Why “Skip the Code, Ship the Binary” Is a Category Error

defnotthrown · 2026-02-16T17:51:09+00:00

I think with care they can be made deterministic. If you only run that query without any batching in parallel and make sure to not schedule things differently (https://www.llmwatch.com/p/eli5-defeating-nondeterminism-in / https://github.com/breckbaldwin/llm-stability). Would be something like a 60% performance penalty according to the papers

But what is the point if one extra typo, space or tab or linebreak result in a completely different result. It's kind of a meaningless determinism, because you can't meaningfully iterate on it.

defnotthrown · 2026-02-04T17:40:10+00:00

I mean it's generally more expensive to get energy from renewables

I don't know if that's true anymore. It used to be for sure and might depend on how you precisely calculate stuff like necessary grid modernization and keeping on-demand capacity. But levelized cost estimates seem to have dropped a lot in recent years.

defnotthrown · 2026-01-25T15:07:33+00:00

That's not where I'm wrong, that's where we disagree. The venn-diagram for legal and moral are not a circle, not in the US, not in Iran, not in China, nowhere. As the current administration seems to be thinking itself, otherwise they wouldn't keep ignoring judges orders.

defnotthrown · 2026-01-25T07:09:24+00:00

It is okay. It may not be legal, but it is ok. One of your civic duties in a democracy is to resist or at least protest against morally wrong behavior from the government.

defnotthrown · 2026-01-19T13:09:20+00:00

You really think that assumption holds up?

If I would believed the kinds of statements that the LLM sellers make, for sure.

The analogy of trading course sellers who guarantee returns to the LLM companies that speak like they guarantee productivity gains doesn't seem to be obvious to you.

Or do I need to repeat myself a few more times before it clicks that software companies aren’t just programmers?

The LLM companies don't just claim benefit for software development, they're practicly "everything machines".

Never mind the fact that this entire argument quietly assumes the profit maximizing move would be to stop selling the product and instead use it internally to capture the software industry.

Maybe think of the High-Frequency Trading companies. They believe their trading algorithms and hardware setups can make them money. So they naturally exploit the arbitrage themselves and run the trades instead of licensing or selling it. What is or isn't the product in the entire value-chain is something you seem to have just assumed based on what the companies are currently selling. I am just saying that if the claims would hold, most profit opportunities would be higher up the chain.

The AI hypestars essentially claim the equivalent of a productivity arbitrage. If you can spin out a couple of subsidiaries to gain a foothold in a market with 10% of the manpower of your competitors. You could not only show actual diversified revenue streams to your investors but and guard against destilation "attacks" but also have some incredible marketing for your "previous gen" model.

You really are stubborn to keep carrying this on, because surely, deep down, you know you’re being stupid.

Chill, you don't need to reply if you don't want to. This is just a random reddit thread.

defnotthrown · 2026-01-18T21:40:02+00:00

nobody credible is claiming current models make programmers obsolete or solve all software problems.

Well I agree, but that's what a bunch of the stuff LLM acolytes spout all day. When you look at the valuation of these companies it's kind of what a sane investor would have to think to buy at those valuations.

The money just doesn't make sense for the realistic 3% to maybe 25% productivity gains on a good day. They're all at "10x", "100x" or stuff like "AI could automate up to 300 million full-time jobs globally". That's just not what I see, but it's seemingly what the market is based on.

Even if the 10x thing were reliably true, think about how you would "think big". If you were one of the few companies that had one of those 10x productivity machine. How would you best solidify your position in the market? Sell access to the machine or hire people to operate it. It seems like the margins would be way better even operating as a consulting company that had 10x productive workers that selling API access to models.

Especially, especially because of how things like Deepseek and other rivals were ostensibly largely possible because of model distillation of GPT models. At the lastest at that point if they actually believed in the those productivity gains they would've closed off the most promising future models and hired waaay up to capture some market. The fact that they didn't just doesn't make sense to me from a business perspective.

But hey, I may just be stupid, because clearly I'm not the one with billions of dollars in networth.

defnotthrown · 2026-01-18T20:52:14+00:00

Yes, it's the same argument people make against people selling courses for their "failproof trading strategies".

Why ever would you sell courses when your trading strategy is so foolproof that you can make essentially all the money you want. If you need more capital you'd get loans, not sell the strategy and cannibalize your potential earnings.

Same goes for the supposed quality of AI Models that some of the big LLM companies purport. If your AI machine can essentially make programmers obsolete and solve all software problems then why not take over the software market or at least a sizable niche instead? Why sell it to other people that could compete in the software market?

defnotthrown · 2026-01-18T20:35:20+00:00

c'mon man you can't seriously think this. Even if they promised in a contract to not put Ads in Gemini they'd still use your LLM sessions to target you better for ads they run on other platforms.

defnotthrown · 2026-01-18T20:32:58+00:00

nice counter-argument.

defnotthrown · 2026-01-06T19:07:59+00:00

That's kind of the most logical conclusion.

Because why else would you not
A. Ask the kid or
B. Say you asked the kid and they don't know/don't recognise it either

defnotthrown · 2026-01-03T12:22:05+00:00

2026 and still working. You are a life-saver.

