tal

Is there really a technology difference between Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 11 ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn%27t_Start_the_Fire

"We Didn't Start the Fire" is a song written by American musician Billy Joel.

Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said "It's a terrible time to be 21!". Joel replied: "Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y'know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful". The friend replied: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties". Joel retorted: "Wait a minute, didn't you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?" Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.[4]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

🎵 We didn't start the fire 🎵
🎵 It was always burning since the world's been turning 🎵
🎵 We didn't start the fire 🎵
🎵 No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it 🎵

Actually, whether or not it's permitted is, surprisingly, an undecided point in case law.

The case law here is Goldwater v. Carter, but the Supreme Court ruled on a technicality rather than the major question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_v._Carter

Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S. 996 (1979), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Senator Barry Goldwater and other members of the United States Congress challenging the right of President Jimmy Carter to unilaterally nullify the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which the United States had signed with the Republic of China, so that relations could instead be established with the People's Republic of China.

EDIT: I've brought it up before because a somewhat-analogous issue was also surprisingly undecided in UK case law, and there was a major legal tussle in the UK over it, whether or not the Prime Minister had the power to withdraw the UK from the EU without going to Parliament.

!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works looked smug as hell. They'd been telling everyone for years.

Summary created by Smart Answers AI

chuckles

And why Bash and not another shell?

I chose it for my example because I happen to use it. You could use another shell, sure.

Should we consider “throwaway” anything that supports interactive mode of your daily driver you chose in your default terminal prompt?

Interactive mode is a good case for throwaway code, but one-off scripts would also work.

The thing is mostly that, while unpopularity does have an impact, that impact is probably going to be somewhat bounded regarding the Trump administration.

Trump cannot be voted out in the midterms, and the US does not have snap elections the way parliamentary systems do, so absent him dying in office or otherwise becoming incapacitated, he will probably be around for the rest of his term.

In general, the popularity (or lack thereof) of the President affects turnout and how people vote for legislative representatives in the midterm elections.

For the Trump administration, there are a couple of major inflection points that I'm aware of.

• Democrats take control of the House in the midterm elections. I would guess that at this point, this is most-likely going to happen, and most of what I've read

including from the Republican side of the aisle

agrees with this. The major impact of this will be that Democrats will be able to initiate Congressional inquiries and demand that the Executive turn over a lot of information about its activities. As I recall reading, the Trump administration specifically directed its the Executive not to respond to requests for information from Congressional representatives in anything other than situations where they were legally bound to do so, which I understand breaks with convention. Basically, the way this works is that a simple majority has to start an inquiry, and put people in front of the House, and then representatives from both sides of the aisle are allowed to require them to testify. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican senator who has been critical of Trump, had some comment a while back about how the only way she found out about things was in the news, so I expect that Republican legislators probably aren't getting much information either. I'd assume that the Democrats will use this both the present the administration in a negative light, and to turn up information damaging to the administration. It will let the Democrats block legislation that they don't like, though I'd assume that there will be an effort to pass any legislation that they might block and that the administration wants in the first half of the term. If they find that Trump has broken the law, they can impeach Trump, but this has limited impact (other than acting as condemnation of Trump) unless they can get a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate to convict and remove him from office; this would require a number of Republican senators to agree that he needs to be out of office, and I'm skeptical that this will happen unless there is material that comes out that is considerably more damning than anything thus far.

• Democrats take control of the Senate in the midterm elections. What I've read is that this is possible, but unlikely. Nate Silver had an article some time back talking about how is was more-likely than one might expect (generally, the Republicans have an advantage in the Senate, as they dominate in more low-population states), and I've seen several other articles saying that while odds are they will not, it is a real possibility, not to be dismissed. I don't know, off the cuff, what impact this will have. It would permit Democrats to block Trump's nominations for people if he dismisses them, which might give cabinet members considerably more ability to disagree with him, if they want to do so. I don't know of anything that a simple majority in both House and Senate buys the Democrats. It'd let them pass legislation that Trump disagrees with in Congress, but Trump can veto it; overriding a veto would require a two-thirds supermajority in both houses.

The US has weak party discipline; legislators are less-accountable to the party as a whole than in many countries. It's possible that some close votes could be flipped by legislators not voting strictly along party lines. For example, some Republican legislators voted to release Epstein information.

I don't know what, if any, impact there will be from control shift regarding the administration asserting emergency powers to impose tariffs. My understanding is that there are currently lawsuits underway, which the Trump administration is most-likely expected to lose, with a major ruling expected in the next week, but that there may be other legal routes for the administration to effectively impose tariffs. I am not sure that Trump's approval ratings will have an impact here.

Trump's approval probably will have an impact on his influence on Republican politicians. Trump has, in the past, threatened to and endorsed primary election opponents of those Republican politicians who disagree with him. The value of a Trump endorsement is predicated on Trump's popularity, so Trump will generally lose sway over Republican politicians if he becomes less popular.

EDIT: The Executive mostly gets to run foreign policy, so I think that regardless of what happens in Congress, aside from tariffs (which are important and are normally a Congressional power) and extended troop deployments, US foreign policy will probably continue to be largely directed by the Trump administration.

EDIT2: Oh, winning the House will give the Democrats ability to block and thus horse-trade on the federal budget. They did so before, but that was relying on the fillibuster. The Senate can always eliminate the power; it's simply a convention built on internal rules set by a simple majority in the Senate itself, which is presently controlled by the Republicans. While adverse to breaking with convention, in a serious enough case, a majority in the Senate could choose to simply remove that power from the minority. In contrast, there is no recourse if the House doesn't want to pass a budget. Pretty much all of what the President does depends on having funds to do it, and he doesn't get money unless Congress chooses to give it to him, so while it's not a very flexible tool, it is a powerful one.

