simontherockjohnson

I've found it hard to find jobs with Clojure/Haskell/Rust. I typically look for interesting projects and industries that don't make me feel icky even though they end up doing so because everything is fucking enterprise sales. My career has kinda been Bar Rescue for idiot companies who have blundered into an extremely hard problem and need someone to actually figure it out before the software stack implodes on itself.

I love Lisp, that's why I like doing industry work in JS, because it's very lisp like.

However if you gave an average industry programmer Lisp today they'd fuck up so much worse than the garbage enterprise grade language code that exists today. I switch jobs probably every 4 years and on average I teach 3 people a year what a closure is.

Lisp has a lot of great solutions for a lot of real problems, but these people quite literally fix one bug and create 3. I had a 10+ YOE Tech Lead tell me the other day that they kinda just ignore the error output of the TS compiler and it made me want to tear my eyes out.

don’t even try to learn what a software dependency

Everyone at my company keeps using the term "dependency hell" when referring to literally dependency management and order of operations with a modern package manager like NPM that tracks versions and dependencies.

They've literally never experienced working with dynamically linked libraries and they think it's so hard because they have to understand a tree that exists in data form (e.g. package-lock.json) and can be easily visualized vs a tangled file system and LD_LIBRARY_PATH or Windows standard search order / HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\KnownDLLs.

It's pathetic.

Margaret Hamilton's first job out of undergrad was working for Lorenz. She was incredibly accomplished with several stints in top labs, by the time of Apollo. It's not like opportunities for trail blazing software fell out of the sky on shlubs who barely passed undergrad data structures and algorithms courses.

Vaxry is not a very smart guy. He originally got a wrist slap by FDO saying don't do your toxic shit here. Then he followed it up by going postal on the FDO mailing list. Then he put up a blog post where he was like like "SJWs are coming for me".

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists

The entire argument is that you can't make an exclusionary space for people (no definition of what that means) but you should be able to call them slurs. Who would want anything to do with him? He should have gone full tilt and made a list of slurs you should be allowed to say beyond just arguing for the R-slur. That would have really convinced people he's not an extremely toxic right wing weirdo.

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandsCommunity

This was his non-apology where he says "lets be real" a lot which is a common way of just ignoring a criticism and then he follows it up with, I should have banned that user instead of doing what I did.

Asking for professionalism in the OSS community is not a huge deal. It's also quite literally not even about the code AFAIR Drew Devault is still taking Vaxry's patches. He just doesn't want him in the community starting shit with people.

It happens faster to images because of the way LLMs work. LLM's work on "tokens", a token for text is typically a character, fragment of a word, a word, a fragment of a sentence. With language it's much easier to encode meaning and be more precise because that's what language already does. The reason NLP is/was difficult is because language is not algorithmically consistent, it evolves, and rules are constantly broken. For example Kai Cenat is credited with more contributions to the English language than the vast majority of people because children decided to talk like him. Point being is that language does the heavy lifting in terms of encoding a string of characters into something meaningful.

With images, it's a whole different ball game. Image tokenizers often work in several different ways, there are two types of token hard and soft. Hard tokens for example could be the regions of the image, part could be the colors, the alpha channels.

Hard tokens are also the visual encoders of meaning so a chair, table, or car could be a hard tokens based on their bounding boxes. These tokenization techniques are based in a lot of other types of machine learning.

Note that these tokens often overlap in practice and consume regions of other tokens, however as "hard" tokens they are considered distinct entities, and this is where the trouble starts esp. for image generation (that's roughly why a lot of AI did and still does things like draw extra fingers).

The next type of tokens are soft tokens, and they're a bit harder to explain, but basically the idea is that soft tokens are encoded by detecting continual statistical distributions within images. It's a very abstract way of reading an image. Here's where the trouble compounds.

So now when we're writing an image, what do we write the image with? You guessed it. Tokens. The reason that those AI drift time lapses exist is because LLMs are statistical and not "functional". They don't have the mathematical concept of "identity". Otherwise they'd try to recreate the same image by copying the data in the exact tokens (or just copy the image itself) , instead they try to regenerate the image by generating new tokens with the same attributes that it read from the image.

To illustrate this lets say an image contains a blue car and the AI can only tokenize it as blue car. Asking an LLM to run an identity function on that image will result in a different car because the resolution of the token is only like 2 dimensions "blue" and "car" which roughly means it will output the average "blue" "car" from its training data. Now with human made things it's actually a lot easier. There's a finite variation of cars. However there's an infinite variation of things that can happen to a car. So an AI theoretically can run an identity function off of a particular make/model/year of a vehicle but if the paint is scratched or the paint job is unique it will start to introduce drift there's also other sources of drift like camera angle etc. With natural objects this becomes a whole different ball game because of the level of variation, this complexity compounds with scenes.

So identity functions on text are extremely easy in comparison for example:

This works because the tokens are simpler and there is less of a loss of "resolution" from the text to the tokenize form. E.g. word "Poopy" is token "poopy". But once you get into interpreting an image, and re-encoding those interpretations onto a new canvas it becomes much more difficult. e.g. image of "Dwayne the Rock Johnson" is most likely a series of tokens like "buff man", "bad actor", etc.

