I just read that a UFC Octagon is being erected on the South Lawn at the White House for use as a temporary fighting venue. Or to put it another way, the president is setting up some backyard wrasslin’ for our entertainment. One can only hope that instead of having ring girls, he hires Insane Clown Posse to spray down the first few rows of proud citizens with Faygo.
Juvenal once said something about bread and circuses. Now go make some inexpensive brioche and revel in your bloodsport circus to celebrate the quarter millennial celebration of what was once The Great Experiment. Or maybe let’s just call it what it is at this point: TRUMP AND AMERICA FOREVER AND FOREVER A HUNDRED YEARS
Who knows though, I may go grab a two-liter from the store and turn on my TV for the spectacle. After all, who am I to turn down “free” entertainment?
I was looking at my dirty bumper the other day, and it got me thinking. My car was in the shop last year because I ripped the bumper off in a parking lot. I didn’t think it was funny, but the group of three guys watching it did. Overall, a net win for the universe (utilitarian philosophy and whatnot).
It was in the shop for a lengthy amount of time for a simple bumper fix, a little over a month all in all. The reason it took so long was that the insurance company wanted to minimize its cost on the bumper. That led to the repair shop having to order in a bumper, test the fit, and continue the work if it fit well. This took a total of three different bumpers, with long wait times in between each to account for supply chain issues. The insurance company saved $18 on the bumper when all was said and done. However, they also spent close to a thousand bucks on a rental car for me to use (I’d guess some actuary at the insurance company isn’t a fan of Jeremy Bentham).
All things considered, it all washes out in the end (just like my dirty and shittily-painted bumper).
I came across an article today that said two thirds of dog owners think their dogs are smarter than average and that it was statistically impossible. It’s not. People need to learn the damn difference between mean, median and mode and use them appropriately. Outliers can skew a dataset significantly. It’s not a difficult concept. I don’t know if the educational system is failing us all or some people are just average. My dogs, however, are not. And while you are at it, stop with the clickbaity headlines like “Your dog is dumb.” I’m looking at you, NYT.
I have this suspicion that the biggest thing no-one in the tech industry really seems to take seriously or give a shit about is the implication of many second-order effects of LLMs, but especially about collapsing the pipeline of developers from junior- to mid- to senior-level skillsets. Silicon Valley has a long history of caring about the short term: what can we get done in the next 18 months, will it get us through to our next round of funding, etc. at the expense of the long term. We’ve recently seen things like Jack Dorsey axing almost half of the workforce at Block because of LLMs.
It really concerns me that we are going to end up in a situation where the junior developer role is so depleted, as far as a dearth of positions, that we get into a scenario where the developer pipeline collapses and 5, 10, 15 years down the road we end up with code written by the currently-trained models that has errors in it. The errors won’t be fixable by our current models; they won’t be fixable by the then-current senior devs who never developed the proper coding chops in a normal sense. It’s easy for the tech industry to do what it has always done and kick the can down the road by relying on future advancements to correct their errors of today.
It really seems though like our current models have been built by a small number of companies burning through investment capital at an astounding, never-before-seen rate. Sure, there is revenue to be had from users and companies paying to use the model, but that is a pittance compared to what it takes to train them (not to mention the environmental toll, but that’s another topic). There’s a decent chance that will lead to investors pulling back for a more sound investment in the future. That will leave us with models that created code with issues they can’t fix.
Oh yeah, I created this microblog of futilely vain caterwauling using an LLM. Can I fix it if it breaks? Maybe.
I’m having real issues with modern society right now. I want to buy a tub of some regular damn yogurt. It’s all Greek yogurt. They have low-fat, nonfat, no sugar added, and extra protein varieties … all Greek. It’s like a mid-life version of that song Institutionalized by Suicidal Tendencies. But I want a tub of regular yogurt instead of a Pepsi.
