One of my favorite papers! On a similar note, I recently started reading A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. Although it’s a lot more recent (2018), I’d argue it’s required reading in light of the LLM hype craze.
ExFed
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Cake day: June 16th, 2025
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Absolutely, the author needs to be able to reason about their changes, no matter what. However, the reason why I think the two situations are fundamentally different, though, is that it’s a lot easier to validate the existence of features than it is the non-existence of bugs or malicious behavior. The biggest risk to removing code is breaking preexisting features, whereas the biggest risk to adding code is introducing malicious behavior.
Agreed. I have a sense that, eventually, development communities will figure out etiquette and policies to govern LLM usage. But how do you enforce that kind of policy? Right now, it’s essentially a judgement call by the maintainers. It’s hard to catch sneaky LLM usage.
On the other hand, I think there are objectively good ways to use LLMs for software:
- High-level design and planning
- Technical Research (although this tends towards the most popular tech)
- POCs & rapid prototyping
- “Textbook” solutions
- TDD Red/Green development (where the LLM generates failing tests based on the high-level spec, and the programmer writes the implementation)
25kLOC delta in a single PR should be cause for instant rejection
Not to pick at nits, but it would be VERY different if it was 1k lines added and 24k lines removed. There’s something extremely satisfying about removing 10k+ lines of unnecessary code.
55·13 days agoLet’s call it by it’s proper name: Daylight Stealing Time
12·13 days agoUnfortunately a lot of people haven’t been paying attention.
Yuck. Thanks for the heads-up.
Wait, what?!? You got a source for that?
I’ll be pissed if it’s true… Audacity holds a special place in my heart.
1·22 days agoHas “performance” or “merit” meant much to Trump for anything else?
This Pentagon has now indicated they’re willing to abuse the “supply-chain risk” label for political reasons, casting doubt over all future, legitimate uses of the label.
That’s a massive mistake and we’re all far less safe because of it.
OpenAI made a statement agreeing with Anthropic’s “red lines”. Google has yet to do the same, although there’s been quite a lot of chatter from employees about it.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5758898-altman-backs-anthropic-pentagon-stand/
I’m the cloud infrastructure business we like to call that the 9mm test. It’s quite effective.
Whoa you gotta put an NSFW tag on images like these.
So long as it’s appropriately branded. If we get a bunch of “Trump bucks” right before midterms, I’m sure that could sway some people to keep him in power.
Good point; I was unaware of the state-level laws. Regardless, I will stand by my statement: it’s better than what we’ve currently got.
America needs mandatory voting to stop this behavior
As much as that seems like a good solution, it’s unlikely to win many supporters. You’d be better off making voting day a federal holiday.
7·1 month agoDoing anything while connected to open Wi-Fi networks. All it takes to eavesdrop on an open Wi-Fi network is a laptop and proximity. Although they can’t eavesdrop on your SSL/TLS traffic, they can (and will) pick up on (insecure) DNS requests, which gives them at least the domains of any websites and services that you use (if not the specific pages).
ROFL using (claimed) age as a proxy for maturity. Classic.
Best guess? They’re either truly dedicated satirists, gone off the metamodernist deep end into deep post-irony, or they’ve genuinely decided that modernist Grand Narratives weren’t really all that bad (let’s just ignore all the atrocities they brought about). After all, far-left modernist narratives aren’t at all like those other, far-right modernist narratives! They’re different, just like everybody else who is selling a utopia (that’s only practically attainable through an authoritarian regime).
I’m not sure I follow… Care to elaborate?
I can absolutely see the potential for abuse and a race to produce faster agents. Now that I think about it, before too long “Time To First Token” will become an uninteresting metric, and agents will all be steerable/interruptible mid-task, enabling legit real-time language processing (as opposed to the batch-mode they currently have).