That a disingenuous reply at best, the choice is clearly “person doesn’t do enough to help your people” vs “person who actively allows great harm to your people”.
The example could probably have done with being gender neutral, but even so.
I’m not sure why you zeroed in on the female part and not the “doesn’t do enough to help your people” part.
As i said, i don’t disagree in principle.
All i was saying in that response was that inaction should also be factored in to any consideration of morality.
I don’t disagree in principle.
Lets take your scenario of not voting for fascist-lite as a means to fight against Full-Fat fascist.
In the current American system ( the greatest and most functional system /s), not voting effectively gives the vote to the eventual victor (that’s reductive but you know what I mean)
Assuming the BigFash win, the choice of inaction would be more impactful than the action of voting for DietFash.
On a relative scale and depending on how you feel about fascism I suppose.
So yes the participation and outcome matter but the effect isn’t always equal.
Inactively participating in the rise of the GrandMasterFash would be the cost of feeling good about not actively voting for the LesserFash.
Ultimately it’s shit choices all around, but that’s the point of the lesser of two evils, right?
Inaction when action is an option is still a choice.
One of the major premises of the trolley problem is the choice.
It’s very specifically a scenario where everything is a choice.
The only way to not choose a scenario option is to not participate at all.
It’s doesnt have to work, it just has to be convincing enough to get the bean counters and/or incompetent/sociopathic upper management to buy in to the idea that they can save money.
Same as always, if the shitstorm created by a decision isn’t immediately devastating or can be incontrovertibly tied to said decision then that’s just BAU.
but the time the shitshow starts playing the preroll trailers the golden parachutes and bonuses have been claimed.
For them, this isn’t broken, this is how the game works.
You mean like a software developer who has to deal with PR’s from sources that may or may not include LLM generated code ?
If that’s the case, i might know someone…
Wait… unless your original assertion was very specifically about only linux kernel development and not about the principles that apply to software PR review and LLM’s as a whole ?
In that case, i don’t have anyone to hand and you should probably mark it “Active Linux Kernel Contributors Only”.
It’s clearer that way.
No.
You ?
edit: If any of my answers made it seem like i was, let me know and i’ll adjust them, that was not my intention.
TL;DR;
You asked why it mattered if it’s LLM generated or not, i provided examples where it does matter, nothing you’ve said in your reply seems to refute that so I’ll just assume we’ve agreed on this point.
The rest of this reply is just me replying to your additional arguments.
Ok, so you’re suggesting that people are submitting kernel patches that somehow modify the architecture of the kernel/it’s components, that the new architecture is very complex and hard to analyze, that the those architectural changes are part of roadmap and are not rejected right away and that those big, complex architectural level patches are submitted with high frequency. Somehow I doubt all of it.
I mean, i didn’t say any of that but feel free to doubt a position you just made up.
I think the slop patches are small fixes suggested by some AI code analysis tools.
There’s no reason to believe that LLM usage is limited to small patches.
that architectural and complex changes are part of well defined roadmap and don’t come out of nowhere and that code that doesn’t follow conventions is easily spotted and rejected.
In a well maintained project, sure, ish, but let’s just say you’re right about the plan/roadmap phase.
The spotting and rejection you mentioned are now significantly more time and resource consuming for the reasons i stated in the previous reply.
Also when i used the word architecturally i was referring to the logical domain of the patch and the things it interacts with, i wasn’t implying that LLM’s would get a chance at re-architecting an entire project as large as the Linux kernel.
At least i’d hope not.
The linked article talks only about marking the code as AI generated (IMHO useless but harmless) and increasing volume of AI slop patches.
I’m not sure of the usefulness of this kind of marking in practice, but i can tell you a way in which it might be useful.
The way you need to go about evaluating LLM generated code vs human code can be different.
And before you get on your high horse I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing a good job reviewing in general, of course we should.
Review and testing resources are limited in most practical settings, we should be focusing on best utilising that resource in the most efficient manner possible.
