I am baffled that, in the year 2026, I am telling technically competent engineers to not solicit nor take legal advice from a random word generator
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I am baffled that, in the year 2026, I am telling technically competent engineers to not solicit nor take legal advice from a random word generator
@Possiblydrew indoctrinating engineers and engineering types with goofy shit is like shooting fish in a barrel. on average they think they're smarter than they are, at least in part because so much education and work culture rewards rationalizing and sounding confident over anything else
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@barubary @hastar @Possiblydrew
You're so clever!
@hopeless @hastar @Possiblydrew
ohd!]r.QBV
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@hopeless wow there’s so much to unpack here.
Random + weights + other stuff is still
random . Random + seed sure is deterministic but how often do you the user set the seed? Why is the answer to an objective query subject to a probabilistic state?
"Random" has a particular meaning when describing someone's answer... it's pejorative and implies the answer is not related to the question.
It's true with LLMs if you ask it stuff that it wasn't trained on, you will get junk / hallucinations.
But if it's within the LLM's training the results can be excellent (yea: with a PRNG involved too). Don't like to hear anything good about LLMs? No worries, it doesn't matter to me either way.
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@hopeless @hastar @Possiblydrew They aren't sentient, they are not 'choosing' anything. They're just picking at random from weighted options. They don't know anything. If the training set was good for what specifically you wanted to do you might be lucky. Otherwise you could be totally fucked and not know it until a lot later when something breaks/lets someone into your system.
@ariaflame @hastar @Possiblydrew
Nobody claimed LLMs are sentient.
"just" is carrying a lot of weight there, the model weights encode why those next tokens are relevant and are the "magic".
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@hopeless @hastar @Possiblydrew
ohd!]r.QBV
@barubary @hastar @Possiblydrew
Great job. Draw a house next. -
@ariaflame @hastar @Possiblydrew
Nobody claimed LLMs are sentient.
"just" is carrying a lot of weight there, the model weights encode why those next tokens are relevant and are the "magic".
@hopeless @hastar @Possiblydrew So they magically create security risks, badly written code and duplicate functions all over the place.
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I am baffled that, in the year 2026, I am telling technically competent engineers to not solicit nor take legal advice from a random word generator
@Possiblydrew@pnw.zone It isn't even random, it is just pseudo-random, right?
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T Like, Y'know, Gneech shared this topic on
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I am baffled that, in the year 2026, I am telling technically competent engineers to not solicit nor take legal advice from a random word generator
@Possiblydrew and not just legal… PROFESSIONAL! Engineers get courses, are tested and trained that **They are certifying that XYZ is proper**. Codebases from the 1970s get wrapped in other code but not altered because They have a body of past work.
Infrastructure doesn’t collapse expressly because we build this way.
… this shit hurts my soul.
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@Possiblydrew and not just legal… PROFESSIONAL! Engineers get courses, are tested and trained that **They are certifying that XYZ is proper**. Codebases from the 1970s get wrapped in other code but not altered because They have a body of past work.
Infrastructure doesn’t collapse expressly because we build this way.
… this shit hurts my soul.
@Possiblydrew I avoided saying law, but all (hand waves) *THIS* is a legal wrapper around what Engineers do. Just like the profession of Doctor has a fierce legal infrastructure wrapping what they do.
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@Possiblydrew Have you actually tried the current Coding assist AIs?
Because if you had, you would be surprised they are not "random word generators" but actually very useful.
You can try https://antigravity.google for free on your own code on your own machine (Linux is fine) and ask it to do your own choice of tasks.
If you want to come back and tell me you found rand() in an overcoat, well, OK. But I think you will be very surprised.
degenerating degenerate So, you’re asking Claude Code for legal advice, is what I’m hearing.
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