This is a rough explanation because there's a lot of voodoo, and I'm more of a Software Engineer than I am a statistics/data guy so I approach the alchemy a little bit from an alchemical standpoint.

I read too much Orwell as a teenager. His personal politics outside of fighting in Spain are fairly shit. Most of Orwell is incredibly boring and simplistic, but I think there are a few deeper parts of it are glossed over especially by libs who think 1984 is a book about communism instead of a book about power.

For example everyone knows the quote:

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever"

Which everyone is like "omg gommunism" to.

This appears in a passage in the book is where O'Brien is explaining the operation of power politics as it relates to parties to Winston as he's torturing him.

'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,' he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'

Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.

'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.'

'And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands -- all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.'

Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You can't!' he said weakly.

'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?'

'You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.'

'Why?'

'It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'

'Why not?'

'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.'

'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The party is immortal.'

As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.

'I don't know -- I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.'

'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside -- irrelevant.'

This is a Blue No Matter Who society. This is a society pure party politics, a society of us and them. Ironically many liberals cannot see the "us" in the "them" of the book. Liberals on their loss literally went online to reclaim their power by gloating about genocide, by gloating about the coming abuse of minorities, and by gloating about the coming economic instability. They were denied the thrill of victory, the thrill of stomping their enemies, so they must recuperate that feeling of power in another way. This is why every few months they start posting about Susan Sarandon, Bernie Sanders, Muslims in Deerborn, Gaza Activists, or for those who are older Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Ted Kennedy, or the eternal of evil non-voters.

The Democrats like O'Brien love creating fake enemies to rile up their base. They use the threat of their "enemies" to their "base" in the same way that in 1984 there's always a Goldberg terror cell around every corner.

Ironically the whole "cruelty for cruelty's sake" is a hilarious denial of the core of the whole book which states "cruelty is the expression of political power". Which they themselves do politically (e.g. Blue team owns the leader board in cleansing brown people from the core and in the periphery) and socially when they're in and out of power. Yet they still love citing it.

But of course Orwell was wrong about the form, there's no 20 Minutes of Hate that's conveniently isolated and ignored if like Winston you find it icky. It's a Unending Hate that's dispensed through a voluntary capitalist media system that hooks you into the feeling. Infinite Scroll is 20 Minutes of Hate. 24 Hour News cycles are 20 Minutes of Hate. Hollywood Movies and Sports Games sponsored by the Department of Defense are 20 Minutes of Hate. They serve the same social purpose. They just have a different and less baby brained form, so the baby brains who love this book cannot make the connections.

We live in a power society. Our O'Briens are capitalists. To the O'Brien and Elon Musks of the world there is no difference to torturing you or forcing you to listen to shitty internet jokes from 2009, to them it's an expression of power that demands reverence. Musk knows he's not funny. He knows he constantly eats shit. He does his little shows anyway because he knows people are forced to pay attention to him. They must suffer him because of his station. The entire capitalist system is built that way. You must suffer them, that is the social relation devoid of economics.

There are some ideas that Orwell got right. There's not many of them, and they're just constantly ignored and misapplied.

It's going to be more YA than Animal Farm already is lmao

"So, I wrote it. He had a very clear idea of the tone he wanted, and he wanted the central dynamic that's not in the book between the kind of Napoleon, bad pig and a younger pig who kind of gets corrupted through the system and then pulls out of it. I thought that was a really good structure, and so he developed it with me, and then I just wrote. It's a bit updated because, obviously, the book was written in the ‘40s, so if you were to update that exactly to what it was, it would feel a bit dated. So, I updated it a bit and made it more darkly comic than the book is. The book is comic, but it's serious. I'm excited for people to see it. I think it's going to be awesome. It's been a passion project of his for a long time."

How many times can these morons remake Battle Royale but in Hunger Games style where it's actually cool and good to be da dystopian hero despite things never changing?

We have to keep updating our fairy tales for 2020's coddled children, 1940's coddled children are whole ass adults in comparison. Very Disney.

I would much prefer the much nicer, organically grown mid-density residential areas of Western Europe

Yeah everyone would prefer to be rich rather than to be poor.

It's funny/sad. When UAE signed the Geneva convention their terms were we promise not to commit genocide as long as you promise you don't have jurisdiction to prosecute us through the ICJ.

Ah so ChatGPT works slightly different than what I'm used to. I have really only explored AI locally via ollama because I'm an OSS zealot and I need my tooling to be deterministic so I need to be able to eliminate service changes from the equation.

My experience is that with ollama and deepseek r1 it reprocess the think tags. they get referenced directly.

At this point my debug instincts have been convinced that my idea is unlikely.

Have we tried asking ChatGPT what's wrong before chain of thought prompting the benchmark data for each model to itself?

Ugh. This is all machine woo. I need a drink

I was trying to make a joke about this and was trying to remember the disease that tech priests get in Rogue Trader and Googles search AI hallucinated wh40k lore based on someone's home brew..... Not only that it hallucinated the characters back story that's not even in the post to give them a genetic developmental disorder..... To answer my question....I feel gross. Fucking man made horrors.

Tbh I literally could not figure out which one was supposed to be you in the preview pic. I don't know how autistic this makes me.