There are tools specifically geared towards evaluating LLM generated code for specific mistakes, this marking would enable a more efficient usage/allocation of review resources over and above the baseline code-quality tests.
The idea that maintainers spend time analyzing complex LLM generated code submitted by random amateurs looking for possible architectural bugs sounds like a fantasy to me
Which is clear from your answers, if you don’t understand how pull request review works in practice you’re going to struggle to make a coherent argument that requires that understanding.
To answer the statement directly, there’s sometimes no efficient way to tell which patches are from amateurs, even without LLM’s.
The issue isn’t even just relegated to amateurs, i would like to assume a competent dev of any skill level wouldn’t be submitting patches they don’t understand but that’s just not always the case.
and again, think architecture with a ‘little a’ rather than a ‘big A’.
Logical flow and domain understanding in a relatively limited scope, rather than system-wide structural change.
The difference between tactics and strategy.
Volume and Moderation.
Generating slop is significantly quicker.
You get an increase in volume of people pushing slop, which then has to be reviewed. In addition to the increase in submissions you also get the increase in fidelity/general complexity of the submissions.
Reviewing a PR generated by LLM’s used by amateurs is more involved than an equivalent PR written directly by said amateur.
Straight up coding mistakes aren’t most of the issue, it’s the complex architectural and logical bugs that are going to be the problems.
Stuff that’s functional but logically/architecturally unsound is much harder to spot and it’s significantly easier to generate these kinds of issues with an LLM than to write them out by hand.
If someone submits bullshit AI generated code he will be ignored in the future.
Like this for example, a seemingly reasonable functional argument that is relatively logically unsound, in that is focuses on a narrow “happy path” and ignores where the actual issues are.
1 . To get to the stage where you can block this person you need to review the code first and identify if there is an issue.
Doing this for LLM generated code takes longer, on average.
So the existing process of reviewing people and code is now a multiple more difficult and resource consuming.
Which is generally what people want addressed.
Can LLM’s help?, possibly.
Are there issues that are going to become a large resource problem if we don’t actually address them, yes.
I vaguely recall the TV show (and that it wasn’t great).
Also, if any of you are old enough to remember the TV show “sliders” there was an episode that dealt with this same general scenario.
Yeah, it could definitely have gone a different way and there were certainly actors pushing for that with various motives.
That it didn’t end up that way but still touched on the topic in general made it a much better read IMO.
It’s really not, definitely worth a read
All the research I am aware of - including what I referenced in the previous comment, is that people are honest by default, except for a few people who lie a lot. Boris Johnson is a serial liar and clearly falls into that camp.
I believe that you believe that, but a couple of surveys are not a sufficient argument to prove the fundamental good of all humanity.
If honesty were not the default, why would we believe what anyone has to say in situations where they have an incentive to lie, which is often? Why are such a small proportion of people criminals and fraudsters when for a lot of crimes, someone smart and cautious has a very low chance of being caught?
I think this is just a lack of imagination.
i will go through your scenarios and provide an answer but i don’t think it’s going to achieve anything, we just fundamentally disagree on this.
why would we believe what anyone has to say in situations where they have an incentive to lie, which is often?
You shouldn’t.
edit : You use experience with this person or in general, to make a judgement call about whether or not you want to listen to what they have to say until more data is available. You continue to refine based on accumulated experience.
Why are such a small proportion of people criminals and fraudsters when for a lot of crimes, someone smart and cautious has a very low chance of being caught?
A lot of assumptions and leaps here.
Firstly crime implies actual law, which is different in different places, so let’s assume for now we are talking about the current laws in the uk.
Criminals implies someone who has been caught and prosecuted for breaking a law, I’m going with that assumption because “everyone who has ever broken a law” is a ridiculous interpretation.
So to encompass the assumptions:
Why are such a small proportion of people who have been caught and prosecuted for breaking the law in the uk, when someone smart and caution has a very low chance of being caught?
I hope you can see how nonsensical that question is.
