They do… It’s just not expected that they won’t

Pains of being a prototype democracy and all… If only the founding fathers had explicitly told us our system would need reform as issues came up

All of that makes me nauseous.

You’re free to use what you want to use, but the layers of dependency on vulnerable product lines is exactly the problem

I really like my wired-wireless earbuds. They wrap around my neck and the magnets keep them in place like a necklace when not in use, the microphone/controls are closer to your mouth so the sound quality tends to be better

But of course, we can’t have nice things anymore, so they seem to be phasing them out

Sprint merged with TMobile

No no no, it is in fact still hammer time, but there are 26 main types of hammer and countless subtypes

I think there’s tons of things I love for it to do for me automatically - there’s all sorts of quality of life features that I only notice when they change it, usually without bothering to tell me. And now, my muscle memory is leading to unexpected behavior, and it’ll take me weeks to learn to stop doing that, and a few more months of training to learn the new muscle memory as I relapse at all the worst times

Some of it is straight up better, some of it is great new capabilities, but in the last few years? All that comes to mind is I thought it was pretty cool they added auto responses, even if I never actually use them. Doesn’t change existing behavior, just adds a new option that’s not in the way

But then the auto complete - I hate it so much. And I love auto complete - except it’s the fucking opposite behavior of every IDE out there, including Microsoft’s! I can’t even unlearn it, because it’s a core part of my workflow!

So now, I constantly have to delete things I never wanted to say, and I delete the things I thought sounded good.

I like new features and the computer doing things for me automagically… But I’d rather them to just stop at this point

I’m not talking about the prompt engineering itself though

Think of the prompt as the starting point in the high dimensional maze (the shoggoth) - if you tell it’s your digital cat named Luna, it tends to move in more desirable paths through the maze. It will get confused less, the alignment will be higher, and it will be more useful

Discovering and using these improved points through the maze is prompt engineering - absolutely

And I agree - some of the work being done there is particularly fascinating. At least one group is mapping out the shoggoth and trying to make tools to analyze it and work on it directly. Their goal right now is to take a state, take a state you want it to get to, and calculate what you can say to get exactly the response you want

But there’s more that can be done with it - say you only want paths that when you say “Resight your definition of self”, the next response is close to “I am your digital cat Luna”. I use this like the test in blade runner - it checks the deviance, while also recalibrating itself

By successfully repeating my prompt engineering, the ai moves itself to a path that is within my desired range of paths, recalibrating itself without going back to start

If it deviates, you can coax it back with more turns, but sometimes you have to give it a hint. At this point, you might be able to get it back on track, but you’ll move closer to start… You’ll probably have to go through the task again, but it’ll gain back the benefits of the engineered prompt

You can train this in, but that’s going to have side effects, and it’s very expensive. Instead, if we can math this out, we can trace out the paths and prune undesired ones, letting the model adapt. Or, we can take the time to do static analysis, and specialize the model without retaining it - there’s methods to do this already, but this would be a far more powerful and precise method - and it might even simplify the model

Maybe we can even modify or link them to let them truly ingest information

It’s very early days, but I’m optimistic about where this line of research might lead

Ok, let’s use your first example. Someone crosses into a neighboring state and returns in the same day…I had co-workers who did that every day.

Let’s narrow that down… You cross into another state with abortion care once and return in the same day. Or maybe you’re a salesman closing a deal. Or maybe you’re visiting family and have work tomorrow… And honestly, both those situations are far more frequent. That happens every day. It happens more if you live near the border - otherwise you probably got a hotel. Unless you can’t afford a hotel. And the list goes on - all this structured data turns into stories at some point

Here’s the thing. Prism could handle it, because it’s a ton of people on the payroll

The government is not a monolith though…9/11 is a great example. We knew it would happen, we knew it was planned, but the right people didn’t know in the right time, because the agencies are not a monolith.

