Not exactly. The real utility value of LLM for programming is to come up with something new. For Space Invaders, instead of using LLM for that, I might as well just manually search for the code online and use that.
To show that LLM actually can provide value for one-shot programming, you need to find a problem that there's no fully working sample code available online. I'm not trying to say that LLM couldn't to that. But just because LLM can come up with a perfectly-working Space Invaders doesn't mean that it could do that.
> The real utility value of LLM for programming is to come up with something new.
That's the goal for these projects anyways. I don't know that its true or feasible. I find the RAG models much more interesting myself, I see the technology as having far more value in search than generation.
Rather than write some markov-chain reminiscent frankenstein function when I ask it how to solve a problem, I would like to see it direct me to the original sources it would use to build those tokens, so that I can see their implementations in context and use my judgement.
"I would like to see it direct me to the original sources it would use to build those tokens"
Sadly that's not feasible with transformer-based LLMs: those original sources are long gone by the time you actually get to use the model, scrambled a billion times into a trained set of weights.
One thing that helped me understand this is understanding that every single token output by an LLM is the result of a calculation that considers all X billion parameters that are baked into that model (or a subset of that in the case of MoE models, but it's still billions of floating point calculations for every token.)
You can get an imitation of that if you tell the model "use your search tool and find example code for this problem and build new code based on that", but that's a pretty unconventional way to use a model. A key component of the value of these things is that they can spit out completely new code based on the statistical patterns they learned through training.
I am aware, and that's exactly why I don't think they're anywhere near as useful for this type of work as the people pushing them want them to be.
I tried to push for this type of model when an org I worked with over a decade ago was first exploring using the first generation of Tensorflow to drive customer service chatbots and was sadly ignored.
I don't understand. For code, why would I want to remix existing code snippets?
I totally get the value of RAG style patterns for information retrieval against factual information - for those I don't want the LLM to answer my question directly, I want it to run a search and show me a citation and directly quote a credible source as part of answering.
For code I just want code that works - I can test it myself to make sure it does what it's supposed to.
> I don't understand. For code, why would I want to remix existing code snippets?
That is what you're doing already. You're just relying on a vector compression and search engine to hide it from you and hoping the output is what you expect, instead of having it direct you to where it remixed those snippets from so you can see how they work to start with and make sure its properly implemented from the get-go.
We all want code that works, but understanding that code is a critical part of that for anything but a throw-away one time use script.
I don't really get this desire to replace critical thought with hoping and testing. It sounds like the pipe dream of a middle manager, not a tool for a programmer.
I don't understand your point. You seem to be saying that we should be getting code from the source, then adapting it to our project ourselves, instead of getting adapted code to begin with.
I'm going to review the code anyway, why would I not want to save myself some of the work? I can "see how they work" after the LLM gives them to me just fine.
The work that you are "saving" is the work of using your brain to determine the solution to the problem. Whatever the LLM gives you doesn't have a context it is used in other than your prompt - you don't even know what it does until after you evaluate it.
If you instead have a set of sources related to your problem, they immediately come with context, usage and in many cases, developer notes and even change history to show you mistakes and adaptations.
You're ultimately creating more work for yourself* by trying to avoid work, and possibly ending up with an inferior solution in the process. Where is your sense of efficiency? Where is your pride as a intellectual?
* Yes, you are most likely creating more work for yourself even if you think you are capable of telling otherwise. [1]
I have a friend who has been doing just that... usually with his company he manages a handful of projects where a bulk of the development is outsourced overseas. This past year, he's outpaced the 6 devs he's had working on misc projects just with his own efforts and AI. Most of this being a relatively unique combination of UX with features that are less common.
He's using AI with note taking apps for meetings to enhance notes and flush out technology ideas at a higher level, then refining those ideas into working experiments.
It's actually impressive to see. My personal experience has been far more disappointing to say the least. I can't speak to the code quality, consistency or even structure in terms of most people being able to maintain such applications though. I've asked to shadow him through a few of his vibe coding sessions to see his workflow. It feels rather alien to me, again my experience is much more disappointing in having to correct AI errors.
No, he's been working on building a larger eLearning solution with some interesting workflow analytics around courseware evaluation and grading. He's been involved in some of the newer LRS specifications and some implementation details to bridge training as well as real world exposure scenarios. Working a lot with first responders, incident response training etc.
I've worked with him off and on for years from simulating aircraft diagnostics hardware to incident command simulation and setting up core infrastructure for F100 learning management backends.
I'm surprised to find that there're so many feature of f-string that I've never heard of. I don't think I'm gonna use them any time soon but nice to know about that.
