Discussion

@weirdunits that’s just cathode.church

One of the patterns I’ve seen with people using Claude for programming is:

A programmer in the past looked at a tradeoff space and decided to make a common operation fast and an uncommon operation slow.

Claude lacks proper context of the use of the software but spots a pattern that looks like things it’s training set has flagged as slow and so points to the slow path as a bottleneck.

The user asks for a test case and Claude provides a simple microbenchmark that triggers the slow path.

Now that it’s confirmed as slow, the user asks a ‘agentic’ harness to explore the design space and optimise for the benchmark. The swarm of Claude instances makes plausible changes to the code and reports back with a modified version that passes the test suite and improves the microbenchmark.

The test suite doesn’t exhaustively cover all possible race conditions and so the new version may include subtle concurrency bugs. It also probably makes the common case slower and so is a regression overall.

I don’t know if other LLMs encourage this flow, but I’ve seen it several times from people using Claude.

I suspect Linus’ recent embarrassing interaction with his kernel’s virtual memory code may have been an example of this pattern. It’s very easy to do with an LLM because each step appears to be a demonstrable improvement. It comes with an objective benchmark, it passes all of the tests. Unfortunately, software often depends on a load of extrinsic knowledge that the LLM is trying to infer from a load of likely misleading data points.

"In 8 of the 11 European countries where Palantir operates at national level, the ministry of defence and/or the armed forces are clients of the company. These include countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain"

"Security experts described the idea that the sensitive data involved in these deals would be secure as “woefully naive”.

#Palantir #Security #EUPolitics
‘A new kind of power’: investigation reveals spread of Palantir’s influence across Europe
https://www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-contracts-1-4bn-europe-peter-thiel-follow-the-money-israel-military-maven

The simple observation:

The #curl project is getting DoS‘ed by security researchers.

No mal intent, but driven by stock/work market evaluations.

Example: Aisle has shown its value by the curl CVEs claimed and was now bought by Cohere, presumably a good deal for both companies.

Economically reasonable behaviour for both. The FOSS projects are the roadkill, though.

All reporters have similar motivations, down to individuals improving their personal market value.

@phoenix ha, same here 😊
not a lot, but still flowers and red strawberries

@kawunngg my account is not locked, my posts in this thread were public and have been boosted a bunch.

No idea what you're missing.

AI is conscious AND it is my girlfriend AND it is my slave. A perfect scenario for me, a normal person. Not gonna think too deeply about this. Now do all other living human people deserve the level of investment devoted to my Tamogotchi slave girlfriend? Not so fast.

@futurebird

I will never have an Alexa (Amazon) device snooping in my home. Or Claude.

Menhit is only 14 and fit for her age so I hope she sticks around for many more years, but in event of a new cat moving in, I *will* name her/him after one of those voice asses. Endless fun for visitors/vets!

@nartagnan Woké. Cool.
@Kevin

Bees. Aberdeen Bestiary, England ca. 1200. Aberdeen University Library, MS 24, fol. 63r.
#medieval #MedievalArt

How did you manage to link them? We tried according to the instruction pictures but nothing.

#NewsIWantToRead

Server annoncements I want to read:

Climatejustice.social's admin PaulaToThePeople cured from ME/CFS.

#UtopianMicrofiction

@cstross I woke up from a nightmare a few weeks ago with the realisation of how to fix a plot hole in the book I'm writing. Half asleep grabbed my laptop and typed out stuff into Obsidian, then went back to sleep.

The next day I even MOSTLY understood the notes I left for myself

@jpm @anon_opin "what's that?" LOL

@cwebber Attribution is the single most important piece of metadata. And, regardless of how the author feels about being recognized for their work, the omission of attribution when someone else uses that work is the single strongest hint of malicious intent.

In other words the corporate technology sector, like all corporate industries round the globe, has grown into the sort of thing that the high-tech "founders" and "innovators" purport to despise: a vast byzantine system of bureaucracies and departments and personal fiefdoms, a thing reminiscent of The Government and dependent upon it. This labyrinthine apparatus of corporate technology can grow ever more convoluted by the day because it's fuelled by the general assumption that it's bound to go on forever. There will always be wealth to fund it all... rather like the old Catholic tithe.

The Bazaar has merged with the Cathedral. The animals look from one to the other, no longer able to tell the difference.

~Chara of Pnictogen

You don't need "alexa" or "siri" if you have a cat. You can say the cats name and all kinds of things will happen.

Probably not what you want, but it's still a kind of "voice interface"

And you still have a "she who will not be named"