• 13 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • “It’s little comfort to know that my stupidity is what brings us together this afternoon,” New Mexico attorney Stephen D. Aarons said in a hearing last month before five judges. He “assumed” ChatGPT would generate a “bulletproof summary of proceedings.” Instead, ChatGPT generated false testimony from “wholly fabricated witnesses,” according to an order of direct contempt from the New Mexico Supreme Court.

    Aarons’ reasoning for trusting ChatGPT, he said in the August hearing, was that he’d heard of doctors using AI for medical research.




  • It has varied. I used to keep them 1-2 years when they used to improve a lot year-to-year. The last 2 phones I’ve had 3 years each.

    After I’m done with it, I hand my phone over to my brother, who runs it into the ground over the course of the next 3 or so years, until it’s almost unusably slow. My brother does the shower thing too, but less often. Maybe 30% of the time and less steamy.

    It’s possible that there could be gradual, over time damage. Rust growing until it forms a short. But that’s not been my experience.

    Ultimately, it’s up to you if you want to take the risk, but given how I treated mine, if you even did this half as often as I did, you’re probably fine.

    I didn’t mention this above, but I sometimes also used the phone inside the shower. Clicking the next video or checking a message notification. Maybe 1 in 8 days.

    I’ve also sometimes washed the crud off the phone under the sink, rather than my normal approach with isopropyl alcohol. The worst I’d get is a notification saying I couldn’t charge for a bit, or the speaker sounding funny for half an hour or so.

    You might call me crazy, but I don’t like to baby my stuff. I paid for water resistance, I’m going to make use of it.





  • I can kind of relate. There are a lot of parts of coding I find a little boring.

    • Once the interesting problem is solved and all you need to do is follow through
    • Large scale refactorings in ways too complicated for an IDE.
    • Fixing annoying dependency / migration issues

    When you use an expensive AI agent, like Claude, it can nowadays handle these tasks competently, to the point where I only need to correct small things here and there.

    When you give these tasks to an AI agent, it feels a bit like delegating to a junior, but without the guilt of giving someone a menial or boring task. That allows me to work on stuff I find more interesting. To me, THAT’S why it’s adictive.

    However, this isn’t without cost. First, there’s the societal costs: Environmental, centralization of power, contribution to hardware shortages and a bubble

    Second, there are more personal costs. You’ll come to rely more and more on these tools, and your skills will rust. You may end up avoiding learning things about a codebase because you delegate it away.

    It’s a tempting tool. One which in my experience can genuinely help, but is easy to misuse.






  • So if I remember correctly, what happens with auto mode is they run a second smaller LLM called the “classifier” to evaluate the tool uses of the main one.

    I’ve used auto mode at work now for many months, and it approves most things because most things Claude does are reasonable.

    Once or twice I have seen it reject Claude. I can’t remember the exact scenario, but I had asked Claude to diagnose an issue but not fix it yet, and when later on it tried to make the change the classifier rejected it, giving the reason that what it was trying to do did not match my request.

    In my opinion, the trick to using auto mode safely here is to:

    • Commit and push your changes before handing over the reins (it rarely commits or pushes without you telling it to, especially if you have never asked in that session).
    • Don’t give it access to things it shouldn’t have access to or that can do significant damage
    • Don’t give ambiguous prompts.
    • Never use LLMs against untrusted code or files, as it may contain prompt injections.