The evolutionary argument goes like this: social animals have selection pressure for traits that help the social group, because the social group contains related individuals, as well as carrying memetically inheritable behaviours. This means that the most successful groups are the ones that work well together. A group first of all has an incentive to punish individuals who act selfishly to harm the group - this will mean the group contains mostly individuals who, through self interest, will not betray the group. But a group which doesn’t have to spend energy finding and punishing traitorous individuals because it doesn’t contain as many in the first place will do even better. This creates a selection pressure behind mere self interest.
That’s a nicely worded very bias interpretation.
social animals have selection pressure for traits that help the social group, because the social group contains related individuals, as well as carrying memetically inheritable behaviours.
This is fine.
This means that the most successful groups are the ones that work well together.
That’s a jump, working well together might not be the desirable trait in this instance.
But let’s assume it is for now.
A group first of all has an incentive to punish individuals who act selfishly to harm the group - this will mean the group contains mostly individuals who, through self interest, will not betray the group.
Reductive and assumptive, you’re also conflating selfishness with betrayal, you can have on without the other, depending on perceived definitions of course.
But a group which doesn’t have to spend energy finding and punishing traitorous individuals because it doesn’t contain as many in the first place will do even better. This creates a selection pressure behind mere self interest.
Additional reduction and a further unsupported jump, individuals are more than just a single trait, selfishness might be desirable in certain scenarios or it might be a part of an individual who’s other traits make up for it in a tribal context.
The process of seeking and the focused attention might be a preferential selection trait that benefits the group.
Powerful grifters try to protect themselves yes, but who got punished for pointing out that Boris is a serial liar?
Everyone who has been negatively impacted by the policies enacted and consequences of everything that was achieved on the back of those lies.
Because being ignored is still a punishment if there are negative consequences.
But let’s pick a more active punishment, protesting.
Protest in a way we don’t like or about a subject we don’t approve of, it’s now illegal to protest unless we give permission.
That’s reductive, but indicative of what happened in broad strokes.
Have you read what the current government has said about the previous one? :P
I’d imagine something along the lines of what the previous government said about the one before ?
As a society we generally hate that kind of behaviour. Society as a whole does not protect wealth and power; wealth and power forms its own group which tries to protect itself.
Depends on how you define society as a whole.
By population, i agree.
By actual power to enact change(without extreme measures), less so
Convenient that you don’t include the wealth and power as part of society, like its some other separate thing.
You should care because it entirely colours how you interact with political life. “Shady behaviour” is about intent as well as outcome, and we are talking in this thread about shady behaviour, and hence about intent.
See [POINT A]
PART 2/2
It’s about confidence. People in this thread expressed with no hint of doubt that the politicians who wrote the legislation did it for kickbacks from big tech. This is in spite of the fact that they have no direct evidence of this and it’s implausible on account of big tech being unhappy with this law. This isn’t simply healthy skepticism, it’s the same old useless cynicism.
I have stated multiple times i do not hold this view.
I have also stated that the sheer difference between what this bill says and the stated intent leans toward either technical incompetence and/or some other reason.
Big tech doesn’t like the encryption stuff, fine, but that doesn’t mean the other stuff won’t benefit them.
If i had to guess at a reason other than idiocy I’d guess it’s a governmental overreach thing.
This will vastly increase the powers and control available to the government in this space (at least the ones publicly utilised) , that isn’t conjecture.
The context was that you can’t just air your personal fan-fiction about politicians’ motivations and personal beliefs as if they were something more than that,
See [POINT A]
so an excuse that “it’s just an opinion” doesn’t wash when the video linked by OP is putting this idea (that the law was written at the behest of big tech) forward seriously.
The OP links to an EFF page , i’m not seeing a video , but that might just be my browser.
The text however makes no reference to big tech pandering afaict.
By all means have your justified beliefs about politicians. But so far the only politician you’ve actually mentioned convincingly as being corrupt is Boris Johnson. You haven’t, for example, leveled any attacks at Oliver Dowden who was the Minister for DCMS at the time of passing the Act. His register of interests does not mention any gifts or meetings with big tech firms.
