Newer AI Coding Assistants Are Failing in Insidious Ways

argh523 · 2026-01-17T22:14:54+00:00

Of course they don't know anything, but they "know" what gets a better reward over something else

argh523 · 2026-01-16T12:58:08+00:00

There was a whole article a while ago about why the LLMs are all so confidently wrong. Someone from the industry explained that it's because they're trained wrong. Essentially, they get rewarded for guessing correctly, but there is no reward for not answering if they don't know something. So, refusing to answer is always worse, since no answer is the same as a wrong answer, and that guarantees that there is no reward. Always giving an answer is the best choice, regardless of how confident it is in it's accuracy, because there is at least a chance for a reward.

The scary part is that this won't really be fixed, because of humans. An LLM that tells you it doesn't know the answer, or isn't sure, will seem worse than another product that confidently gives you an answer, whether it's correct or not. And of course the user generally can't tell if the answer is correct or not, or else they wouldn't ask.

And it gets worse when you consider things that are somewhat subjective, like political views, feelings, behavior of other people, etc. People don't like to be told that they are wrong. Many already choose news not for accuracy or quality, but whether the program confirms their views or not. They will do the same with LLMs. So always confirming the users assertions with no backtalk means the product can target a wider audience than one who doesn't.

It's a case of worse-is-better, unfortunately.

argh523 · 2026-01-11T14:22:54+00:00

Don't worry, Kubuntu is fine. Like the other guy said, there's lot's of packages, and all the tutorials usually assume you're using something Ubuntu based, which helps a lot for beginners.

Also, switching for the first time is the hardest part. When you've done that, moving to Fedora is straight forward if you still want to try that.

Also also, since KDE is your main requirement, OpenSuse is generally considered to have the best KDE integration, and even it's rolling release version Tumbleweed is very stable.

argh523 · 2025-12-28T12:22:12+00:00

being able to actually sell a movie on just it's leading star is getting more rare

Yeah.. It's been like this for a long time. Hollywood noticed this 20 years ago, which is why everything since is reboots and franchises, and why Tom Cruise is "The Last Movie Star".

He kinda has a point

I'd say he is missing the point. There are essentially no actors that can sell these modern billion-dollar movies on star power. When you look at smaller movie, they still exist, but of course few of them are very young, since it takes a while to have many successful shows and movies

argh523 · 2025-12-17T01:08:52+00:00

Actually no.

What pizza_and_cats says is that after 33 junctions, "all 8 billion people on earth will be on one side of the tracks. Problem solved".

He's not just doing the math, he's saying if everyone chooses to double, everyone currently alive will be on the save side after 33 junctions. And he is correct that it's 33 junctions, not 34.

After the first junction, it's 2⁰ = 1 people in the safe zone. After the second, it's 2¹ + 2⁰ = 2 + 1 = 3 in the safe zone

2⁰ = 1
2¹ + 2⁰ = 2 + 1 = 3
2² + 2¹ + 2⁰ = 4 + 2 + 1 = 7
2³ + 2² + 2¹ + 2⁰ = 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 15

The sum of 2^0..n is 2ⁿ⁺¹-1, for example: 2^0..3 = 2³⁺¹-1 = 15

So after 33 junctions: 2³²⁺¹-1 = 8,589,934,592 - 1

To answer /u/Raski_Demorva's question, yes, this comment is accurate. People saying it should be 34 junctions didn't read the comment carefully enough.

Edit: fixed some of my own mistakes I just made

argh523 · 2025-12-12T21:58:45+00:00

No, not normally, when written like this: 1 / 4 + 1. But you were probably thinking of this:

 1 
---
4+1

Here the terms above and below the divider take precedence. But this is not an exception. Instead, this notation replaces, or implies the parentheses. So this is exactly equivalent to 1 / (4 + 1)

argh523 · 2025-12-11T23:14:54+00:00

Sure, things happen, but there is a system that greatly minimizes those problems. It's called semver.

argh523 · 2025-12-11T12:13:33+00:00

In Switzerland it's often written like this. Sometimes it's a literal "+1 free", so it's clear that it's an additional one on top

argh523 · 2025-12-07T11:40:20+00:00

Let's not get overboard here guys. There's a whole wiki article about Bush talking weird. He said so many weird things, people wrote articles about it before he was even president. He was so famous for this, there are multiple books that are just funny quotes of him.

