Call the function from the if block.

Now your tests can more easily call it.

I think at my last job we did argument parsing in the if block, and passed stuff into the main function.

I know it’s not for everyone, but for me I feel like buying music I like directly from the artist/label or via bandcamp has been a better experience. Now I have a library of DRM free music, and I know the musicians got a better cut.

no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

I found a free port of Civilization (unciv) on the phone and immediately lost like 3 hours. That shit is dangerous. There are better phone games, but there’s certainly a lot of slop.

I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?

I think I posted this the last time this topic came up, but Ed Zitron’s article about how business idiots run things despite not really understanding the users or product is pretty solid. Long, but solid. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

I’m reminded of that book about Authoritarian Personality Types. They did like a model UN / Civilization game kind of thing, where the players represented different countries and could make decisions about policy, war, and so on. There were two groups. Unknown to the players, the people running this experiment put all the people who scored high for authoritarian personality in one group, and everyone else in the other group.

The group with low authoritarian personality scores? Basically everything was fine. They solved the ozone layer crisis. They were solving world hunger. One guy tried to be a dick and the rest of the group brought him in line.

The high authoritarian guys? Nuclear apocalypse. They made them sit in the dark for five minutes to think about what they’d done, and let them have a do-over. They still did a shit job. Petty squabbling. Stealing. Out of control climate crisis.

I don’t think there’s an ethical way to do this in real life, but I do think if you just didn’t allow people with that kind of personality to have any real power, we’d all be much better off.

It’s also possible i mangled the story because I rewrote it here from memory, but I believe it was in this book: https://theauthoritarians.org/

Lots of people don’t get anything resembling a speedy trial in the US.

To be right wing is to be ruled by emotions. Humans are all emotional creatures, but for some people it reaches a point where emotion alone creates reality. Facts are there to be picked up or set aside to support feelings. When their guy eats ice cream it’s because he’s a man of the people. When your guy eats ice cream it’s because he’s a baby. Facts don’t matter. It’s feelings.

And most of their feelings seem to be fear. Fear of loss. Fear of humiliation. You can show them stats and history demonstrating how, like, a diverse workforce leads to higher productivity and greater happiness, but that doesn’t matter. They’re not looking at facts. They’re feeling feelings.

Imagine trying to talk to someone who’s drunk. That’s the right wing, except all the time and they can’t really sober up. Honestly, it sounds like hell.

Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.

Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.

Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.

They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.

They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.

Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.

The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.

Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.

I wonder if it’s exceeded the max length and caused a poorly handled error

Ed Zitron wrote a blog post I’ve been thinking about, where he said that a lot of decisions are made by “business idiots” now. People that don’t really use or understand the product, and don’t really understand the users or their needs. It’s an interesting read, even though the guy is rather verbose: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

I see what you did there and I’m not going to fully fall for it.

I guess it’s like the difference between a parasite that doesn’t kill the host, and one that does. The current breed looks like it’s going to kill the host.

I canceled my subscription. In part because fuck using AI to hurt labor, but also unemployment. Capitalists want us to spend spend spend, but they don’t want to give us any money to spend.

Sometimes you do. Like monologue. Monogamy. Hm but I guess the root isn’t a whole word in those cases.

Huh. I guess no one says “monosexual”

This reminds me of the new vector for malware that targets “vibe coders”. LLMs tend to hallucinate libraries that don’t exist. Like, it’ll tell you to add, install, and use jjj_image_proc or whatever. The vibe coder will then get an error like “that library doesn’t exist” and "can’t call jjj_image_proc.process()`.

But you, a malicious user, could go and create a library named jjj_image_proc and give it a function named process. Vibe coders will then pull down and run your arbitrary code, and that’s kind of game over for them.

You’d just need to find some commonly hallucinated library names

Do the needs stay satisfied, or is it going to be like 2 years later we have billionaires and starvation again?

Many people have found that using LLMs for coding is a net negative. You end up with sloppy, vulnerable, code that you don’t understand. I’m not sure if there have been any rigorous studies about it yet, but it seems very plausible. LLMs are prone to hallucinating, so you’re going to get it telling you to import libraries that don’t exist, or use parts of the standard library that don’t exist.

It also opens up a whole new security threat vector of squatting. If LLMs routinely try to install a library from pypi that doesn’t exist, you can create that library and have it do whatever you want. Vibe coders will then run it, and that’s game over for them.

So yeah, you could “rigorously check” it but a. all of us are lazy and aren’t going to do that routinely (like, have you used snapshot tests?), b. it’s going to anchor you around whatever it produced, making it harder to think about other approaches, and c. it’s often slower overall than just doing a good job from the start.

I imagine there are similar problems with analyzing large amounts of text. It doesn’t really understand anything. To verify it’s correct, you would have to read the whole thing yourself anyway.

There are probably specialized use cases that are good- I’m told AI is useful for like protein folding and cancer detection- but that still has experts (I hope) looking at the results.

To your point, I think people are trying to use these LLMs for things with definite answers, too. Like if I go to google and type in “largest state in the US” it uses AI. This is not a good use case.