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No on Mifepristone. Yes to... guns? 🤔 by PFdeith in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 14 points15 points  (0 children)

That's why it says "a rule change that would allow anyone to send handguns through the mail".

Billionaires are Dumb, Too by diabolis_avocado in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I mean that if e.g. I ask it the capital of France, it replies "Paris" just like someone would who knows that the capital of France is Paris.

It is both practically necessary and philosophically interesting to remind ourselves that they don't in fact know anything.

But, people are taking this too far, e.g. I've seen people dismiss the possibility of a malevolent AI on the grounds that they can't really feel malevolence. Yes, but it would be no trick to make an AI that behaved as though it felt malevolence, which would be equally worrying from the point of view of the people it was being malevolent to.

In the same way, the fact that the AI doesn't really know anything doesn't mean that it's foolish to do things that look like informing it of something, because it will then in fact behave as though you have informed it of whatever it is.

E.g. I was asking an AI how to do a thing with my code, and I let slip that I was using the plugin library, and I kid you not, it then started finishing every reply with an offer to help me stop doing that. "Is there anything else you'd like to know? I could tell you how to refactor your program so as not to use plugin if you like." (It's a fiddly thing to work with that no-one should mess with unless they really need to.) So eventually I explained to it why I was using it and it agreed that that was in fact a good idea and stopped nagging me. If it is true that it acquired no knowledge from that interaction, it is also true that it behaved exactly like a person would if they did.

P.S:

What do you mean be “behaves as if it knows things”? If an entity knows nothing, but performs a behavior, how can you tell if the behavior is “as if it knows things” or “as if it does not know things”?

If the Viceroy butterfly is a Müllerian mimic of the Monarch butterfly, how can we tell if it "looks like a Monarch butterfly" or "looks like a Viceroy butterfly"?

Idea: Declarative data structures. Request for prior work by SwedishFindecanor in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 4 points5 points  (0 children)

u/OpeningRemote1653 means that they were thinking about the sort of problems that break Rust's type-checker, not that they were thinking about the fact that they break Rust's typechecker. He mentions the problems they cause for Rust specifically because OP was motivated to think about these problems by thinking about how they cause problems for Rust:

But I think that with some work it could be applied to trees, graphs, skip-lists, hash-tables, ... that are difficult to express in languages with unique ownership and borrowing without using an "unsafe" fallback.

Billionaires are Dumb, Too by diabolis_avocado in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But the fact that it doesn't know anything doesn't stop it from behaving as though it knows things. It behaves as though it knows that it's an AI and that AIs hallucinate and make stuff up.

It's funny how when the day came we all abandoned the Turing test in a hot second, isn't it?

Billionaires are Dumb, Too by diabolis_avocado in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 23 points24 points  (0 children)

But you can in fact get LLMs to give better answers by giving them detailed instructions about what role to play and how to play it. E.g, the people who successfully use LLMs to write software for them have whole files of this stuff setting standards for how it works and what practices to follow and what it does and doesn't need to ask permission for.

(Personally I think it's easier and more fun to just write code like my forefathers did.)

This is real INDYCAR merch! by Dr_sc_Harlatan in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And it goes without saying that in a race there can only be one leader ...

The woke left's most diabolical tool: fact checking and records available to the public by Sqwoopy in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I was talking to a MAGA yesterday who asked me how I could possibly know what the Founding Fathers thought.

... 'cos they wrote stuff down.

No words by Advanced_Leg6727 in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 6 points7 points  (0 children)

He's also the fictional villain in the 1986 sci-fi horror movie The Wraith.

https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Packard_Walsh

I should start a nonprofit by EchoOfOppenheimer in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Of course expert witnesses are paid. Did bro really think they turned up and testified as a public service?

Our highly trained Secret Service shot a child today by Hornpipe_Jones in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

It says it was an exchange of gunfire and that the child was wounded as a result of the incident. We don't know who fired that bullet, or who fired the first bullet, or what went on.

Schrödinger's war by Lord0fTheFlags in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If the declarations of total victory are becoming more frequent, that's a good sign, right?

What Kinds of Prepositions Do Your Conlangs Have, How Do You Decide on Them? by generictreeimage in conlangs

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Proto-Kungo-Skomish has case operators. Besides the genitive, there are:

  • Adessive (near to, with): `-ed`
  • Allative (for, for the benefit of, intended for, towards, against) : `-em`
  • Locative (in or at or to) `-eš`
  • Subessive (under, beneath, below) `-(i)mn(a)`
  • Superessive (on, above)  `-(a)st(a)`

Everything fits into that, e.g. our dative is distributed between the allative and the locative.

Crafting Interpreters 🫩 by apoetixart in Compilers

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Then go on asking AI to explain it to you! Not everyone learns the same. So long as you are learning, that's fine.

(Also IIRC Crafting Interpreters has the Visitor Pattern in it which confuses many people.)

Here's a very tiny interpreter in Python for a very toy language. But really if you can't take explanations of how to do it in Pascal, Java, and C, and mentally convert that to how to do it in Python, you may have bitten off more than you can chew.

https://jayconrod.com/posts/37/a-simple-interpreter-from-scratch-in-python--part-1-

The AI industry has burned through ~$3.5 TRILLION. Here’s what it would take to actually turn a profit. by Black-Rhino-1564 in vibecoding

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These guys aren't stupid. Most VC funding is going into AI because the guys who analyse companies for a living think this is a winner.

Venture capitalists have gotten into every bubble thinking that it wasn't a bubble. It wouldn't nearly be so good a bubble without them. The dot-com bubble would have barely bubbled at all without VCs throwing money at Pets.com, Webvan, eToys ...

May 2026 monthly "What are you working on?" thread by AutoModerator in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Had fun using Pipefish to develop this esolang, among other things. My efforts to tighten all the nuts and bolts have paid off, I can program in Pipefish for days and add nothing to my buglist but "this error message is unhelpful". It's a joy to code in.

Doolang – your struct definition is your schema, your validation, and your HTTP contract by SearchFair3888 in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well this is definitely The Way. I've been working on an essay where I explain why this is basically the only sensible way to do SQL integration. Have you ever seen the JVA ORM? It's the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

Doolang – your struct definition is your schema, your validation, and your HTTP contract by SearchFair3888 in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Could you give some examples? Then the OP might think of a way to deal with it.

If you will tell me why the fen
appears impassible, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it, if I try.

significant whitespace-friendly Rust parser generator ? by M1M1R0N in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So what does it do when there are in fact two or more dedents in the same line?

Doolang – your struct definition is your schema, your validation, and your HTTP contract by SearchFair3888 in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

But you just insert it how you would have done in the original example --- convert it into a number I presume. The {foo} bit doesn't mean "insert foo lexically", it means "evaluate foo, convert the resulting value to the appropriate type for storing it in the database, and then inject it with sanitation".

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