I don't get why the US thought that it'd be a good idea to vet social media accounts for visa applications. If someone's having ill intent, one could easily create a burner account and fill in some random content for the sake of getting thru the visa application. Or they could even just purchase an account somewhere on the internet.
No one is pretending this is about terrorism now. They're explicit this is about curbing political activism by foreign students. Some outside the US miss that because few countries would have given foreign students this much room for activism in the first place.
it's strange that you are comparing democracy with a communism.
Wasn't the whole premise of democracy to express yourself freely and the core idea was "rule by the people"?
If country claims that they are democracy, then they should give people to add their opinion to rule the country, China is following its own core idea, ruled by a single party.
People have been detained/face deportation for activism against other foreign countries, so why not? The point is: if the admin wants you gone, or doesn't want to let you in, they'll use anything as pretense.
... That's not remotely true. Hypocrisy on the issue of human rights doesn't negate their existence in frameworks or as ideals that have motivated real progress. And, ignorance of human rights work outside of Europe doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Finally, Europe doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to human rights hypocrisy either, even if they're some of the best of a bad lot.
No, "the US" does not. Maybe the fascists currently in power are twisting words like that though, just as they twist every other lofty ideal into a rationalization for hurting people.
> why the US thought that it'd be a good idea to vet social media accounts for visa applications.
The catalyst was the campus takeovers by people wearing masks and causing disruption for months. That was a gift for the Republicans, delivered on a silver platter. They made that an issue every day in Congress from October 7 2023 until November 5 2024. It coincided with the resignation of several university presidents.
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik
Cornell Martha Pollack
Liz Magill, University of Pennsylvania
Claudine Gay Harvard
Additionally, the US has a statutory requirement for biometric exit scans when a visitor leaves. It was completely ignored. There were entry scans, but no exit scan.
The simple fact is they don't want anyone not like them coming to the US, and unauthorized entry has diminished significantly. It's also the reason for rejecting birthright citizenship, and deporting unauthorized persons to third country staging areas.
The UK is in the same boat. The UK is currently spending ~£3 billion per year on accommodations, and costs are expected to triple. It's created profiteering companies and waves of human trafficking across Europe. France only recently agreed to stop them when they line up a row of 20 zodiacs to assault Dover.
The goal isn't to stop terrorism, or drug trafficking, etc. It's to curb opposition. There's very little difference between someone that's anti-american but keeps their opinions to themself, and someone that has no opinions. Why do you think China cracks down on speech? Is it for shits-and-giggles?
Perhaps you think it's anti-American to believe that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. Perhaps I think it's anti-American to believe that the Jan 6 rioters should have been pardoned.
I'd certainly expect visitors to be held to the same standards as the natives. This is the problem, as a US citizen I don't want to be respectful and quiet, especially when I disagree with my government.
> I'd certainly expect visitors to be held to the same standards as the natives.
Visitors are held to a higher standard than natives. Visitors do not have control, a vote, etc: they are temporarily permitted by the privilege of policy at the time.
> as a US citizen I don't want to be respectful and quiet, especially when I disagree with my government.
Good, don't be! You're not at risk of having a visa revoked or go unissued.
Telling the US government it's broken is a favor to the US government. Freedom of speech is a gift to both the people of this country and the institution itself, helping it be pure and accountable. It's the force that prevents us from becoming like China.
Those who seek to stop that regulating force are undermining what makes America great. Where those voices of dissent were born isn't pertinent.
This is akin to the fallacy of saying that the accountability of "real name" policies on web forums make higher quality comments, and then you actually look at the contents of Faceboot. I mean, actual US citizens just voted this tiny-minded failure of a "president" in for the second time, because apparently he hadn't damaged the country enough the first time. Having a stake didn't help there, right? Either people are unaware they are harming themselves (stupidity/anti-intellectualism), don't care because others are getting harmed "more" (spite), or are in social media bubbles pushed by hostile actors (agent provocateurs don't actually need physical presence).
I feel like this is a ridiculous bad-faith argument. You know damned well that banning people from the country for having a JD vance meme on their phone is not stopping international agents. Arguing by presently demonstrably false hypotheticals as though they were reality makes me think it's a waste of everybody's breath talking to you.
It would be a stupid position. I was failing to explain that not all rights like the freedom of speech necessarily make sense to apply to foreigners who are given the privilege to enter the country. I am not necessarily firm in this position the other poster made an argument that they can speak because what does it matter which is a good point.
Okay but that's not what this is about. This is saying that a foreigner cannot express private thoughts online at any point before they enter the United States.
I assume someone who goes by "15155" would believe that having private conversations online can be useful. Or do you want to post your identifying information?
You do you, and we'll have the parties at my house then. Enjoy quietly playing Catan or whatever.
