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Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

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Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#41

Post by brailsafe »

ianbutler wrote: post #32
spudlyo wrote: post #19

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark. Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such…

I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers". I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

> I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

In some sense this is true, but in my view it's not whether a person theoretically has leverage or opportunity, but whether it's feasible to practice or to explore it. If enough people believe that programmers shouldn't have leverage, and in-practice if there's only negative repercussions from trying, then it's not meaningful. Broadly, in any profession, it seems like it comes down to a whole lot of luck whether you have real, practicable leverage. Barring some exceptions for somehow intentionally positioning oneself to be solely responsible for an uncommonly important system in an uncommonly lucrative business, but that seems to me to also be dependent on a lot of luck.

Overall, it seems that if you really have leverage, you effectively can't economically be replaced, and everyone knows it, but otherwise you'll be on the chopping block for not doing exactly what your narcissistic boss wants on a moment to moment basis.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#42

Post by spongebobstoes »

I really enjoyed this. This talk contains a powerful message of optimism, possibility, agency and power that resonates strongly with me.

Computers and technology are force multipliers for humanity. As coders, we are lucky to be gifted with such high agency and global reach, all at a fairly affordable price tag.

I love computers.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#43

Post by 986aignan »

nz wrote: post #7
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "theft" is not a new argument, and its always been run by people who have a vested interest in killing open-source or who aren't part of it. In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code. I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business". I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "an…

The argument is not just "theft", and to the extent that "theft" is a part of it, it is not the most important part, not by large margin. The reason that "theft" is not a solid argument, is because people creating open-source often distribute it for free themselves. Piracy is not the issue. The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a…

> LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).

And something like attributions can be determined even if the LLM is paraphrasing, if I'm understanding Cosma Shalizi correctly[1]. He gives Grosse et al.[2] as a reference for doing so in a scalable manner.

[1] https://bactra.org/research/2026-03-10.html

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03296

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#44

Post by tptacek »

lightedman wrote: post #31
mikewarot wrote: post #5

So, today I'm one of the lucky 10,000[1] who finally understands what "black pilled" actually means. (Edit: The video explains what black pilled means) As a mapper[2], that knowledge now gets subconsciously checked for matches and usefulness against all the other chunks of knowledge I'm fairly certain of. The first thing that popped out (and there will be more over the next 24+ hours) is that y'all are black pilled a…

"y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time" This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.

OK, produce a SHA-2 collision.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#45

Post by zoobaloo »

joshcsimmons wrote: post #30
leecommamichael wrote: post #28

> “I almost fell into this trap (...) I was raised by conservative Christian parents and thereby had so, so much to learn, and unlearn, in order to date comfortable and confidently. Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this…

This viewpoint is preposterous to me in the first place. I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!

While I can't speak to the universality or novelty of the world falling apart, I feel the same way.

Some people aren't yet in a place to understand this perspective. Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. Some slander the faith based on ignorance or misunderstanding.

We're called to forgive our enemies and respond with patience, humility, and compassion. I've found that doing this without losing sight of God's commandments is a struggle that requires daily prayer and reflection.

Have a good weekend, and peace be with you.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#46

Post by r2_pilot »

joshcsimmons wrote: post #30
leecommamichael wrote: post #28

> “I almost fell into this trap (...) I was raised by conservative Christian parents and thereby had so, so much to learn, and unlearn, in order to date comfortable and confidently. Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this…

This viewpoint is preposterous to me in the first place. I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!

From my perspective, I do not perceive the world as "falling apart" and I wonder how much of your perception of the state of things (as if there was a universally defined "perfection" to strive towards instead of humans creating these concepts) falling apart is derived from your faith, which has a vested interest in presenting itself as a real-feeling thing in order to promulgate its existence. As a meme, it appears to be persistent in the environment for roughly 2k years, so clearly there's some fitness to its host species. And contrast its feelings of apocalyptic end times to Buddhism, where things are more cyclical rather than ending soon, and I wonder how your feelings would be affected were you to have been raised in that environment instead.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#47

Post by javcasas »

weinzierl wrote: post #22

"Our task as the older generation is to shield the young from those who would exploit their naïveté without infecting them with our own accumulated pain and cynicism." [33:53] stuck with me and is my take away.

Shield is the wrong word. At some point, the shield must fall, and then the young are no longer young, but are still näive.

There will always be exploiters, don't believe that they will die once we manage to shield the young for enough time for the exploiters to die of old age.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#48

Post by javcasas »

tptacek wrote: post #44
lightedman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time" This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.

OK, produce a SHA-2 collision.

Why a collision? Abuse it where it is being used. Infect the chain of certificates that guarantees that the hash you are checking is actually the one you want. Send a million legit documents with bad hashes, so that the forged one looks like another legit one. Infect the library that calculates hashes so that these specific documents have a special hardcoded hash.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#49

Post by jagged-chisel »

nz wrote: post #37
jagadaga wrote: post #8

I watched 8 minutes and feel like my time was wasted. Thank you. Yeah, we always knew how to build reliable software, but it's expensive.

Unreliable software is also expensive. Rather, building reliable software is incompatible with a management policy that rewards and punishes people based on KPIs (basically leading indicators). The concept of KPIs is fine, but they should (a) be actual indicators of progress, and (b) be kept secret from employees (so that we can avoid or mitigate Goodhart's Law). Both of those things are difficult, because you need a…

> … kept secret from employees [to] mitigate Goodhart's Law

While I empathize with the need for mitigation, secret goals and milestones are an excellent way to mistreat employees and eliminate morale.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#50

Post by tptacek »

javcasas wrote: post #48
tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, produce a SHA-2 collision.

Why a collision? Abuse it where it is being used. Infect the chain of certificates that guarantees that the hash you are checking is actually the one you want. Send a million legit documents with bad hashes, so that the forged one looks like another legit one. Infect the library that calculates hashes so that these specific documents have a special hardcoded hash.

Because man made SHA-2, so it must be breakable. I don't dispute that there are systems humans make that are breakable (that would be weird given my career).
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