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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: February 7th, 2025
  • It’s more about the ethical and cognitive effects of relying on AI. To simplify, I don’t think there is any good use for “leaning heavily” on it for code generation. The worst case scenario is that the code fucks your system in some way.

    I don’t know what precautions the author might have made, but to dedicate a paragraph to pointing out how useful AI was to him sounds more like the type of AI hype techbro to just trust the AI to get it right, which makes me trust him less.

    Plus, you know, the whole energy consumption and cognitive decline issue.

  • I haven’t seen this particular code, but I’ve had the pleasure of working with AI-generated code before. There was a single line that I ended up using in my manually written version, the rest of it was just hard to read and maintain. The advice for editing that code I got from the person who sent it was to just feed it to the model and ask it to make those changes.

    I don’t want to outsource my brain and I find it untrustworthy to see someone advocate for it.

  • I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing. I was talking about Iran backing Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli factions, which I’m pretty sure they didn’t exactly make a secret of. The JCPOA was very much lacking in restrictions in that department, because ultimately, it’s a local problem that the global powers didn’t care too much about. This was definitely a flaw in an otherwise good deal.

    You mention compliance, so I assume you mean Israel’s claim about the “secret” nuclear program? Yes, that one was a very transparent lie. Iran had very good reasons to comply and get the great powers off its case. They’d have been very stupid to risk throwing away diplomatic credibility by randomly breaking deals, even unofficial ones. They wanted the sanctions gone, after all, which is why they were absolutely transparent about their compliance.

    The alleged “secret” program had stopped in 2009 and been covered in the IAEA report. The director of the IAEA even said as much when Israel made that claim. They straight up fabricated a nuclear threat that wasn’t there to goad the US (well, Trump really) into supporting their genocidal ambitions. That is absolutely evil.

  • The statements aren’t the ones you claim though.

    “I don’t care if it’s raining. I’m going for a walk.” doesn’t mean I never care about rain at all. It means that the fact that it’s raining has no bearing on my decision to go for a walk. I could join them with a dash to make their connection clear, but even if I don’t, the composite meaning is obvious.

    “I don’t care if …” is the construct joining the two clauses into a full sentence, indicating that the first statement (“they target something I don’t like”) has no bearing on the second (“they’re still assholes”). The second part doesn’t itself have a bearing on the first, but the sentence as a whole and the disqualifying particle in particular do.

    You split the sentence wrong, altering the meaning of the first clause by prepending a part that doesn’t belong to it.

  • It is syntactically two independent clauses (or a compound sentence) joined by an em dash rather than a single, indivisible thought.

    You’re mistaking syntactical shape for semantic content. Independent clauses can still have context-dependent meaning. In fact, that’s the norm for sentences placed together. By being in sequence, all three statements are implicitly connected.

    What’s more, the dash explicitly signals that the thoughts are connected. That’s a common use of dashes: juxtaposition of opposed thoughts. They’re dependent both by the implicit context-dependency and by virtue of being marked as dependent.

    Figuring out how the distinct statements are connected and how these dependencies shape them is a fundamental linguistic puzzle. You didn’t find the solution, which isn’t a bit deal, but even when you had the solution explained to you, you keep insisting there is none.

    You assume second half acts as a pivot (“setup for a ‘but’”). But look at the actual words: there is no “but” or ideological reversal present.

    “They hit someone I don’t like” is something you’d expect people to approve of, but in this context, it’s juxtaposed against both the preceding and succeeding statements of disapproval of their actions and motives respectively, which creates a contradiction: If they target someone you don’t like, aren’t you happy about that?

    That contradiction is preemptively resolved by “I don’t care if … – …”. If you’re looking for words to pin the pivot to, those are the closest you’ll get. They express the semantic connection between the facts “they targeted someone I don’t like” and “I disapprove of their actions”: the former has no bearing on the latter.

    a political/institutional cynicism (“I don’t care if they target a government agency I don’t like”)

    I see your confusion here: “I don’t care if” isn’t actually part of the fact being presented. It’s not a distinct emotional stance, but rather part of the linguistic construct linking the independent statement “they target a government agency I don’t like” to the one following it. If anything, it’s the negation of an expected emotional stance.

  • I’m really not sure why it seems like most people here think context matters, but you keep insisting that it doesn’t. The two parts of that second sentence, which you treat as separate statements, were literally linked with a dash. It’s also not like the statement or its parts stood alone:

    The first sentence implies disapproval of the hackers’ previous antics. The second one first concedes that they also hit someone the commenter dislikes, which in that context is a clear setup for a “but”, which follows and makes it clear that this isn’t enough to redeem them, since the motive likely isn’t ideological nor political, but plain greed.

    You’re taking a sentence in isolation and pretending its meaning is self-contained. That’s not how human language works.

  • In or out of context, "I don’t care if they target a government agency I don’t like"means the exact same thing. It’s a stand alone statement not impacted by your second sentence.

    That’s just not true. The fact that it can form a complete sentence on its own doesn’t divorce its meaning from the surrounding context.

    In my favourite example, “I want to make sure the children die with the parent” is a complete sentence, but outside of a programming context, it’s quite fucked up.

    In this case, the sentence you quoted is equivalent to a parenthetical to add nuance to the second half you omitted: “They’re just another bunch of assholes out to make a profit (even if they target a government agency I don’t like).” It’s the opposite of a standalone statement: It’s the subordinate qualification to a different, standalone statement.

    Just because you can quote it outside its context doesn’t mean that it’s independent of context.