Your extrapolation to the national level is fallacious. Many of our academic institutions were deliberately hosting foreigners, with the explicit goal of being melting pots of ideas. That gave the US an exceptional cultural cachet around the globe. This whole thing is an exercise in attacking and destroying our traditional distributed institutions in favor of centralized autocratic control.
Which elected a democratically-elected representative.
That is how democracies work.
If there's anything the executive has power over besides commander in chief, it would be leader in chief of defining what is actually, American.
The fact that prior presidents have actually abdicated this important role, doesn't mean it didn't exist. This is why traditions of the State of the Union, etc exist. The executive gets to call the plays towards unity for Americanism.
discriminating in employment due to one's affiliation is illegal in state and federal employment [1]. That does not mean one can break ToS and for example, publish on a massive public platform, your private opinion (which can be misconstrued as your employer's). Most employers have ToS against online activity during employment, for that reason.
It is also illegal to do the same for students. [2]
Faculty is already protected under tenure rules. And even for the nontenured, who really needs protecting ? Only 5.7% of all faculty are registered as conservative as of 2020 [3]
My point remains. "Filtering out" is illegal. Setting the stage on what is american, is not.
When it comes to allowing foreighn students to come to US, which from my understanding is a likely path to citizenship, the executive branch gets to decide, which is basically elected by 51% of population every 4 years.
I prefer the exec branch over no purity test, or delegating to some other "expert" institution.
51% of the voting population. Not the majority of the population. Big difference in numbers there, only 65.3% participated. So, less than a third of Americans voted for the current president… why people don’t vote, I’ll never understand.
Your deportation hearing is now scheduled for next week for anti Americanism disguised as jingoistic patriotism. Hopefully there’s a country that will accept you but if not there are some extraterritorial islands we can parachute you on to
It truly does not matter how this opinion can shift with the political climate: foreigners aren't citizens, no matter how much folks would like this to be the case.
> We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection.
Reagan is a hypocritical cunt of course, but how far we've fallen that now you might as well put a chain around Lady Liberty's neck, pull it down like the statues of Saddam Hussein or Assad (or I guess hanging is more appropriate, since the spiritual successors of the Confederancy is now in power), and replace it with a statue of redneck lady giving foreigners the middle finger, with "Fuck off!" written on the base.
Ah yes, because we don't automatically tolerate foreign political activists (or intelligence operatives, who cares, right?), freedom is all but lost, right?
You have managed to conflate vocally anti-genocidal students (exercising their universal human right to freedom of assembly) with "foreign political activists" (as if they came to the US just to try and help us stop enabling genocide) - and then leaped straight to "intelligence operators".
You also seem to be all over this thread insisting that these violations of human rights will only ever be applied to foreigners - even as the executive branch openly works to redefine who counts as a foreigner.
> I don't want foreign students (or otherwise) being "vocal" for literally any reason whatsoever.
Your opinion doesn't trump universal human rights. Nor should it.
> Go to school, become a citizen if you wish, and then participate in the political process.
What if the political issues affect you as a visa holder? Have you actually thought this though?
> I consider the case at hand, not a slippery slope of hypotheticals.
It's not remotely hypothetical [0], and if you don't know that then you really lack the basic table stakes of knowledge to be weighing in on this at all (as also evidenced by your refusal to acknowledge the UDHR).
”I'm not a visa holder. I wouldn't expect to be able to go to China and espouse anti-CCP rhetoric, either.”
You don’t expect to do those things in China because it’s an authoritarian government that doesn’t care about human rights A-Z (all the way from basic labor rights over to internment reeducation camps).
So the question is why are you applying a standard we have for China, which is just slightly above what we expect from North Korea, unto to America?
We are not the country that does shit like what you are describing. This is a temporary dark spot on American history, and you are absolutely on the wrong side of things. All of this joins the embarrassing catalog of American darkness - Japanese internment camps, Chinese exclusion act, segregation, list goes on.
Man, I'm getting emotionally worked up on a Saturday trying to change some [two words removed because hello HN guidelines]'s mind. I hope you're not on the same path as me.
I suggest we let him think what he wants to think. I find it curious anyway when people say they don't consider hypotheticals, humans are all about hypotheticals ("what's going to happen if x happens..."), even apes do so. Not considering them means wanting to be as intelligent as amoebas, and the [term has been deleted] we're trying to converse with seems to be proud of that.
> What is the source of this righteous indignation? You think countries invite foreigners here with the patronizing attitude of “you’re lucky to be here, don’t say a fucking word”?
Yes, I do think that's how countries invite foreigners.
> Try your best to not sound so unfuckable.
Looks like I hit a nerve. I'm sure you're a great houseguest.