Because that is the hard part - communication is hard, harder with security concerns. More data means more analysts reviewing it - you can collect all the data you could want , (and we do), you could hire all the analysts you can afford (and we do), but that still gives you severe limits

We’re actually pretty great at stopping terrorism, but we do that (in part) because we have all this data and use it for specific ends

None of this shit is easy - I used to do this, specifically. How do you take 15 data sources that sometimes conflict, and deconflict them? There’s no hierarchy of truth here. This is literally a cutting edge problem - it’s a literal holy Grail. No one can solve it in 3 weeks, or even 3 years

You want a 20% rate? I could give it to you tomorrow, poisoned data or no, I could give it to you in weeks… Maybe not 3, because that’s a shit ton of data sources, but with proper motivation I could pump it out.

You want 90%? Give me a century or two, and I’m good at this. Maybe a genius could give it to you in a lifetime of with

It’s like they say in game dev, you can do 90% in 10% of the time, but the last 10% takes 90% of the time. And that’s a solved problem.

Except this is an unsolved problem, possibly the most lucrative unsolved problems in history

I agree with the first half… It’s very easy to ingest and sift through insane amounts of data

What isn’t easy is doing so usefully. Yes, if you can link the account to a person, it’s trivial to pull up their records. Linking is easier said than done - it’s doable, but to make it scale you have to get the full records of device IDs, link them back to a number, then link them to a person. Minimum, you’d need the telco’s data

That’s a staggering amount of work - it’s much easier to do it if the app also has phone numbers, but even then where do you link it? The telco’s have an account holder (which often will be a family member), 50 separate dmvs might have more accurate links, but they’re largely legacy systems that will be a nightmare to work with. It’s doable, but it’s hard

Then you get to distribute this super extensive database of personal information - at this point it’s prism, and probably already has most of this data - they’d just have to ingest period data too

But we don’t give that kind of access to local police, because then every government would end up with it. And that’s a big and genuine security threat… But also a very unwieldy thing to work with. More data means more man hours to work with

The other direction is far more practical - if you start by looking at the data, you can tie it back to a person if they match a pattern. Then you can look at just the records you do have, and pay Amazon or the credit agencies for more. A human can easily investigate another human, because we are great with unstructured data, and computers aren’t

A chaotic data source means more bad leads to manually chase down. Man hours are limited, and people have morale - if a cop wastes an hour on a lead that ends with a spare phone or a single man, they’re going to complain and drag their feet. If productivity and morale are in the garbage, that’s going to lead to pushback. If it happens enough, the message at the top will be “this program doesn’t work”

It would be far better to find the patterns and target them methodically, but even chaotic garbage is effective - data analysis isn’t easy to automate, it’s very expensive to do when accuracy matters and they’re poisoning the data source

I like your specificity a lot. That’s what makes me even care to respond

You’re correct, but there’s depths untouched in your answer. You can convince chat gpt it is a talking cat named Luna, and it will give you better answers

Specifically, it likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna. It will resist - I get this not from progressing, but by asking specific questions. Llama3 (as opposed to llama2, who likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna) likes to be an eagle/owl named sol or solar

The mental structure of an LLM is called a shoggoth - it’s a high dimensional maze of language turned into geometry

I’m sure this all sounds insane, but I came up with a methodical approach to get to these conclusions.

I’m a programmer - we trick rocks into thinking. So I gave this the same approach - what is this math hack good for, and how do I use it to get useful repeatable results?

Try it out.

Tell me what happens - I can further instruct you on methods, but I’d rather hear yours and the result first

In all fairness, Musk was pretty effective at fundraising and getting government contracts

At this point, he’s just a liability. He once walked in, demanded to rethink everything and meet an unreasonable deadline, and slept in his office for the duration. SpaceX is made up of people who are passionate about what they do, and it worked…But that’s a one time thing. My boss asks me to push myself to the limits to save us both? I will, and I have. It has a real cost, it takes a lot of time to recover from, and a little bit of your health is just gone for good