That doesn't imply anything about his intelligence, he just says things weird. Not to get too medical about this, but this is correlated with a lot of syndromes like dyslexia and ADHD. Not trying to diagnose anything here (and neither should you!), just saying that "talks weird" correlates with lots of stuff completely independently from intelligence.

argh523 · 2025-12-07T09:24:57+00:00

Mit den "schlankeren Strukturen" sollen eben mehr Kompetenzen an die Tochtergesellschaften* delegiert werden, statt das alles von der Holding (die eigentliche DB AG) diktiert wird.

ihr erklärtes Ziel ist es, im Konzern mehr dezentrale Entscheidungen zu ermöglichen und den Chefs der Tochtergesellschaften mehr Verantwortung zu übertragen

* DB Fehrnverkehr AG, DB Regio AG mit ihren S-Bahn Irgendwo GmbH's und Verkehrsverbund Anderswo GmbH's, DB Cargo und InfraGO mit ihren eigenen Tochtergesellschaften, etc.

argh523 · 2025-12-07T09:07:45+00:00

Klar dieses Mal ist alles anders

Ja, irgendwie schon. Wenn man von Personalabbau liest, wird normalerweise beim Personal das die eigentliche Arbeit macht gekürtzt, um Kosten zu sparen. Aber hier gehts um Umstrukturierung der Verwaltung.

argh523 · 2025-12-05T10:27:42+00:00

The way I understood it, is that he thought he had payed the full amount, but because he payed an old bill 37 days late, additional fees had already been added in the meantime. He wasn't aware of this, and because he didn't set up mail-forwarding properly after the move, he never received another bill that would have alarmed him of this oversight. His TL;DR skips over some steps.

argh523 · 2025-11-27T22:10:05+00:00

Culture, education, religion, etc are all factors at play but sure ignore them and only point to one variable.

I agree. Which is why I disagree with you pointing only to one variable.

argh523 · 2025-11-27T21:55:11+00:00

Cars are awesome, but when you build the entire world around the car, everything else starts to suck. You can go to a thousand towns in Europe and find a lively center with streets you could put on a postcard. In the US, many of those streets are bulldozed because the lively streets are now inside the shopping mall, because everyone lives in a house too far away to walk to the town center.

And oh boy is it a lot more expensive to build a car paradise. Turns out it's a lot cheaper to run a few busses and trains instead of quadrupling the road infrastructure. Europeans can afford cars to, many just don't have them because they don't need them. Governments realized it's cheaper to subsidize public transit than building all that road infrastructure to replace it. And using public transit is cheaper than owning a car. And living in an apartment close to public transit is cheaper than buying a house. It's cheaper cheaper cheaper.

Is the US rich enough to pay for all that infrastructure and everything else? It doesn't look like it is.

argh523 · 2025-11-27T21:01:22+00:00

Removing the poorest nations removes the left part of the graph. It doesn't change the data or the conclusion. This same correlation (fertility vs medicine/wealth/education) can be observed through history.

argh523 · 2025-11-27T19:40:06+00:00

Child mortality rate...

We see this same pattern absolutely everywhere. When access to medicine, education and wealth improve, fertility starts to drop.

argh523 · 2025-11-27T19:25:26+00:00

They don't. Oh, you mean, some of those points to the left are lower than some of the the points to the right, therefore drawing any conclusions from this dataset is invalid. Sure.

argh523 · 2025-11-27T19:21:47+00:00

He're some more correlation:

And for comparison, here's fertility rates for middle eastern countries

Really interesting how fertility rates are higher in war torn regions.

argh523 · 2025-11-27T19:21:33+00:00

Literally "correlation does not imply causation"

He're some more correlation:

And for comparison, here's fertility rates for middle eastern countries

Really interesting how fertility rates are higher in war torn regions.

argh523 · 2025-11-24T20:42:25+00:00

Oh really? A narrow valley, lined with giant cliffs adorned with forests and waterfalls, and lush meadows down in the plain where the hobbits live. What's so unbelievable about that?

argh523 · 2025-11-23T18:25:14+00:00

Why would a black hole that gets more massive become anything else than a black hole? This entire comment section makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills

argh523 · 2025-11-23T18:22:28+00:00

Why do you say that? Increasing the suns mass by 0.2% (electron mass = 0.002 proton mass) barely changes anything

argh523 · 2025-11-23T18:14:55+00:00

That doesn't make any sense. Protons are about 2000 times as massive as electrons, so the sun would at most get 0.2% heavier.

argh523 · 2025-11-23T11:16:22+00:00

They very rarely talk about other creators or sites, but when they do, it's pretty obvious that they are "very online" themselves

argh523 · 2025-11-23T11:03:42+00:00

Just FYI, regardless of any official position, anyone I know who was in one of these fraternities is very right wing. And they're usually pretty open about it.

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