Silhouette

7 ms·

1.
by Silhouette 4d ago
But again the real question is why a TV should need users to accept any kind of post-sale agreement at all to be used normally (meaning "as reasonably expected and/or explicitly advertised"). Maybe the simplest solution is
2.
by Silhouette 4d ago
Sure, to use the TV you need to go past the EULA screen. And that's where the problem is. TVs should be TVs. Phones should be phones. Cars should be cars. If the manufacturers can't help themselves adding other stuff that is for
3.
by Silhouette 16d ago
The thing I find concerning lately is that even a lot of technical people seem to be jumping on the hype train this time around. Obviously LLMs have become very useful tools for assisting some technical tasks but even SOTA models are nowher
4.
by Silhouette 16d ago
Given the number of places in the world that have been severely restricting or banning car use to promote walking and other safer and more environmentally friendly alternatives I'm not sure your analogy is making exactly the point you
5.
by Silhouette 16d ago
I feel like every time this conversation comes up now someone has to remind everyone that an LLM is just a mathematical model. An LLM can't do anything except produce a stream of output tokens. The problems we keep seeing are tools t
6.
by Silhouette 17d ago
Option A: If you have a tiger in your room then make sure it's properly caged. Put up warning signs so everyone knows. Add physical barriers to prevent people too young or impaired to read the warning signs from approaching close enoug
7.
by Silhouette 23d ago
One significant problem with the TV licence here in the UK is that the people who end up paying it and the people who actually use the services it pays for are now very different groups. The BBC is heavily funded by TV licence fee payers bu
8.
by Silhouette 23d ago
That's pretty much the situation in the UK if you are a sole trader. If you set up a limited liability company, that's a separate entity and has its own tax reporting requirement, but nothing onerous. It's becoming more one
9.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
Anecdotally my own experience is consistent with this with the same platform+browser combination. It appears that there are now significant numbers of sites - or at least noticeable parts or features of sites - that rely on Google-specific
10.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
It looks like we agree here. I too think any useful regulation should be specified primarily by experienced practitioners who have been achieving demonstrably good outcomes. And I too think that in reality it would mostly likely be a very d
11.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
I'd expect lots of software organisations to fire a bunch of people looking for people pleasers until this becomes an accepted part of the business approach. No doubt. Imposing this kind of professional standards to regulate an indus
12.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
Regulatory compliance is 90% social and 10% reality. Again our experiences are on opposite ends of the spectrum. For safety issues in particular getting an engineer to sign off some plan when they will be accountable for that authority la
13.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
In the physical engineering teams I've worked with the culture you just described is not what happens at all. There are always some people who seemingly live to circumvent the intention of rules lurking around the edges of regulated in
14.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
There is zero useful evidence because there is no one to collect it. I'm not sure that is entirely true. There have certainly been a few people who have attempted to study what did or didn't work in industrial settings - eithe
15.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
What would credentialing software engineers do to curtail leadership incentive problems? The same as in other regulated professions. It would give the people on the front line who can see the consequences of the corner cutting an effectiv
16.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
In my experience this works both ways too. Good engineers working on physical projects have picked up on some of the useful practices that good software developers have adopted for maintaining progress in the face of ambiguous requirements
17.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
I appreciate your positivity. However it is difficult to reconcile your argument with the reality that executives at tech companies frequently behave in ways that satisfy the investors but clearly do not produce good results for the people
18.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
I have been a professional software developer for decades and worked in several roles where quality and security were at a premium but I have no idea what you mean by WASP. And yet you described it as "barebones" - an interesting
19.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
The problem with making programming a regulated profession is who gets to define the regulations. You are probably imagining that it would be expert developers with a track record of success. I would bet on it being the people who write lot
20.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
Sadly AI also amplifies both the good and the bad managers and tech leads. If you have managers who fail to set a clear direction or tech leads who fail to define a good framework for developers to operate within then AI just means the poor
21.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
There are armed police in the ticket hall. What do you do? Only 31 seconds now... Is the suspect black? (I'm asking this because there is evidence suggesting current facial recognition technology is less accurate at matching faces fr
22.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
This seems like a problem with the level of abstraction the user interface is working at. It is highly unlikely that in any real world task lasting less than one day there were really hundreds of distinct decisions that needed to be made by
23.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
Yes - I'm objecting to the lazy use of terminology here. LLMs are useful in their own right and are not the real problem here. The real problem is people placing too much trust in inherently unreliable output and then trying to automat
24.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
Even if that's what they mean it would still be disturbing if commands that should have explicit user confirmation were being waved through - whether by users or the auto mode - and being run when they shouldn't. The statistics ap
25.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
My point is that an LLM can't attempt to connect to anything by itself. All an LLM does is produce a stream of output tokens - and that was already quite useful as a coding aid. It is the harnesses that some people are now wrapping a
26.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
If you don't understand clearly what an action proposed by your tool is going to do then why would you permit it?
27.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
LLMs are inherently dangerous tools I don't see how. An LLM just generates a stream of output and they became very useful doing no more than that. What is dangerous is then interpreting that output as instructions to some other part
28.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
Am I the only person reading the statistics in this announcement from Anthropic and the associated blog commentary and trying to work out how they possibly couldn't imply that a significant number of dangerous commands are likely to be
29.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
You are misunderstanding the leadership structure of the EU. There are three main bodies that lead it - the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, and the European Parliament. The Council is the one that generally consist
30.
by Silhouette 1mo ago
Just like EVERY OTHER democracy. Not really. In most representative democracies it is the elected representatives who initiate new law. In the EU the elected MEPs have no power to do this and it is the role of the unelected Commission to

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