thebestaquaman

@thebestaquaman@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You can fine-grain nr. 2 even more: You can give access to e.g. modify files only in a certain sub-tree, or run only specific commands with only specific options.

  A restrictive yet quite safe approach is to only permit e.g. git add, git commit, and only allow changes to files under the VC. That effectively prevents any irreversible damage, without requiring you to manually approve all the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re absolutely right. I mostly run a pretty simple local model though, so it’s not like it’s very expensive either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Saying that it can serve the same purpose does not mean that I mean the two are equivalent in every aspect.

  Just based on how you’ve responded so far it seems like you’re wilfully misinterpreting how I actually use an LLM for this purpose, especially with responses referring to LLMs causing people to commit suicide and offloading decision making or the thought process itself to an LLM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It really seems like you’re wilfully misinterpreting what I’m writing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That is correct. However, an LLM and a rubber duck have in common that they are inanimate objects that I can use as targets when formulating my thoughts and ideas. The LLM can also respond to things like “what part of that was unclear”, to help keep my thoughts flowing. NOTE: The point of asking an LLM “what part of that was unclear” is NOT that it has a qualified answer, but rather that it’s a completely unqualified prompt to explain a part of the process more thoroughly.

  This is a very well established process: Whether you use an actual rubber duck, your dog, writing a blog post / personal memo (I do the last quite often) or explaining your problem to a friend that’s not at all in the field. The point is to have some kind of process that helps you keep your thoughts flowing and touching in on topics you might not think are crucial, thus helping you find a solution. The toddler that answers every explanation with “why?” can be ideal for this, and an LLM can emulate it quite well in a workplace environment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, absolutely, but there’s a huge span from completely removing the box to having “just” a chatbot.

  For example, at my company, we’ve set up an agent that can work with certain design-files that engineers typically work with through a rather complex GUI. We’ve built a bunch of endpoints that ensures the agent can only make valid changes to the files, and that it can never delete or modify anything without approval. This saves people a bunch of time, because they can make the agent do “batch jobs” that take maybe 10 min in about 10 s. It’s not possible for this agent to mess up our database or anything like that, because all interactions it has with anything are through endpoints where we verify that files, access permissions, change logs, etc. are valid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’ve misunderstood the purpose of a rubber duck: The point is that by formulating your problems and ideas, either out loud or in writing, you can better activate your own problem solving skills. This is a very well established method for reflecting on and solving problems when you’re stuck, it’s a concept far older than chatbots, because the point isn’t the response you get, but the process of formulating your own thoughts in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, you can run it in a box and limit its ability to interact with anything outside the box to certain white-listed endpoints. Depending on what you want to achieve, that can be more than safe enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Meh, they work well enough if you treat them as a rubber duck that responds. I’ve had an actual rubber duck on my desk for some years, but I’ve found LLM’s taking over its role lately.

  I don’t use them to actually generate code. I use them as a place where I can write down my thoughts. When the LLM responds, it has likely “misunderstood” some aspect of my idea, and by reformulating myself and explaining how it works I can help myself think through what I’m doing. Previously I would argue with the rubber duck, but I have to admit that the LLM is actually slightly better for the same purpose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, there’s a good reason the first rules of firearm safety are to always treat a weapon as loaded, and to never direct the weapon at something you aren’t prepared to destroy. The key point being that you never know when some freak accident can happen with a loose pin, bad ammo, a broken spring, or just a person tripping and shaking the gun a bit too hard.

  A gun should never go off by itself. You still treat it as if it can, because in the real world freak accidents happen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I suck at reading comprehension... what the heck does this law even mean? [8 U.S. Code § 1451 - Revocation of naturalization]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Regarding the very last point: Won’t his kids retain citizenship regardless if they were born in the US, in which case they have a citizenship in their own right (not tied to their father)?

  My impression was that you got a US citizenship if you were born on US soil, regardless of the status of your parents?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You can’t effect the number of bit flips your users hardware has, but you can affect how often buggy code corrupts their memory or otherwise crashes your program.

