yes there would be some dumb ones, but as long as you test on enough people they would show up in both samples rougly at the same rate.

> become confused in ways that humans in that problem-solving class would not be.

You just state the same thing others are disputing. Do you think it will suddenly become convincing if you write it down a few more times?

u/krisoft

KarmaCake day12568February 27, 2011
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