Because google search and llm teams are different, with different incentives. Search is the cash cow they keep squeezing for more cash at the expense of good quality since at least 2018, as revealed in court documents showing they did that on purpose to keep people searching more to have more ads and more revenue. Google AI embedded in search has the same goals, keep you clicking on ads… my guess would be Gemini doesn’t have any of the bad part of enshitification yet… but it will come. If you think hallucinations are bad now, just you wait until tech companies start tuning them up on purpose to get you to make more prompts so they can inject more ads!
I think I might enjoy the CPS scenario... let them call CPS, and wait for CPS to arrive, and then discuss with CPS who is endangering the child, the parent or the school. I'm pretty sure a judge will quickly decide whether their rule makes sense or not, and I think judges in child protection cases are going to quickly side with what's important for the child.
I HATE this kind of nonsense, and threatening you as a parent is only making things worse. Why not offer a way to handle this on a simple website? It would have lower cost to the school and be more accessible to anyone with any device able to access websites. Nonsense.
Well the judge will likely rule the app is bullshit, but in the meantime CPS will argue they need to go into your house, look to see if you have a dirty dish, or the wrong proportion of snacks to vegetables, or maybe take notice your child is playing independently outside while they come around. Then they will portray that in the most insane way possible, and since it is a civil and not criminal process their is no requirement anything is shown beyond a reasonable doubt.
There's also the problem that once they have your kid, the tables are completely turned, rather than them showing why they should take them, now you have to show why you should get them back and that is a process that can be dragged out for over a year.
Unfortunately CPS has wide latitude, secret courts, and the ability to unendingly fuck with you, so it's better just to not "invite" them in your life if you can. And if they do manage to snatch your kid, note they give so little fucks for the kid that their contractors will leave a kid in a hot car to die because apparently that's safer than being with their parents.[]
Damn. When I had a child in Germany, our version of CPS came over and told me what fun things the city offers for children and asked me about my plans for day care and how I can get help to get a spot.
I once called them because the day care lady of a friend‘s kid is a bit of an idiot and kinda scared us about mass closure of day care centers and it was probably the nicest interaction I’ve ever had with a government agency.
But from what I’ve heard, America in general is a whole other beast both regarding expectations for parents, trust in the kids and the trouble you can get in for minor things.
I wouldn't be so quick to equate differences in personal anecdotes with stark country-level differences (though it's plausible that everything is worse in America as usual)
I grew up in a low income neighborhood in the Netherlands and many times saw people be utterly terrified of CPS. In many cases these were households where outside help could've been really useful, but even in the worst cases where heavy CPS involvement was the only option (real "take the child away" cases), the child's situation often unfortunately hardly got better, just different. In less intense cases CPS involvement often just seemed to thrust a compliance burden on households without offering much real support, mostly just leaving people feeling guilty and stigmatized. Overall still better for them to exist than not, and budget cuts and restructuring really hurt the situation later, but still an organization with very real odds of making the situation worse, sometimes catastrophically worse.
I'm so sorry that's the situation in your country. Another answer to your message from Germany is pretty close to my experience in France, child protection is way less combative and genuinely invested in what's good for children.
Because once you figure out the correct way to handhold, you can automate it and the tediousness goes away.
It’s only tedious once per codebase or task, then you find the less tedious recipe and you’re done.
You can even get others to do the tedious part at their layer of abstraction so that you don’t have to anymore. Same as compilers, cpu design, or any other pet of the stack lower than the one you’re using.
But the way they learn to be wise in the context of using LLMs is to try using them and fail, just like all learning experiences. Companies insisting on the use of these tools seems logical to me when the assumption is that they will, once learned, be better than previous methods of working, but only with practice.
how do you know what you want if you didn't write a test for it?
I'm afraid what you want is often totally unclear until you start to use a program and realize that what you want is either what the program is doing, or it isn't and you change the program.
MANY programs are made this way, I would argue all of them actually. Some of the behaviour of the program wasn't imagined by the person making it, yet it is inside the code... it is discovered, as bugs, as hidden features, etc.
Why are programmers so obsessed that not knowing every part of the way a program runs means we can't use the program? I would argue you already don't, or you are writing programs that are so fundamentally trivial as to be useless anyway.
LLM written code is just a new abstraction layer, like Python, C, Assembly and Machine Code before it... the prompts are now the code. Get over it.
> how do you know what you want if you didn't write a test for it?
You have that backwards.
How do you know what to test if you don't know what you want?
I agree with you though, you don't always know what you want when you set out. You can't just factorize your larger goal into unit tests. That's my entire point.
You factorize by exploration. By play. By "fuck around and find out". You have to discover the factorization.
And that, is a very different paradigm than TDD. Both will end with tests, and frankly, the non TDD paradigm will likely end up with more tests with better coverage.
> Why are programmers so obsessed that not knowing every part of the way a program runs means we can't use the program?
I think you misunderstand. I want to compare it to something else. There's a common saying "don't let perfection be the enemy of good (enough)". I think it captures what you're getting at, or is close enough.
The problem with that saying is that most people don't believe in perfection[0]. The problem is, perfection doesn't exist. So the saying ends up being a lazy thought terminator instead of addressing the real problem: determining what is good enough.
In fact, no one knows every part of even a trivial program. We can always introduce more depth and complexity until we reach the limits of our physics models and so no one knows. Therefore, you'll have to reason it is not about perfection.
I think you are forgetting why we program in the first place. Why we don't just use natural language. It's the same reason we use math in science. Not because math is the language of the universe but rather that math provides enough specificity to be very useful in describing the universe.
This isn't about abstraction. This is about specification.
It's the same problem with where you started. The customer can't tell my boss their exact requirements and my boss can't perfectly communicate to me. Someone somewhere needs to know a fair amount of details and that someone needs to be very trustworthy.
I'll get over it when the alignment problem is solved to a satisfactory degree. Perfection isn't needed, we will have you discuss what is good enough and what is not
[0] likely juniors. And it should be beat out of them. Kindly
Imagine this as a voice chat interface between 2 human beings. This is basically pretending like the interaction of thought and perception of what is on screen is somehow gated by a “I have fully consciously absorbed everything on screen and decided my next action” perfect modeling where both the human ability to perceive and the computer ability to represent information are prefect.
No. That’s not how humans interact with computers. It’s not how humans interact with each other either.
Turn based games can be fun. They are not how we want to interact for day to day life.
Sorry but your idea comes across as one that makes the job of making the computer good to interact with easier, but not as one that makes the computer better to interact with as a human.
Please stop over simplifying a complex system. Humans are complex, the solution is t to be less human. It is for computers to become better at human interaction on human levels.
I’m not sure lacking comprehension of a comment and choosing to ignore that lack is better. Or worse: asking everyone to manually explain every reference they make. The LLM seems a good choice when comprehension is lacking.
Because stock prices and the people's interests they reflect only care about immediate returns that allow investors to then dump those returns into the next immediate returning investment again, to maximize return with no consideration for the overall health of the system they operate in. Capitalism. Long term health of the stock systems. Long term health of the underlying value they reflect. Nothing long term matters in a stock buy at all.
Why do you even ask this question, did the answer really not seem obvious, or was it rhetorical?
What are you on about? I can ask an llm (which amusingly autocorrects to “lol”) or a search engine, stocks that retained and grew their value over decades. There’s lots.
Would you rather a centrally planned government where companies no longer care about their value? That, in a nutshell, is socialism.
I totally agree, but also wonder how to fight against this cancer. It seems to me like it’s a natural state of groups of people to devolve into this kind of group as the group grows in size. Are we simply doomed to failure?
