Kerfuffle

joined 1 year ago
[–] Kerfuffle 4 points 1 year ago

But as OP points out, someone will get that kidney eventually anyway.

OP erroneously thought that but it's not actually correct. The conditions where someone dies but their kidney is viable for a transplant are rare.

[–] Kerfuffle 9 points 1 year ago

I don't recommend using RAID 0 for kidneys.

[–] Kerfuffle 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

You now have a single point of failure, where you had redundancy before.

On the plus side, someone else gets to continue existing.

Or from the IT perspective: I have two important servers, one has a single drive, the other has RAID mirroring. The drive in the first server fails. I could take a drive out of the server with RAID and have two functional servers or I could keep the second one running on its RAID and have a server with redundancy (that hopefully/might not be needed).

(I'm not going out and donating a kidney though, guess we can say it's because I'm selfish.)

[–] Kerfuffle 2 points 1 year ago

One would hope that IBM’s selling a product that has a higher success rate than a coinflip

Again, my point really doesn't have anything to do with specific percentages. The point is that if some percentage of it is broken you aren't going to know exactly which parts. Sure, some problems might be obvious but some might be very rare edge cases.

If 99% of my program works, the remaining 1% might be enough to not only make the program useless but actively harmful.

Evaluating which parts are broken is also not easy. I mean, if there was already someone who understood the whole system intimately and was an expert then you wouldn't really need to rely on AI to port it.

Anyway, I'm not saying it's impossible, or necessary not going to be worth it. Just that it is not an easy thing to make successful as an overall benefit. Also, issues like "some 1 in 100,000 edge case didn't get handle successfully" are very hard to quantify since you don't really know about those problems in advance, they aren't apparent, the effects can be subtle and occur much later.

Kind of like burning petroleum. Free energy, sounds great! Just as long as you don't count all side effects of extracting, refining and burning it.

[–] Kerfuffle 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To put it a slightly different way, if the original person said "those people (black people, for example) can't be trusted to use the money responsibly, we need to manage it for them" then criticizing that would basically be criticizing the person for being racist. I'm not saying you were rude or even very direct. I'm just saying that kind of criticism or counterargument is a different type than "I think method A is more effective than method B". The latter is just about practical stuff and doesn't touch on moral issues like racism.

Anyway, the way I interpreted your first post was arguing against that first type of problem. It's very possible I misinterpreted both of you but hopefully why I said what I did makes more sense now.

[–] Kerfuffle 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Idk what you mean by normal disagreement, but I have no intention of being hostile about this if that is what you mean?

Ah, that's not what I meant. Sorry for not being clear. I was referring to where you originally said:

It is so weird to me you can somewhat accurately describe the issues that still exist today related to slavery and then just “but I don’t think we should give em the money because they probably wouldn’t spend it responsibly”.

If the parent post was talking about "those people" as in a specific race, then the problem would be that person was being racist. So calling out a post for racist statements or overtones is different from just a normal disagreement about the best way to accomplish something. See what I mean?

quick edit:

worrying too much about the money being used “correctly” or “efficiently” above all else is a misdirection to keep the debate stagnated

"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good." — I agree. I think we should try to identify the best way to use resources to help most effectively, but certainly not to the extent we're just paralyzed and don't do anything.

[–] Kerfuffle 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So you might feed it your COBOL code and find it only coverts 40%.

I'm afraid you're completely missing my point.

The system gives you a recommendation: that has a 50% chance of being correct.

Let's say the system recommends converting 40% of the code base.

The system converts 40% of the code base. 50% of the converted result is correct.

50% is a random number picked out of thin air. The point is that what you end up with has a good chance of being incorrect and all the problems I mentioned originally apply.

[–] Kerfuffle 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I was speaking generally. In other words, the LLM will convert 100% of what you tell it to but only part of the result will be correct. That's the problem.

[–] Kerfuffle 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I don’t really agree with that either.

That's just a normal disagreement, though. Right?

giving people some cash does generally help.

Maybe. I wouldn't personally argue it doesn't help at all, but I also don't feel like it's that likely to be the most effective use of resources. I don't have any issue with that approach in principle, just to be clear. I'm 100% in favor of whatever approach does the most good.

[–] Kerfuffle 1 points 1 year ago

not some Joe Blow whose lineage has always been lower/middle-class, working for a living like everyone else.

The corresponding Joe Blow from the group that got screwed over is going to be comparatively much worse off. Right? Or you can look at it from the other angle: if normal Joe Blow had ancestors who benefited from seriously screwing over people but made bad decisions, squandered their wealth and advantages so Joe Blow is just a Joe Blow then how much worse off would Joe Blow be? Possibly quite a bit.

But anyway, looking at it from the perspective of ancestors, who screwed over who, who's responsible for what is overcomplicating things. Are there people who are suffering from unfair disadvantages, are their people who are enjoying unfair advantages at the expense of others? If you're a decent person, that status quo shouldn't be acceptable: it's something that needs to be fixed. Maybe through reparations, maybe through affirmative action, maybe through some other approach. We should determine what the most effective use of resources is and do it.

[–] Kerfuffle 4 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Hopefully what they meant is giving relatively disadvantaged people some cash doesn't really help. In other words, nothing to do with race specifically.

[–] Kerfuffle 3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Even if it only converts half of the codebase, that’s still a huge improvement.

The problem is it'll convert 100% of the code base but (you hope) 50% of it will actually be correct. Which 50%? That's left as an exercise to the reader. There's no human, no plan, no logic necessarily to how it was converted also so it can be very difficult to understand code like that and you can't ask the person who wrote why stuff is a certain way.

Understanding large, complex codebases one didn't write is a difficult task even under pretty ideal conditions.

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