@movq LOL. I think I get the idea. I am concerned about AI too. Managers starting with “I don’t know anything about this, but here is what says”. Infuriating.
I came across this one today, here is a gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/opinion/art-artificial-intelligence.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bFA.XNiu.ZukFfdNl3Al1&smid=nytcore-ios-share
@bender Or maybe I’m just shitty at communication and maybe that’s why nobody at work understands my “arguments” against AI/LLMs. 🤪🤣
(I’m too tired to rephrase the OP. Maybe some other day. Actually, rest assured that I will complain about this again. 😅)
I recon I might be still missing your point. I see it more like a semi-organised ramble, than a rant. LOL. Sooooorryyyyy!
@movq it went over my head, sorry. Someone wanted you to vet their instruction files, correct? People writing them should know what they are doing, otherwise they should engage with LLMs like that at all (unless it is a hobby, outside the enterprise).
@bender … that was not my point. 🥴
@movq that’s the way large language models work, with a prompt. Rather than entering the prompt, most inference providers allow for specific files to be created that define the scope of what’s been requested, the skills the model is supposedly to posses, the stuff to “remember”, etc. Some will “learn” and add that “knowledge” to the proper files.
@itsericwoodward at least that encouraging in a gentle way. Imagine how do I feel waking up in the middle of the night to take a piss, and within seconds get a message from my watch “It is time to stand up!”. Like, wth?! 😅
Message on my watch this morning: “Last week’s goals slipped away. No worries, this week is yours!”
Thanks, watch. Where would I be without you?
Another AI rant:
One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.
In prose.
This is a complete disaster.
Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.
But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.
People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.
Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.
We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.
Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.
Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.
I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?
(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)
@thecanine so cute, and happy!
@prologic that would work too. Not just for this adventure, but for the ones to come! Do it, do it!
@bender Nah, i’m gonna start a blog for our adventure i think instead 😅
@prologic maybe that’s your next project! :-P Welcome back from Vacationland!
Drew one in the old Pokémon battle angle and resolution.
@lyse I’m afraid my ability to share photos like you do aren’t quite up to scratch 😅
@lyse Clearing legally? You must have an amazingly efficient legal team – there’s like 10 new tools every week. 🤣
@prologic Back to slaving away, now that your batteries are fully recharged. But we might be in for some little picturesque treats of QLD and NSW. :-)
@bender Thanks! :-) Nature explodes everywhere at the moment, so pretty.
@movq No, just the damn training. For the tools, they always want the latest shit available. The company isn’t quick enough in purchasing and legally clearing the latest models, services, etc., they say. Other than that, they seem to be happy.
@prologic Welcome back 👋
even our hippest AI enthusiasts found it absolutely terrible
Does this refer to the training course or to the tools themselves? 🤔
Back home now! 🏡
@lyse one my most favourite smells too! I also love the rain. Absolutely love it!
@lyse totally in love with these flowers, and bee!
I love the smell of the rainy air. Sooooo good. The thunderstorm is gonna miss us now, two closer bangs, but that’s supposed to be it.
@movq I couldn’t agree more! I also have the feeling that it causes more people to just accept “it’s a software problem, there’s nothing that can be done about it”. Which is very frightning to me.
Up until now, I was successful in refusing to actively use that crap. I had to do one mandatory AI training, but even our hippest AI enthusiasts found it absolutely terrible. Probably also nailed together by the same rubbish they want us to now use everyday as much as possible.
Code reviews are the part that I have to deal with most. And I believe that the code quality is degrading.
Let’s hope the bubble bursts sooner than later. It will definitely burst at some point. That’s for sure.
We cleaned up the forest today with the scouts at absolute dream weather. Blue sky, no clouds, 19°C sunshine. In the morning it was still quite chilly and windy, though. We didn’t find anything spectacular, maybe a rubber dinghy, three car tires and a broken ratchet strap are the most outstanding things to me apart from all the general rubbish, cigarettes, glass, wet wipes, etc. Still, a very fun activity. In the end we had bockwurst, grilled cheese and lye buns on the camp fire.
I then went for a quick stroll with my mate. It’s crazy how quickly the clouds moved in, 30-45 minutes tops. There will be rain in an hour. And the coming days only reach half the temps. I’m glad I took advantage of the great spring day. Haven’t seen Azabache yet and with the rain on deck, the odds are against him and me.
@lyse Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the “old” knowledge to fall back on.
It’s concerning, I’ve warned about it many times, nobody listens.
I think the best thing one can do is explicitly not use any AI tools but keep your actual skills intact. Might be out of a (good) job for a while, but once this bubble bursts, this is who is going to get hired again. (I think.)
And considering how insanely expensive all this is, I’m still (mostly) convinced that the bubble will actually burst. This stuff just isn’t sustainable.
… or I might be wrong. And if so, I see an even darker future that I don’t want to put into words right now.
@xuu, what’s going on with y’all up in the mountains? The mouse has been mighty quiet for a while!
@movq “out of morbid curiosity” LOL. That draw a laugh out of me, so easily! 🤭
@movq Yup, I’ve also seen the floating point conversion happening with (1 << 63) - 1 yesterday night. But instead of pausing to think about it for a second, somehow all I had in mind was “give me a better representation, ain’t gonna have time for this shit”, so I turned it to hex. Beyond my comprehension what I was thinking there. O_o That’s embarrassing, unbelievable. Well, I blame late o’clock where my brain had already quit on me and went to bed.
Very interesting data point you raise there. The fun part didn’t cross my mind yet or at least I couldn’t pinpoint it. In hindsight it’s totally obvious, though. Past experience also tells me the exact same. Dealing with a problem and researching something myself is a so much more better teacher. The longer I faced up with a topic, the higher the chance to really manifest in long- or at least mid-term memory. If I just get told something, the odds are that it’s completely erased from memory in a matter of days if not hours.
