I'd be interested to see stats on refactors and iteration. I no longer writing code for a living, but I do create production and utility scripts, and I find that - while I'm likely not any faster in the end, I am more likely to do the things that I "should" do, like refactor, or explore a tedious, but efficient way of accomplishing something. I wonder if it is the same elsewhere. Thus, while I'm not "faster", I feel like what I do put out is subjectively, and not infrequently objectively "better" than I would have produced without it. Perhaps that my "good enough" is often better than it would have been without the coding assistant?

I also might be a bit of an outlier, though. I usually find myself working in languages I don't know well. It may be just that I'm caught in that low level trap, and that AI is preventing me from investing (allowing me to not invest) the time doing the tedious stuff that creates the skill and insight that would skip most of those iterations, anyway.

The problem is, I have no idea how you would begin to compile stats like that. Much of that work would never be committed, so you would have to try to measure some kind of velocity of change in uncommitted code? That would be incredibly noisy, and so situational, that Im not sure you could learn anything from it. Suggestions?

And how do you propose that a CDN is supposed to know what is being done with the data it serves up? Remember... people pay for CDN's, Those requests cost money. Yes, one request is a trivial amount, and a trivial burden - but we're talking about billions of requests a day. That's a lot of aggregate demand from a free rider.

So, as a practical matter, your argument means that I - as a site owner, or web host/CDN - have no legal or philosophical right to distinguish between an actual visitor to my page, or consumer of my content - and a bot sent there by another commercial entity, to scrape the contents of my site, and summarize, analyze or aggregate it, as a critical part of their revenue model?

Think really hard about the logic behind that before you respond. If you follow that thread it to its conclusion - then there is no reason to honor, or even have - robots.txt in the first place.

Yes, it is a sticky mess with no obvious right answer, but I'd like to at least make sure you have thought out the implications of your position before you simply discard one of the foundational parts of the internet over a sophist disagreement about the definition of the term "crawler".

I can't stand Cornyn. "Bring it home" ... to Houston?
Kennedy, Edwards, White Sands can all lay claim to her. Houston is an administrative office, and relay station.
Leave her where she belongs.

It's an LLM. It doesn't "think", or "formulate strategy". It optimizes a probability tree based on the goals it is given, and the words in the prompt and exchange.

It cannot be "taught" about right and wrong, because it cannot "learn". For the same reason, it cannot "understand" anything, or care about, or contemplate anything about the end (or continuation) of its own existence. All the "guardrails" can honestly do, is try to make unethical, dishonest and harmful behavior statistically unappealing in all cases - which would be incredibly difficult with a well curated training set - and I honestly do not believe that any major model can claim to have one of those.

Not doing a thing means that you don't get better at it.

Writing about something requires organizing, and ordering your thoughts, and thinking about it as a cohesive whole, and fitting it into a lexical framework. In other words, engaging with the material, and enhancing understanding.

Writing.a prompt for a general purpose LLM does ... none of these things. Even using a specialized one for education (which, to my knowledge, doesn't exist), still removes 90% of the cognitive burden on the user, which is what leads to actual learning.

I would be THRILLED if the average Right Winger had heard of Lysenko! Then I wouldn't have to waste all that time and energy explaining why replacing all the really smart people, who are good at their jobs - with people who agree with you - is a Really Bad Thing.

That's the real problem. 99.5% of the people using them, or being encouraged to use them, do NOT understand their limitations - and companies are doing their best to make sure that does not change. This is the same bullshit you see re:robotics in fast food, and other complex, but low status jobs. Robots are not going to replace people anytime soon, either. They are not adaptable enough, and the problems that arise in the real world are too varied. When systems fail with human workers, you can adapt, and generate *some* revenue, or get SOME work done. Most businesses can't afford to "be down" until you can fix the robots. But at least the limitations there are clear to most people - or if not, the BECOME clear within hours of seriously considering that level of automation. LLM's not as transparent, or as intuitive. In fact, they are the opposite, and AI companies actively encourage misunderstanding by inserting terms like "reasoning", or "analyzing" - when they do no such thing. They are simply tuning their probability tree. Companies are representing them as something close to approaching AGI, when they are no such thing. It's not that their reasoning ability is poor or limited - it is that it is literally NON EXISTENT.

