Well, yes, that is a central point.

I am a senior programmer. LLMs are amazing - I know exactly what I want, and I can ask for it and review it. My productivity has gone up at least 3-fold, with no decrease in quality, by using LLMs responsibly.

But it seems to me that some people on social media just can’t imagine using LLMs in this way. They just imagine that all LLM usage is vibe coding, using the output without understanding or review. Obviously you are very unlikely to create any fundamentally new solutions if you only use LLMs that way.

only to find out you didn’t provide adequate requirements for your config.

Senior programmer. I know exactly what I want. My requirement communicated to the LLM are precise and adequate.

So fuck the US, but this is not good. This can create a huge economic crisis and food instability, which would create untold suffering among innocent poor people across the world.

You are allowed to rightfully criticize the US for this war, without applauding Iran sinking ships with fertilizer the world desperately needs to not starve.

The books is actually quite explicit about what makes the Fremen such good fighters - their hard environment shapes them.

From https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sardaukar

The abilities of the Sardaukar were largely attributed to the harsh environment and brutal discipline they were exposed to on the planet Salusa Secundus, the Corrino prison planet. Only the Fremen, raised in the fanatical warrior culture and merciless desert environment of Arrakis, were capable of matching the Sardaukar. Fremen typically scorned Harkonnen soldiers as cowardly and weak, but judged that the Sardaukar fought well, and even respected them to some degree.

So what makes the greatest fighter in the narrative of the Dune universe is a merciless environment.

In the book, Baron Harkonnen unwittingly scares the emperor by suggesting making Dune a prison planet like Salusa Secundus. The emperor knows that is a way to make the best fighters - Baron Harkonnen did not.

Are the people making weapons to defend Ukraine evil? Surely not, right? Hence working for a defense contractor is not inherently evil either.

Some are of course - like Peter Thiel’s Palantir.

The database was an arbitrary example. A more relevant example would be tenserflow layers in a neural network. As I understand it, you can in some cases get a novel solution to a problem just by choosing a smart enough combination, with the right data.

ChatGPT absolutely knows how to help doing the grunt work setting up the tenserflow configuration, following your directions.

I am not a lawyer so I don’t risk anything by calling it as I see it.

So from a moral perspective, that is not how it works. Saying you knowingly know less than other people does not give you a moral license to say more…

You could just call it “evil” instead of “illegal”, and I would have no objection. Why do you insist on the word “illegal”?

The US sub not picking up the sailors after sinking the ship does seem like a straight up warcrime.

I am done giving the US any leeway with the way they have been acting. Department of War, lethality, and the rest of their garbage.

Oh, I am right there with you. Fuck the US.

But I just like randomly flinging around words like “illegal” in the sense of “things I don’t like”. If we do not require ourselves to make sure what we say is true, then soon we will be no better than them.

Like, there is a huge focus on inventing and implementing exactly this. I have seen many technical science/engineering articles about the different approaches to make it work. Because it would be amazingly useful. But the solution has generally not been found yet.

Reality bites. Some stuff is just not possible to make economically. You can’t just say “economics of scale” like it is a magic incantation.

There has to be some solution in use today, since I as a consumer don’t have recurring blackouts. I don’t know what they are, but they are likely not chemical batteries, and they are likely cheaper than batteries.

But seriously, what were the arguments given? Inconvenient objective reality is surely not a permitted reason, as you say.

Even novel solutions are usually built out of smaller common building blocks. E.g. many novel solutions surely use a database. You can make the LLM help you set up and use the database, that your novel solution uses.

It is a fucking warship in international waters - if it is a war, then it is a valid target.

The US’s war as a whole is illegitimate, I agree. So if you want to complain about illegality then argue that, instead of an attack on a legitimate military target inside the war - that is silly.

As I read it, they are scared of the Chinese Communist Party having an “official” back door built in. Not run-of-the-mill criminal bot-nets.

Yes, but Cuba never did this whereas the US attacked a defenseless ship returning from war games and killed 87 Iranian sailors.

It was a warship in a war. So fuck the US in general, but that is a bad example of illegality.

The US has also been attacking civilian fishing ships claiming they are narco terrorists summarily executing civilians without trial.

Yes, that was also illegal. But that was not part of the Cuba embargo.

The US is doing a lot of illegal shit right now. But if you want to argue that the US is doing illegal shit related to Cuba, you need to actually cite examples related to Cuba.

When unilaterally attacked by a terrorist state neighbour supported by the largest military in the world, I do feel Iran has the moral right to use assymetric warfare to survive.

There is an argument here, if the asymmetric warfare was against the US or US allies. But Iran is attacking the whole world, including many innocents. Especially the blockade of fertilizer exports has the potential to kill countless innocents.

The Fremen in the books were the finest soldiers in the galaxy. And Baron Harkonnen in the book (and the films) fucked up big time, by being completely unaware of their numbers or their quality.

I am reminded of Putin’s expectation of a 3 day special military operation in Ukraine. Baron Harkonnen’s intelligence fuckup was arguably even worse.

From a narrow ethical standpoint, there is no issue I can see?

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