The point I'm making is that bash is optimized for quickly writing throwaway code. It doesn't matter if the code written blows up in some case other than the one you're using. You don't need to handle edge cases that don't apply to the one time that you will run the code. I write lots of bash code that doesn't handle a bunch of edge cases, because for my one-off use, that edge case doesn't arise. Similarly, if an LLMs is generating code that misses some edge case, if it's a situation that will never arise, and that may not be a problem.

EDIT: I think maybe that you're misunderstanding me as saying "all bash code is throwaway", which isn't true. I'm just using it as an example where throwaway code is a very common, substantial use case.

I don’t know: it’s not just the outputs posing a risk, but also the tools themselves

Yeah, that's true. Poisoning the training corpus of models is at least a potential risk. There's a whole field of AI security stuff out there now aimed at LLM security.

it shouldn’t require additional tools, checking for such common flaws.

Well, we are using them today for human programmers, so... :-)

No problem; I remember being delighted to learn that there was a name for the thing, years back.

Also, one other comment regarding the "change away from mechanical toggle". If you got the machine pre-built, you may never have noticed this, but on ATX motherboards, there's a set of pins which you fit the power and reset switch wires onto.

I mean, you can plug whatever you feel like onto those pins and stick your power and reset buttons wherever you feel like, if you don't like the position of the existing case switch. It's just a momentary switch. You can grab replacement ones that aren't built into a case:

https://www.amazon.com/Warmstor-2-Pack-Computer-Supply-27-inch/dp/B074XDTVN1

Or even just get your own switches and connect the plug and wires to whatever sort of momentary switch you want. Amazon or Mouser or DigiKey will have all sorts of momentary switches.

Security is where the gap shows most clearly

So, this is an area where I'm also pretty skeptical. It might be possible to address some of the security issues by making minor shifts away from a pure-LLM system. There are (conventional) security code-analysis tools out there, stuff like Coverity. Like, maybe if one says "all of the code coming out of this LLM gets rammed through a series of security-analysis tools", you catch enough to bring the security flaws down to a tolerable level.

One item that they highlight is the problem of API keys being committed. I'd bet that there's already software that will run on git-commit hooks that will try to red-flag those, for example. Yes, in theory an LLM could embed them into code in some sort of obfuscated form that slips through, but I bet that it's reasonable to have heuristics that can catch most of that, that will be good-enough, and that such software isn't terribly difficult to write.

But in general, I think that LLMs and image diffusion models are, in their present form, more useful for generating output that a human will consume than that a CPU will consume. CPUs are not tolerant of errors in programming languages. Humans often just need an approximately-right answer, to cue our brains, which itself has the right information to construct the desired mental state. An oil painting isn't a perfect rendition of the real world, but it's good enough, as it can hint to us what the artist wanted to convey by cuing up the appropriate information about the world that we have in our brains.

This Monet isn't a perfect rendition of the world. But because we have knowledge in our brain about what the real world looks like, there's enough information in the painting to cue up the right things in our head to let us construct a mental image.

Ditto for rough concept art. Similarly, a diffusion model can get an image approximately right

some errors often just aren't all that big a deal.

But a lot of what one is producing when programming is going to be consumed by a CPU that doesn't work the way that a human brain does. A significant error rate isn't good enough; the CPU isn't going to patch over flaws and errors itself using its knowledge of what the program should do.

EDIT:

I’d bet that there’s already software that will run on git-commit hooks that will try to red-flag those, for example.

Yes. Here are instructions for setting up trufflehog to run on git pre-commit hooks to do just that.

EDIT2: Though you'd need to disable this trufflehog functionality and have some out-of-band method for flagging false positives, or an LLM could learn to bypass the security-auditing code by being trained on code that overrides false positives:

Add trufflehog:ignore comments on lines with known false positives or risk-accepted findings

I keep seeing the “it’s good for prototyping” argument they post here, in real life.

There are real cases where bugs aren't a huge deal.

Take shell scripts. Bash is designed to make it really fast to write throwaway, often one-line software that can accomplish a lot with minimal time.

Bash is not, as a programming language, very optimized for catching corner cases, or writing highly-secure code, or highly-maintainable code. The great majority of bash code that I have written is throwaway code, stuff that I will use once and not even bother to save. It doesn't have to handle all situations or be hardened. It just has to fill that niche of code that can be written really quickly. But that doesn't mean that it's not valuable. I can imagine generated code with some bugs not being such a huge problem there. If it runs once and appears to work for the inputs in that particular scenario, that may be totally fine.

Or, take test code. I'm not going to spend a lot of time making test code perfect. If it fails, it's probably not the end of the world. There are invariably cases that I won't have written test code for. "Good enough" is often just fine there.

And it might be possible to, instead of (or in addition to) having human-written commit messages, generate descriptions of commits or something down the line for someone browsing code.

I still feel like I'm stretching, though. Like...I feel like what people are envisioning is some kind of self-improving AI software package, or just letting an LLM go and having it pump out a new version of Microsoft Office. And I'm deeply skeptical that we're going to get there just on the back of LLMs. I think that we're going to need more-sophisticated AI systems.

I remember working on one large, multithreaded codebase where a developer who isn't familiar with or isn't following the thread-safety constraints would create an absolute maintenance nightmare for others, where you're going to spend way more time tracking down and fixing breakages induced than you saved by them not spending time coming up to speed on the constraints that their code needs to conform to. And the existing code-generation systems just aren't really in a great position to come up to speed on those constraints. Part of what a programmer does is, when writing code, is to look at the human-language requirements, and identify that there are undefined cases and go back and clarify the requirement with the user, or use real-world knowledge to make reasonable calls. Training an LLM to map from an English-language description to code is creating a system that just doesn't have the capability to do that sort of thing.

But, hey, we'll see.