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yes_man commented on Majority in EU's biggest states believes bloc 'sold out' in US tariff deal   theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/belter
yes_man · 3 days ago
The kind of conditions for peace Russia seems to be going for allows them an unfair position to restart the war in a few years, or pressure Ukraine to become a satellite state for Russia with threat of a new invasion.

This is via demanding Ukraine imposes restrictions on their armed forces, Ukraine giving up territories Russia doesn’t even control today but which are awfully convenient invasion grounds in a potential future attack on Kyiv and declaring Western peacekeepers in Ukraine post-war as a dealbreaker by their FM.

Not to even mention denying any future entry to an alliance like NATO.

And all this by a country that has a record of breaking such agreements time and time again.

Is this really a sound deal Ukraine should take?

yes_man commented on Formatting code should be unnecessary   maxleiter.com/blog/format... · Posted by u/MaxLeiter
socalgal2 · 5 days ago
some settings have advantages. For example, trailing commas on tables

    [
      'apple',
      'banana',
      'orange',
    ]
has an advantage over

    [
      'apple',
      'banana',
      'orange'
    ]
Because adding a new line at the end of the table (1) requires editing 1 line, instead of 2 (2) makes the diffs in code review smaller and easier to read and review. So a bad choice makes my life harder. The same applies to local variable declarations.

Sorted lists (or sorted includes) is also something that makes my life easier. If they're not sorted then everyone adds their new things to the end, which means there are many times more merge conflicts. sorted doesn't mean there are zero but does mean there are less than "append to the end". So, just like an auto-formatter is there to save time, don't waste my time by not sorting where possible.

Also, my OCD hates inconsistency. So

    [1, 2, 3]
    {a, b, c}
Is ok and

    [ 1, 2, 3 ]
    [ a, b, c ]
Is ok but

    [1, 2, 3]
    { a, b, c }
Is not. I don't care which but pick ONE style, not two styles!

yes_man · 5 days ago
The problem is when 2 people with same level of enthusiasm for linter rules but opposing views collide. If there’s nothing more impactful you could be solving and spending energy and time on than arguing those linter rules, then it’s time to question where the project is at and where is it going.

And if there is something more important, then instead of of micro-optimizing the rules when there is strong disagreement it’s probably best if one of the parties takes the high road and lives with it so you can all focus on what matters.

yes_man commented on Paracetamol disrupts early embryogenesis by cell cycle inhibition   academic.oup.com/humrep/a... · Posted by u/XzetaU8
astrange · 19 days ago
Tylenol is very safe if taken as prescribed. The overdose amount is relatively low, but not uniquely low.

The alternatives are worse - ibuprofen destroys your stomach lining if taken at the regular dose for too long.

yes_man · 19 days ago
Ibuprofen also increases risk of strokes and NSAIDs have been linked to increased risk of intracerebral hemorrhage. It’s a question of whether benefits outweigh cons on population level and I am not an expert, but recommending ibuprofen over acetaminophen might be over-simplifying things. It depends on the person (their meds, their pre-existing conditions, their genetics etc)
yes_man commented on Never write your own date parsing library   zachleat.com/web/adventur... · Posted by u/ulrischa
mikepurvis · 2 months ago
Some things are good hard, the kind of hard that's driven by an interesting domain, going deep with well-architected tools or systems, learning lots of cool stuff.

I expect datetime-adjacent code is basically the opposite of all of this. All the hard parts are driven by fiddly adherence to real-world geography, politics, physics/astronomy, etc. There's no underlying consistency from which a sane model can be extracted, it's just special cases and arbitrary parameters all the way down.

I'm up for a challenge of course, but all else being equal, I'm happy to leave work that is the "bad hard" to others.

yes_man · 2 months ago
Reminds me of this passage from Postgres documentation:

”As an example, 2014-06-04 12:00 America/New_York represents noon local time in New York, which for this particular date was Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4). So 2014-06-04 12:00 EDT specifies that same time instant. But 2014-06-04 12:00 EST specifies noon Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5), regardless of whether daylight savings was nominally in effect on that date. … To complicate matters, some jurisdictions have used the same timezone abbreviation to mean different UTC offsets at different times; for example, in Moscow MSK has meant UTC+3 in some years and UTC+4 in others.”

Parsing datetimes indeed sounds like a challenge in collecting, knowing and maintaining all these warped out standards and compromises. ”Bad hard” is a great description

yes_man commented on Claude Code now supports hooks   docs.anthropic.com/en/doc... · Posted by u/ramoz
ath92 · 2 months ago
Barring population growth, there is essentially fixed demand for agriculture. For software we don’t know what the market will look like once everything about making it gets automated. Either we will churn out the same amount of software with fewer people, or the same amount of people will churn out larger amounts of software. Or maybe there will be even more people working on creating enormous amounts of software. I’d say the likely answer is somewhere between the first and second option, but time will tell.
yes_man · 2 months ago
If software becomes cheaper to make it’s not like every IT company in the world is running a cartel where they agree to just cut costs and leave the output the same. Someone will come and smash the competition with more or better features and the ones who didn’t invest into development will face pressure to acquire more talent again.