I have been arguing from a perspective on politicians (and people) in general, Alexander was the easiest example because he’s such a prominent example of a lack of consequences breeding shitbaggery.
And again, i’ve also not been arguing the big tech direct intervention angle.
I shall point you to [POINT A] in general because it applies here but i’ll also add something brief about this guy specifically.
From a quick peruse I’m seeing his Wikipedia and he seems like a standard conservative stereotype, if somewhat laid back in his upset at “wokeness”.
Not my kind of person but not moustache twistingly evil or anything afaict.
This is a long form “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”.
It isn’t necessarily wrong, but it is putting great deal of emphasis on the perceived problems and basically no thought into how to do it.
Contextual incompetence rather than maliciousness.
If this singular person was responsible for the writing, presentation and ability of the bill to get this far through the system, i’d be open to it just being technical idiocy.
Unfortunately it will have to have gone through the entire British political system to get there, which makes it subject to the will of many.
See [POINT A]
PART 1/2
What’s an area where something can be done maliciously or by accident? Car crashes? Workplace injury? Incorrect tax claims? Taking something from a shop? All of these are, to my understanding (and with decreasing confidence, but all have evidence - crime stats for the first, to, HMRC estimates and this Ipsos poll respectively) more likely to be accidental than malicious.
Is there a similar poll for political decisions and outcomes ?
Genuine question, that’s be super interesting, if so.
To me this is a general principle: human beings are social animals and have an instinct to be agreeable and cooperative, to live within socially-agreed rules, to tell the truth and not to fuck people over. Those who break the rules are the exception - otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense to have rules and to have society.
So my background assumption is that people are honest.
I think that’s where our difference in interpretation stems from , i think humans have the instinct for survival and reproduction, that agreement, cooperation and social interaction provided a better environment for survival is incidental.
Honesty is possible in a situation where survival isn’t on the line, in a life or death situation i think the person who would tell the truth knowing it will get them ( or more importantly, their family ) killed, is the outlier.
Outside of hyperbolous scenarios i think honesty is not the default in a situation where it doesn’t have a social/survival impact.
Such as a politician lying for fiscal/politician gain, knowing that there isn’t really any punishment for that.
because the nature of being in a society is that we point out and emphasise the times when people don’t abide by its rules; we have to use more robust methods to estimate its prevalence.
I also disagree with this, it’s a nice ideal and we should absolutely strive for this, but it’s just not how it works in practice, from my experience.
I think we disagree on what the rules are, it seems like you think calling out perceived injustices in fairness and corruption being met with punishment for the corrupt is what should happen.
In practice i think that only happens in the lower stakes, once you start pointing at people with wealth and power that rule quickly changes from “call it out and we’ll punish the offender” to “call it out and we’ll punish you for pointing it out and as a deterrent to others who might do the same”.
That’s not a society that honesty and inherent (relative) goodness as foundational concepts would produce.
Kickbacks to politicians in the UK are comparatively tiny though. Enough to motivate someone who’s already a grifter, but not enough to cause anyone but the extraordinarily stupid to be motivated by getting them.
That comparatively is carrying a lot of weight there and again i think we just disagree about this point in general.
You pushed back on this before but I genuinely think that the reason people think otherwise is because they just can’t believe that (for example) Tories actually believe that the country would work better by spending less on public services and benefits. The only remaining explanation is kickbacks by the direct beneficiaries of these policies. Even if your logic isn’t as formalised as that, I still think that on some level that is the feeling that makes you ready to believe that Tory politicians are so unlike the population at large - that is, massively more dishonest.
And again you are missing my point, that they believe or not it isn’t the issue.
I can say with full confidence i absolutely do not care if they believe it, or if they don’t, makes zero difference to me.
If a politician(or politicians) wants to run some shenanigans on PPE contracts, netting their friends x millions of pounds, it care not a whit if they believe in the general correctness of conservatism.