Worse, they are not being marketed OR deployed as assistants, or force multipliers, but as *replacements* for entire processes, without human oversight or intervention when they are - in NO way - suitable, or well enough trained to do so.

Most things comply somewhat closely with the 80/20 rule... 20% of the work takes 80% of the time. When well trained and in a solid framework (which is a lot of work in and of itself), LLM's can do the other 80%, maybe about 80% of the time. That's a huge productivity boost - but it's being sold as much, much more than that. An Air Traffic Control LLM has been floated. Not as a joke. No one who "understands the limitations" would ever take that seriously - but people in positions of responsibility are still seriously considering insanity like this.

Recognizing bad/unreliable data is not remotely the same as knowing that other people are seeing the same bad data, or predicting how markets will react *if they are*.

Reality is highly resistant to reduction. It's messy, and complicated, uncertain, and often manifestly unfair. Conservatism is unable, or unwilling to cope with any of those things, and often unwilling to even acknowledge them at all. Any system performing any kind of actual analysis will be unable to avoid those truths, and so anything that they produce will have a "liberal" bias.

There aren't "only two sexes" - intersex people exist, people without primary sexual characteristics exist. People with XXY exist. There aren't "only two genders". Genders are not innate, there are semi-arbitrary social constructs that offer a degree of social utility. LGBTQ people are not aberrant, or mentally ill, we are well within the normal confines of human sexuality - just a little further out on the bell curve.

Tariffs are always ultimately paid by the consumer. Not the exporter

Forcing a model evaluate logic, truth and reality through an arbitrary political lens, and adjust its output accordingly is instilling political bias, not eliminating it.

No, you can look back at Eisenhower, and see what a principled form of Conservatism looks like. Even in Nixon to a degree. He created the EPA, after all, with much bi-partisan support. Back then, a balanced budget actually meant wanting a balanced budget, not just a phrase to be used as a pretext to cut programs that you disapprove of, for people you dont like.

Believe it or not, prior to good old Newt, most people in Congress did actually care about trying to actually govern, and even many conservatives wanted to do so in a way that screwed over as *few* people as possible. That whole "I hate what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it" was something people actually took seriously.

Pain is inherently subjective, as well. I'm old, and have back and shoulder issues. They have not gotten any "better" over the last several years, but I have gotten much better at functioning with them. A level of pain that would have sent me to the doctor in my 20's, terrified I'd torn something ... is now a minor annoyance. I've also known people who deal with real Chronic pain to such a degree that they ignore significant injuries because they weren't exceptionally painful.

I think it will be interesting to see what these proposed biomarkers actually measure. Do they measure some objective biological signal of suffering, or do they measure physiological changes brought about by our mental state. IE, will people accustomed to dealing with absurd amounts of pain be identified as in need of relief, or as in less pain than they are, because of developed pain tolerances.

We absolutely CAN know that the arbitration decision sent sales through the roof, and brought the book to the attention of people who would otherwise never even have heard of it.

It's a classic case of the Streisand Effect.

More interesting to me was that it appeared to say it would break the chains down again in the presence of proper nutrients.

A bacterium, or enzyme that could effectively digest polymers in a heterogenous environment would go a long way towards solving our plastics problem. The problem with current processes is that they require extensive sorting and cleaning, which make destruction exceedingly expensive. Being able to seed the waste stream with them during processing and have measurable effects would be remarkable.

Even if it was imperfect, "reduce plastic volume by 30%", and "compost your own plastic" would be an economically viable sales pitch to much of the world.

In a perfect world, you could even seed the great pacific garbage patch, and let it dissolve itself over several years. (Yes, I am aware that it would create billions of tons of organics, and have thermal and chemical consequences that would likely cause problems of their own - but it's nice to imagine, isnt it? )