@lyse AI result ahead, feel free to ignore.
I “asked” the AI at work the same question out of morbid curiousity. It “said” that SQLite converts that integer to floating point internally on overflows and then, when converting back, the x86 instruction cvttsd2si will turn it into 0x8000000000000000, even if the actual floating point value is outside of that range. So, yes, it allegedly actually saturates, as a side effect of the type conversion.
I couldn’t find anything about that automatic conversion in SQLite’s manual, yet, but an experiment looks like it might be true:
sqlite> select typeof(1 << 63);
╭─────────────────╮
│ typeof(1 << 63) │
╞═════════════════╡
│ integer │
╰─────────────────╯
sqlite> select typeof((1 << 63) - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ typeof((1 << 63) ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ real │
╰──────────────────────╯
As for cvttsd2si, this source confirms the handling of 0x8000000000000000 on range errors: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/cvttsd2si
The following C program also confirms it (run through gdb to see cvttsd2si in action):
[#include](https://yume.laidback.moe/search?tag=include) <stdint.h>
[#include](https://yume.laidback.moe/search?tag=include) <stdio.h>
int
main()
{
int64_t i;
double d;
/* -3000 instead of -1, because `double` can’t represent a
* difference of -1 at this scale. */
d = -9223372036854775808.0 - 3000;
i = d;
printf("%lf, 0x%lx, %ld\n", d, i, i);
return 0;
}
(Remark about AI usage: Fine, I got an answer and maybe it’s even correct. But doing this completely ruined it for me. It would have been much more satisfying to figure this out myself. I actually suspected some floating point stuff going on here, but instead of verifying this myself I reached for the unethical tool and denied myself a little bit of fun at the weekend. Won’t do that again.)
@movq Now, it’s official, I AM an idiot. Yeah, thank you, that’s it! Apparently, I’ve quickly unlearned to use my brain with great success. :-(
Disclaimer: Can’t guarantee that I’m fully awake and I’m being trained at work not to use my brain anymore, so maybe this is complete bullshit. 😪🧟♀️
It says here that SQLite uses signed integers:
https://sqlite.org/datatype3.html
In pure bits, 1 << 63 would be 0x8000000000000000, but as a signed value, it gets interpreted as -9223372036854775808. Subtracting 1 yields -9223372036854775809 – but that doesn’t fit in 64 bits anymore. It’s possible that SQLite doesn’t want to wrap around but instead saturates? Haven’t checked. 🤔
With 62 bits, there is enough room.
With 1 << 64, I have no idea how SQLite wants to handle this, because this should immediately trigger a warning, because it doesn’t fit right away. Maybe it gets truncated to 0?
sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 2 * (1 << 64));
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 2 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0x0 │
╰──────────────────────╯
sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 0 - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 0 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0xffffffffffffffff │
╰──────────────────────╯
sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 0 - 2);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 0 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0xfffffffffffffffe │
╰──────────────────────╯
Hmmm doesn’t appear to be documented 🧐 Nut ly watch reckons i climbed 242m so yhay part is right!
@lyse I don’t axtually k ow what the incline was we went up! Haha 😅 Honestly just guessing hmm must be documented somewhere 🧐
@prologic Awwwwwwww! I love these stripes, very cool!
Oh, I bet these inclines are no joke. I also know one about 200 meters long terribly steep dirt path up a hill around here. Climbing that is super exhausting. I just looked it up on a map. And it’s just ~17° or ~30% incline. Okay, that’s absolutely nothing compared to your adventure. :-D
But you got your exercises for the day then. Which will make for an even greater sleep tonight. ;-)
Eehhh, what the hell is going on here!?
SELECT
printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) - 2),
printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) - 1),
printf("0x%x", 1 << 63 ),
printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) + 1),
printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) + 2)
SQLite yields:
0x8000000000000000 (instead of 0x7ffffffffffffffe)
0x8000000000000000 (instead of 0x7fffffffffffffff)
0x8000000000000000 (correct)
0x8000000000000001 (correct)
0x8000000000000002 (correct)
Huh!? O_o Am I stupid? What am I missing here? Or is this actually a bug? :-?
With 62 bits, everything is spot on:
0x3ffffffffffffffe
0x3fffffffffffffff
0x4000000000000000
0x4000000000000001
0x4000000000000002
And 64 bits rather unsurprisingly also yield:
0xfffffffffffffffe
0xffffffffffffffff
0x0
0x1
0x2
@prologic Oh, so that’s where you are! 😅 Great scenery. Enjoy!
ssh snakes.run
@itsericwoodward yeah, it is mostly a curiosity and not something one will do often. I first came across it a while ago, checked it for a few seconds, and moved on. :-D
Lovely pics, mate! Looks like the weather cooperated nicely too! 😍 Take more, share, but, most importantly, continue having fun! 🙏🏻
@bender Ah, great, thanks!
that last one is what we walked up I reckon probably a 30 or 40° incline at least 250 m straight up!
@lyse Thanks! Hers a few more!
ssh snakes.run
@itsericwoordward Haha, that’s a nice one. I was alone, too.
@bender Hahaha! :-D
Thank you, @prologic, that looks really stunning! Seeing forests reaching beyond the horizon always amazes me. This does not exist around here. I also like those balancing rocks.
Keep ‘em coming. Looking forward to see more. But most importantly, enjoy your trip, mate! :-)
@kiwu Oh, they absolutely do! There were waterfalls coming out of my nose. Luckily, it got much better over time. So, there might be chances for you, too.
TIL that SSH actually stands for Secure Snake Home, a massively multiplayer snake game playable via the SSH protocol: ssh snakes.run
Of course, no one else was online when I was playing, so…
spring allergies suck