I will state it plainly, mark this as [POINT A] and point back to this, because it seems you are skipping this part entirely.
[POINT A]
If there is consistent historic precedent of a mismatch between stated intent and actual outcome by both the individual/institution and other related contexts then i will assume that behaviour will continue until proven otherwise.
It’s not “i don’t understand, so they must be corrupt” it’s “they have a history of being shady and incompetent, so I’m going to assume they will continue to be shady and incompetent”
Their belief is irrelevant, their later explanations of their intent is perhaps cause for minor adjustment.
Feel free to rephrase the same assumption again, i will point back to this explanation.
That proves it’s possible, not that it happened this time.
Yes, as I’ve previously pointed out, there are examples of this happening.
Can i prove it’s a majority, probably not and it seems like a lot of effort so I’m not going to, but I’ll wait while you provide the majority of examples proving incompetence over malice.
No, just because something is not objective does not mean that claims about at are baseless. Do you think that the article here “has no basis for saying it’s a bad idea”? Surely not. Politics is, more often than not, about questions that don’t have objective answers. You say there’s a provable downside, but it’s not actually provable; it’s still theoretical at this point. We don’t know for sure whether anyone’s data will be leaked, for example. It’s in exactly the same realm as the potential upsides - it is likely (but impossible to quantify at this stage) that some people will feel curtailed in what they can do and say online, which will be negative for them. At the same time, it is likely (but impossble to quantify) that some children will not harm themselves because they won’t have seen encouragement online to perform acts of self-harm.
I’m not sure why you asked about how i do predictive analysis and ask questions that ignore the answer.
I’m not saying this specific action can be proven to be a bad idea before it happens, i have, many times said that i judge these things based on what has come before and the outcomes of those things.
Read the rest of my replies for examples of how this works.
Boris you’re probably right but I don’t think Sunak went into politics to enrich himself or to seek power. The rewards you get in the UK are just pitiful - Sunak did a hundred times better by marrying into wealth, and anyone could do better by getting a job in the City.
Again ignoring the idea of power as a motivation, but sure sunak probably had/has other avenues to money (and power).
I know dozens of people who earn more than an MP even if you count all the likely dinners gifts and cushy consulting jobs they’re likely to get. Why bother going to the trouble of getting selected, getting elected, and then having to show up for whipped votes, merely for a chance at some perks, when you could do better with less faff elsewhere>
If you are judging the potential benefits of being an MP/PM solely by the salary they pull in you have already failed to consider all of the relevant information.
You yourself mentioned corruption, and again the kickbacks and favours are well established.
I genuinely don’t understand how you think arguing this point and ignoring a large chunk of the salient information would work.
It might be interesting to listen to interviews with politicians from across the divide, preferably after they’ve left office. It won’t make you agree with their position, but it’ll make you see them in a different light when they’re able to explain their thought process (which the media culture doesn’t permit when in office) and the principles behind what they did.
You have to be trolling at this point, so I’ll say it once more and then I’m just going to point at this line again in the future.
The things that they say and the outcomes that resulted from that don’t match a lot of the time, after-the-fact explanations add flavour sure, but given how often this makes little difference i will continue to base my predictions on what they stated they were going to do vs what happened.
Reading alexanders biography isn’t going to change the outcomes or the stated intents of the time.
Assuming he’s not lying or spinning, which is a big if given his track record, then i might get some insight as to his stated intention, which i will still judge against the outcome.
This is the same method i would use for all political biographies.
If you say something is true, then you should be able to justify it…
If i say something is absolutely true, then i should back it up with absolute proof, this applies to everyone.
If i state something is my opinion (or it’s clear that it is) then i should provide the information i can to show my working and how i came to that opinion, that gives others the opportunity to examine my reasoning and thought process and then perhaps question parts of it they disagree with.
This is how debate style conversations generally work.