There really isn’t a diminishing return on executing great ideas. Almost all software projects have an essentially endless backlog of items that could be done. So I think it will be between 2. and 3. with people who really understand how software is built being even more in demand than ever since they act as multipliers in making sure the increased output is evolvable and maintainable.

yes_man commented on Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model    · Posted by u/owendarko
tacitusarc · 5 months ago
Thank you so much for this bit of humor. After ChatGPT first responds with the surgeon being the mom, I asked it to read the riddle more carefully, thinking it might figure it out with a little prompting. I got this gem of a response:

Ah — now I see the twist. The patient is the cousin, but the surgeon says “He’s my son.”

That means the man who died was the surgeon.

So how is it possible? Because:

The surgeon is the cousin’s father — and the man who died was also the surgeon.

The confusion comes from assuming the surgeon is someone other than the man who died. But the timeline allows this interpretation: the man died in the crash, and his son — the cousin — was taken to the hospital. The surgeon arrives, sees his son, and says he cannot operate.

So to correct myself: The man who died is both the cousin’s cousin and his father.

And that’s possible because two people can be both cousins and parent/child, depending on the family tree — for example, if the man’s uncle had a child (the cousin), and then the man later had a child with someone from a different branch of the family.

Want a diagram of how that family relationship could work?

yes_man · 5 months ago
Now I really want to see that diagram…
yes_man commented on YAGRI: You are gonna read it   scottantipa.com/yagri... · Posted by u/escot
lud_lite · 5 months ago
Another option is audit info could go to another table or datastore entirely.

If you never use it, that data can be dumped to s3 glacier periodically (e.g. after 90 days).

By losing the foreign key you gain flexibility in what you audit. Maybe audit the operation and not the 20 writes it causes.

yes_man · 5 months ago
Fair enough, but now your application is relying on 100% uptime of AWS and S3 and no network failures in between. And what happens if your transaction goes through, but the request to AWS doesn’t? What happens if another operation mutates the target meanwhile before you can retry with current state? Your app is also slowing down since it needs to send the events to S3 and guarantee they got there. Now you are reinventing two-stage commits. Unless you aren’t actually making an audit log and don’t care if events are guaranteed to be logged?

So like OP said, no silver bullets exist for auditing.

yes_man commented on AI Is the Black Mirror   nautil.us/ai-is-the-black... · Posted by u/Jun8
magic_hamster · 9 months ago
Statistics play a massive role in our universe, and evidence suggests that even the very fabric of the universe is statistic. I am not putting statistics down, however I do think statistics are orthogonal to a deliberate thought. Which is why I can't see LLMs as a very smart person making deliberate discussion just yet.
yes_man · 9 months ago
What is ”deliberate thought”? And why would human level intelligence require it? Wouldn’t performance of any intelligence be completely separate of how it produces the output? I mean if an AI one day surpasses human performance in every conceivable task, is the argument still going to be ”yeah but I feel like it’s not deliberate thought, it’s just statistics”?
yes_man commented on The art of programming and why I won't use LLM   kennethnym.com/blog/why-i... · Posted by u/theapache64
milemi · a year ago
This is like saying “I don’t understand how airplanes fly, so I’ll happily board an airplane designed by an LLM. The reality is determined by how much I know about it.”
yes_man · a year ago
No, the other way around. I am saying it is not a smart take to say ”a safe airplane cannot be built if LLMs were used in the process in any way, because reasons”. The safety of the airplane (or more generally the outcome of any venture) can be measured in other ways than leaning on some rule that you cannot use an LLM for help at any stage because they are not always correct
yes_man commented on The art of programming and why I won't use LLM   kennethnym.com/blog/why-i... · Posted by u/theapache64
rstat1 · a year ago
Saying a compiler, and an "AI" hallucination model are even remotely the same is a pretty huge stretch.
yes_man · a year ago
I get the point that they are in different magnitudes of unknown but the analogy is still pretty good when it comes to the median programmer, who has no idea what goes on within either one. And if you argue that compilers are ultimately deterministic, that same argument technically holds for an LLM as well.

The biggest difference to me is that we have humans that claim they can explain why compilers work the way they do. But I might as well trust someone who says the same about LLMs, because honestly I have no way to verify if they speak the truth. So I am already offloading a lot of burden of proof about the systems I work on to others. And why does this ”other” need to be a human.

u/yes_man

KarmaCake day391September 22, 2018View Original