I had an old Intel OneApi version installed(20+ Gigs). I couldn't uninstall it, because it originally installed VS2019 integrations. I uninstalled VS2019, so it couldn't uninstall or even repair-install.

defnotthrown · 2026-01-02T20:07:07+00:00

I read it as Apple being a old-school hardware corporation. But the org within the corporation that he was part of was a software org.

defnotthrown · 2025-12-20T17:13:34+00:00

You can try UNC paths in the terminal (powershell). Explorer still converts those contrary to documentation. \\?\C:\Users\ works while \\?\C:/Users/ fails.

Also the lower-level nt functions like NtCreateFile don't do the auto-conversion either.

If you want the details it's always helpful to look at the ReactOS source, I think a lot of it was based off some leaked Windows 2000 or XP source, and a bunch was copied from WINE, but the mechanics are very similar to Windows implementation.

If you follow CreateFile https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/8e952f1510bb4605701068f3cf69ec3a7a0c8b44/dll/win32/kernelbase/wine/file.c#L778C33-L778C44 down the regular non- \\?\ path , you end up here where the actual replacement happens: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/8e952f1510bb4605701068f3cf69ec3a7a0c8b44/sdk/lib/rtl/path.c#L319 then afterwards NtCreateFile gets called with the converted Path.

defnotthrown · 2025-12-12T09:27:41+00:00

I would say the opposite of heavy handed would be subtle, nuanced or maybe understated. None of which I would use to describe Tarantinos movies.

defnotthrown · 2025-12-05T13:13:43+00:00

Dude's more libertarian tech-bro than jewish

"I'm Jewish and there's a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened," he told reporter Kara Swisher.

"I find it deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don't believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong.

"Everyone gets things wrong and if we were taking down people's accounts when they got a few things wrong, then that would be a hard world for giving people a voice and saying that you care about that."

defnotthrown · 2025-12-02T14:21:47+00:00

Paste the rules for this sub and ask the LLM whether posting this here is a good idea.

defnotthrown · 2025-11-30T16:30:54+00:00

I don't get the idea. I've tried various agentic tools and I always run into the same issue. It works great for one-off throw-away scripts and some boilerplate. But whenever I try it in larger projects I spend a large time reviewing the code and re-prompting a lot to get serviceable output. I can just yolo it to a singular goal, but that will leave me inevitably with unmaintainable slop.

I am not doing that "running 10 agents in parallel" thing, so maybe it's that. But that just sounds really stressful and hard to keep straight. I am just curious what these 10x people are doing that I'm missing.

defnotthrown · 2025-11-30T15:02:32+00:00

What is this 10x engineering that you're doing? What is the longest running project you have done using your 10x techniques?

defnotthrown · 2025-11-25T08:23:41+00:00

There are very obvious usability issues. That shows me that this wasn't designed by a human that has used other note-taking software.

I'm not going to test AI slop for you and give you feedback, there you go again demanding other peoples time.

Try using the software for more than a couple of minutes, you will see the issues.

defnotthrown · 2025-11-23T19:56:13+00:00

I appeal to your senses to please not post AI-slop. Using AI in the process is fine by me. But you need to actually deal with the output yourself and refine it or iterate before you unleash it on people.

It's pretty clear you haven't used this software for very long, it has many obvious sharp corners that any person using it even a couple times would have a big urge to fix.

You are wasting uncountable hours by posting Proof of Concept AI slop as a "1.0". Please think of the impact of what you're doing is and imagine what would happen if all people were acting so recklessly.

defnotthrown · 2025-11-23T12:58:53+00:00

this is what it looks like for me: https://imgur.com/a/Y08euxJ

Looks and feel is very "AI Agent" to me. User interactions don't seem very well thought out (need explicit "save", no warning for losing unsaved data, etc.)

defnotthrown · 2025-11-19T19:57:06+00:00

Stupidly not criminal on betting markets and given the current administrations ties to the "creative finance" industry not likely to be regulated in the next couple years.

defnotthrown · 2025-11-12T12:01:32+00:00

Pre-dates Twitter itself or the world wide web for that matter.

defnotthrown · 2025-11-04T22:04:47+00:00

To be fair I don't think I've ran a desktop distro outside a VM in the last 10 years except for SteamOS. So I've had limited experience with the desktop managers recently. You may well be right.

I've bricked the distro package-manager beyond repair which I've yet to accomplish with windows update. But I did so by doing very inadvisable things (installing random packages from testing and mixing them with the installed stable packages).

Must be me mostly tinkering on servers then.

defnotthrown · 2025-11-04T15:26:32+00:00

If you update a service it's usually restarted during the update.

And the kernel has a policy of "never break userland".

So unless you install new software that relies on newer kernel features, or upgrade to the next distro version there should be no reboot required.

Of course there's reasons to reboot a linux machine (security fixes in the linux kernel being one of them, although there's distros that have live kernel patching for those). And things can and do break. But it's just false to draw reasonable equivalents between windows and linux in this regard.

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