Politics is not the realm of headcanon
I am legitimately unsure how you came to the conclusion that a discussion around politics (especially modern politics) has no room for the inclusion of the public opinion and perception of the politicians.
I mean, go up a few lines in your response for this banger :
Politics is, more often than not, about questions that don’t have objective answers.
You can’t have it both ways.
Without objectiveness you are left with subjectiveness, also known as personal opinion and perception (headcanon)
But you haven’t provided any reason to believe it’s self-serving (other than it is actually quite popular, so it will probably help to get them re-elected)
I can list examples of politicians promising things and then backtracking or making decisions that benefit them or their retinue directly but it’s so entrenched in the zeitgeist I’d be genuinely shocked if you didn’t know any examples yourself.
I agree. In that case, the tagline was objectively false and it was printed anyway, so we can conclude pretty safely that the people in charge of making it were lying.
So we’ve established a baseline of possibility, we can work from here.
That’s not the case here; there is genuine disagreement about whether the Online Safety Act will be a success.
Yes, politicians are people too, there will be disagreements between them, most have no idea what they are talking about with regard to this so that discussion probably won’t actually help anyone, but such is life.
it is quite popular with the public - a clear majority of people do believe it will be a success.
Same with brexit, popular support isn’t necessarily an indicator of a good idea.
Whether it will be is not a matter of objective fact
Agreed
not only can we not see the future, there is also no objective way to balance the benefit of decreasing harm to children by preventing access to harmful content with the cost of preventing their access to useful information and the cost of increased friction and privacy breaches to everyone else.
Indeed, and by that rationale there’s no basis for saying this is a good idea with regard, specifically, to the protection of children.
Which is why many people say this isn’t about the protection of children, because they have no way of proving it, or really even a vague idea of how to measure it , at all.
There is however precedent for this kind of attempt at control to be poorly implemented and abused in other areas, such that there is a provable downside.
So if there’s no provable upside but there is a somewhat provable downside, which option should be used.
If there’s a 0.01% chance of photographs of people’s IDs being leaked online due to this, but a 90% chance that more than 100,000 children will be prevented from seeing content advocating suicide, is that OK? We don’t know if those are the correct percentages and, even if we did, that is a moral question, not a factual one.
That’s a different discussion, but yes, ethics, morals etc.
The situation is wholly different than the Brexit bus.
It’s a different scenario yes, but it proves the possibility of that type of action, which it seems you were denying by saying “they’re just idiots they couldn’t possibly be doing bad things”
There is an example of action not based in incompetence.
Citation needed.
Indeed, this is personal opinion/anecdote.
I can give you examples of shady politicians doing shady things but probably not enough to demonstrably push it over that 50% line.
In the same way you can’t prove incompetence over intentional malice.
People don’t go into politics to line their pockets - not in the UK anyway. It’s just not that lucrative. People go into politics mostly for the right reasons (that is, they want to change the country in a way they believe will be better - even if you disagree about that) and some of them are natural grifters who try and make a quick buck off it as well.
That level of naïveté is staggering ( and also conveniently skips over power as a motivator )
Even if we don’t agree on the percentages i think we can agree that there is a level of political corruption, a quick buck doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak from recent memory, i could probably dredge up some more.
Again, nobody in this thread or elsewhere has provided any evidence that this is not their intent. The only argument put forward comes down to “it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.” But that is not how it works. People can disagree about things and on this particular matter most people disagree with you (and me.)
That’s why i stated it as me saying, not as an objective fact, though i see that might not be clear.
Also remember the predictive analysis based on previous actions.
I the absence of hard proof i’m pretty sure you’ll agree that opinions can be formed using predictions based on past actions of the person and similar situations and scenarios.
as i said earlier(NOTE: this was actually in a different reply, but the point stands)
it’s not:
“it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.”
so much as it is
“Previously, on multiple occasions they have proven to not be doing things for the stated reasons, it’s perhaps reasonable to work under the idea that they may be doing this again”.
Yeah, re-reading it myself , it was a weird example and that may have been where they were going with it.