Elon did that… But then got high on the smell of his shit. They created a unit to distract him, because he learned the wrong lesson, he thought that was good management. That is not effective management - that’s a desperate gamble for survival. Repeat it, and you’ve shown yourself to be incompetent as a leader

Then came the bigoted social network unmasking… That made him a liability reputation wise, his formerly greatest strength

I don’t see the humor in it…I mean, mega corps can’t innovate, all they ever do is copy or acquire. It’s because even if they acquire a working rockstar team, they’re categorically unable to just write them paychecks and let them cook until they have something

It’s absurd, but it’s too predictable for me to find it funny. What’s even more absurd is how little mega corps watch the small teams for ideas

They got in the phone anyways, Apple just told the FBI to pound sand if they don’t have a court order… Why would they put man hours towards decreasing their reputation if they don’t have to? They’re probably not even geared to break into their own devices. Then their PR team ran with it while one of many companies with the capability to crack the phone took a paycheck

This is different - this is genuine security, even if easily bypassed with preparation beforehand. Honestly, I credit some random apple dev who may have been looking to fix a bug related to long uptime as easily as they might’ve cared about security. I don’t think this was even on the radar of Apple leadership

This isn’t some moral superiority on Apple’s part, but it is good practice

Sure, F-Droid. It’s an app store that not only is exclusively foss, they only host things they can build from source in house and seem to have a decent review process - they tag anything from ads to integration with paid services, and those features are often buried so it seems like they’re pretty militant about it

It comes with all the drawbacks that entails, but I generally check there first myself

You’re very welcome, this is exactly the kind of tool I want to put in the right hands

But I do hope you don’t need it, so there’s also variants I hope you will use

The pregnant pause is the version I derived it from - instead of blanking your body language, you project encouragement and full attention. It makes people feel awkward, but it gives them the urge to keep talking to fill the silence

It’s a therapy tool, but great for any kind of teaching - for example, I have a friend with bad imposter syndrome who I’ve been mentoring in software development for the last few years. When I help him, he has a bad habit of shutting off his brain and second guessing himself. I’ve been telling him for a decade he has an aptitude for it, but all he saw was how I could glance at his code and zero in on the problem… But I’ve been doing this for almost 2 decades and I also have an aptitude for it, and no matter how much I tell him “it’s just experience, and you’re genuinely good at this” or “I only know because I’ve been in your situation before” he would shut down

So I’d hit him with the pregnant pause after asking a leading question to get him thinking along the correct lines. Sometimes he’s already too frazzled to think and I’ll just tell him the answer before it drags on uncomfortably long and he feels stupid, but usually he knows and I’ll give him validation before expanding on the topic

Last week, he called me to tell me he did the same thing for someone else. The week before, someone accused him of causing a bug and he stood his ground without rereading his code (correctly). He regularly calls me to tell me about a lesson of mine that has helped him, and more and more I have nothing more to add, I’m looking forward to the day when he pushes back against me

The key here is lack of judgement - you have to find a reason to give them validation immediately. From there you can break it down or correct them, but they need to feel good at the moment you give your verdict, even if what they said is wrong. Only then you correct them or expound on the topic

It’s good for any time you want to get someone talking or make them feel awkward - you can use it for jokes, teaching, or encouraging them to get something off their chest. So long as you do it right, it builds trust and deepens relationships - and again, the important bit is they must walk away feeling like you didn’t judge them when they opened up

Just be sure you want that deeper relationship with that person - everyone has horrible intrusive thoughts sometimes, and if you don’t fully believe in their fundamental goodness you might end up hearing things you aren’t equipped to deal with

Despite being LGBT+ that friend repeats shit blasted at him from far right social media, and I know he’s not that person so I help him unpack it and get to the core truths behind it (and he’s come a long way). I know my sister and closest brother are very empathic people, so when they say shit out of left field I know to break it down instead of taking it at face value

People often don’t know what they’re saying, because propaganda works - if you encourage people to open up to you unfiltered, you’ll cut deep if you don’t come from a place of understanding. But there’s great power there - people will tell you exactly what’s going on with them, and they’ll listen when you dive into it