  Let’s say any app will crash about once a year on my machine due to a bit flip. If the app is crap and crashes hundreds of times for other reasons, the bit flip is irrelevant. If the app is robust enough that the bit flip accounts for 10 % of the crashes, that basically means the app is pretty much never crashing due to poor code.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hallucinations’ to Wikipedia Articles⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  But… why? Isn’t that just far more energy consuming and expensive to run? It sounds like replacing your car for a bus that sporadically stops working, even though you always drive alone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair I would assume that it’s better to trigger something like this during a security review when people are actively “online” and focused on security risks than at some other time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China tests world's first megawatt-class flying wind turbine⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Even with steel pipes you get problems with hydrogen embrittlement because hydrogen diffuses into the steel and can cause it to crack.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Current events dictate that I post this.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You correct, it’s the NATO flag, so you can replace “US” with “NATO” in my comment and my original point still stands. I wrote “US”, because they’re the only NATO member currently bombing someone in a war of aggression.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Current events dictate that I post this.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t interpret this in either of the ways you suggest. I interpret the image as a whole as ironic:

  OP is paraphrasing people that claim “Russia bombing people is bad, but the US bombing people is good, and by the way Israel is above all criticism and you’re an antisemite for suggesting otherwise”, and pointing out the hypocrisy in that claim. I think OP is against wars of aggression in general, and is pointing out that the US and Israel are behaving the same way as Russia when they go bombing people “preemptively”, and that being the aggressor in a war is always bad, regardless of who you are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In 51.6% of cases where someone needed to go to the hospital immediately, the platform said stay home or book a routine medical appointment

  So it performs slightly worse than a coin flip…

  In one of the simulations, eight times out of 10 (84%), the platform sent a suffocating woman to a future appointment she would not live to see

  Holy shit! That’s a lot worse than a coin flip.

  Meanwhile, 64.8% of completely safe individuals were told to seek immediate medical care

  And there are real people out there that actually trust this tech to make real decisions for them. It literally performs significantly worse than a coin flip both with regards to false positives and false negatives. You are literally better off flipping a coin or throwing a dice than asking this thing what to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twitch: "Hey, come back! This commercial break can't play while you're away."⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Seeing those was one of the more dystopian experiences I had when visiting the US a while back. The entire concept was absolutely insane to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitHub Is Down⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Seriously: What kind of good options exist for migrating a couple GitHub repos (including CI pipelines that work across repos to deploy to azure) cleanly and quickly (i.e. including PR’s, issues, etc.) to a different provider?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3204: Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At the same time, all mammals are evolved from a common ancestor on land, which means that whales, seals, dolphins, etc. are the evolutionary result of land-based mammals “re-entering” the ocean.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Wikipedia's Volunteer Model Facing a Generational Crisis?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That simply is not what people want when they look for information.

  What? Is there anyone out there that prefers to find small bits of information lying around various sources over a concise summary followed by a solid fleshing out, all in one place? I honestly cannot imagine a use case where I would prefer that a source omits a bunch of information rather than just structure the information so that I can find what I’m looking for. Wikipedia does that. That’s why you have dedicated articles for all those battles in WWII, with their own table of contents and summaries to help you digest them. There has literally never in human history existed any source of knowledge coming even close to structuring and summarising this amount of information as well as Wikipedia has, and you’re advocating that they should make it… not that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Wikipedia's Volunteer Model Facing a Generational Crisis?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see why you would want to hide the hoard of knowledge that is a good Wikipedia pare behind a button. There’s already a summary at the top of the page and a table of contents for when you want more on some topic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Draw!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen an interview with a guy that said, with a straight face, “for legal reasons I’m not allowed to disclose to you whether or not I have an NDA with <company>”.

  I’m pretty sure they make NDAs where you’re not allowed to disclose the other party as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would happen if a person proved in a lab they're gaining weight while in a verified calorie deficit?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s one of the most fundamental principles of chemistry and physics. It was discovered by Antoine Lavoisier in the late 18th century, and you can only meaningfully break it during nuclear reactions (fusion/fission). If any container is gaining mass, it is either a dying star or there is more mass entering the container than leaving it. This also applies to the human body: If you are gaining mass, it is because there is more going in than out, otherwise you’ve broken pretty much all known physics (or you’re about to go supernova).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would happen if a person proved in a lab they're gaining weight while in a verified calorie deficit?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You won’t gain net weight my that mechanism though, you’ll just grow more dense. Mass is a conserved quantity, so if you’re gaining more muscle mass than you’re losing fat, that extra mass is coming from somewhere. That somewhere is your food.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would happen if a person proved in a lab they're gaining weight while in a verified calorie deficit?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or conclude that they were accumulating mass some other way, such as

  • Accumulating water
  • Being severely constipated
  • Some obscure bone disease that causes them to accumulate absurd amounts of minerals

  My bet would be on (1) and/or (2).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would happen if a person proved in a lab they're gaining weight while in a verified calorie deficit?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Water content could be increasing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I spend more time than I would like to admit on reddit 50/50…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn’t working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.

  The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn’t what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.

  Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn’t even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn’t do what I said it did when they hadn’t even run it.