This term "sitting" is doing a lot of work. Have you seen the guy's posture? I guess the term "teetering on the edge of a chair president" doesn't have the same ring to it.
> If someone's having ill intent, one could easily create a burner account and fill in some random content for the sake of getting thru the visa application.
The timestamps will immediately give it away if you try to pull that though. Not to mention that they could also (if they want) just harvest data on what accounts already exist at what point in time, to detect actions like this. Lots of data brokers have such data already. And they could just do some cursory searches for other accounts you might have too, if you don't deactivate them...
Because then anyone can be deported at any time without any more process needed since it's visa fraud. Maybe even get your citizenship revoked one day given how things are going.
Entry can be denied if you claim to have no social media accounts, so you can in fact only give one of your choosing to gain entry.
Whether not disclosing any others is visa fraud is a matter of legal consideration iff other accounts are discovered before the collapse of the current administration.
There are plenty of things that are only "legal thing" once they are officially judged to be so. An obvious (to a layman HNer) crime isn't one until legally declared so.
The same standard applies to many of the apparently unconstitutional actions of the current administration.
Please stop with the paranoid "bot" nonsense, my account is over a decade older than yours is.
I think I was clear; your morally based personal conception of "fraud" isn't relevant to what actual practise is, and this is especially relevant to an administration that might not even be acting legally in the first place.
Maybe these things are fraud, or would be judged so if it goes to court, assuming such a right applies, and you aren't illegally deprived of it; maybe these standards aren't even legally valid.
> your morally based personal conception of "fraud" isn't relevant to what actual practise is
lying on your visa application is visa fraud. Its not that complicated. It has nothing to do with "this administration". social media account info has been on those forms for a long time.
Can you pls educate yourself a little bit instead of some nonsensical ranting. bye!
Along with the push for ending birth right citizenship and detaining citizens the goal is a white ethnostate. I doubt Trump is that cognizant of that but Stephen Miller definitely is pushing for that.
Yeah, I mean, what was that whole we’re going to bring white South African immigrants here and kick brown ones out?
MAGA is a white supremacy movement, but calling this out in America is like trying to tell your best friend her husband is cheating on her. It’s going to be an ugly reveal and difficult conversation, but the facts are the facts.
It's enshrined in the constitution. You're welcome to try to ammend the constitution to make it a white only nation. Good luck with that. I guess upping the bribes to certain scotus justices also works.
> I don't get why the US thought that it'd be a good idea to vet social media accounts for visa applications.
Since almost all major social media companies are american, and all major social media/tech companies are state/defense companies, the US already "vets" social media accounts of foreigners and most likely americans as well.
This has nothing to do with "vetting" social media accounts. It's about scaring the world so that the world stops criticizing primarily israel.
If we really want to "vet" foreigners, we'd be doing it secretly so that bad actors feel free to expose themselves on social media. This does the exact opposite. It's about controlling the narrative and preventing criticism of israel.
Facts and evidence? I explained to you my reasoning. If you disagree with it fine. Let me ask you, why do you think this is happening all of a sudden? To "vet" foreigners? Yeah right. As I said, if we wanted weed out undesirable foreigners, we would want them to post freely on social media with any fear of repercussion. We wouldn't warn them about potentially having their social media scrutinized.
That's just the base/stock/instruct model for general use case. There gotta be a finetune specialized in translation, right? Any recommendations for that?
Plus, mistral-small3.2 has too many parameters. Not all devices can run it fast. That probably isn't the exact translation model being used by Chrome.
Video games are a good place to start, especially for old consoles like the NES. The impacts of your experimenting are immediately visible, and they're simple devices (though the hardware "APIs" can be pretty unintuitive to a modern programmer), and there's a lot of tooling already built for hacking and reversing them. Try loading up your favorite NES game in Mesen and poke around its debugging tools with nesdev.org open in a browser. If the game you're working with has already been reversed by someone else, you may find some useful info on https://datacrystal.tcrf.net , too.
Reversing more modern software is tricky. I wrote a couple articles a while back about hacking a Gamecube game that you might enjoy:
Without discrediting the author, as it's always cool to share these findings, was anyone actively looking for this over 27 years?
A lot of the times, it just happens that someone was the first person that even bothered trying digging into the code. Specially after decompilation became much more accessible for less popular architectures with Ghidra. Give it a try, there's plenty of low hanging fruit! I've submitted another case some time ago.
Also luckily, considering other OS easter eggs, it doesn't seem like there was any obfuscation involved, like "chained xor stored in bitmap resource of badly supported executable format": https://x.com/mswin_bat/status/1504788425525719043
Back side is much more correct but in colloquial English it sounds like you’re talking about the Moon’s butt. This would also mean if the Moon lost its tide lock and spun around it would be Mooning us.