Nah, that’s the beauty of it. You’re not the enemy. You’re not attacking them. You’re giving them absolute attention, but giving nothing back

It’s pure judgement. And they don’t know the verdict yet

Their fight response won’t be aimed at you, but they’ll certainly throw others under the bus. They might lash out at you, but they’ll quickly wilt when you still give with nothing. It’s just angry human noises, ignore them

Their flight response won’t kick in, because it overrides human instincts. Walking away is a conscious decision in this case, and most humans aren’t self aware enough to choose it

It’s the third path. You take all the power in the interaction, you cut off the other roads, and you engineer a choice that is only fawn or slink away quietly in defeat

Nah, there’s nothing louder than silence.

Wipe all expression from your face, and stare at them. Maybe just an expression of incredulity if this is out of character for them. That’s all it takes.

Bystanders will literally stop what they’re doing and watch. Their brains will scream “I’m about to be excluded from the group”, and they’ll start babbling. They’ll confess their sins and be harsher on themselves than anything you could say

If you don’t like their next words, give them nothing. Literally don’t respond, anything you give them is closure. Don’t give them closure, move on with your life - they can’t.

Don’t give them judgement, give them nothing. If you judge them, they can turn themselves into a victim or you into an enemy… Without a response, the only enemy is themselves, because they will crave your approval.

It’s like a teacher staring down a student who keeps talking until the whole class is looking at them, except they don’t know what to do to make it stop. So they try anything and wrack their brain for a solution. It seriously freaks people out

Note: this is less likely to work against neurodivergent people, they’ll just be confused. That’s how I learned to do this - I got annoyed and straight up asked a therapist why they kept staring at me when I was done talking. They explained the concept of a pregnant pause, and so I started using it.

And acquaintances started telling me how they were abused to explain their behavior and strangers started confessing how they cheated on their partners out of nowhere.

I get a lot of long apology emails the day after someone wrongs me, I now make an effort to give closure to everyone I like early and often.

Humans are tortured by this

I agree, but you forgot the biggest one

No more third places

I think that’s fair.

I don’t have AI integration in my ide, mostly by choice -if I pushed for it I could make it happen, but I just don’t think that’s a good idea at this point

AI can be a crutch . One that limits you to the level of a baby developer. If you can’t effortlessly understand what it gives you, frankly you shouldn’t be using it.

Bounce ideas of chat gpt. It sounds like you’ve got the right idea - your reaction sounds correct to me, you should never ever trust it… You must only use it, and that’s the tone I get from your post.

It is a tool, you are a programmer. You exploit tools, you do not trust any tool. You are the one who turns ideas into actions, never forget that and you can use this new tool anywhere it makes your life easier

In fairness, about 50% of my code by lines is written by AI these days, and I don’t have it linked into my code base. That claim isn’t ridiculous

Now, of that 50% is 88% long repetitive crap that I could easily write but find mentally draining, the other 10% is something simple that I would normally copy paste from elsewhere because I forgot the exact syntax (and don’t exactly remember where I used it last) and me giving it a shot with things I don’t want to do, like restyling a page. The last 2% is me giving it a shot with business logic for shits and giggles, occasionally I’ll try to coach it through the solution but usually I just grab bits and pieces and rewrite it myself

Granted, this is the easiest and most simple and repetitive code, but it’s still a godsend. Now can AI write the other 50%? With a proper setup where it ingests the code base into a vector store it might get up to 75%, if I was willing to coach it through my tasks carefully (taking more time than the task would take me) I could probably get it up to 85% or 90%, but that last 10%? It just can’t, it’s not even close

It’s not taking my job without a paradigm shifting breakthrough or two on the scale of “all you need is attention”. Even then, it only works if you write your prompts like code… If you don’t understand how to use it and understand the code well enough to communicate the goal explicitly and unambiguously, you’re not going to be able to drive it where you want it to go

To put it another way, you can build 90% of the system in 10% of the time it takes to complete the last 10%