Mark DennehyMar 1

"Who cares if the answer is sometimes not 100% perfect, it's close enough and you're way more productive!"

Counterpoint, Claude just selected an elementary girls school as a target and you just bombed it killing over a hundred kids.

But sure, LLMs are worth betting all our pensions on and giving over all our manufacturing capacity to and all our potable water and electricity. No downside there at all.

Show threadMark DennehyMar 1
First day of college, first lecture, 9am monday morning. Prof Perry.
"Hello. Congratulations on passing the leaving cert. You're going to be engineers. Here's an hour of explaining what that means by showing you every major disaster caused by engineers *whose names have been recorded* and how many people their failures killed"
Show threadMark DennehyMar 1

I can still close my eyes and be right back there, sitting in the dark in the arts block thinking "what the fuck have I gotten into" and we could use more of that.

And every time I look at these silicon valley fuckwits dismissing any applications of their tech, or the side effects on everyone else, or any semblance of a duty of care, I think "we need to clockwork orange this into these fuckers". And it probably needs to be the first lesson for *every* engineer and software eejit forever.

Show threadchebe / Shhh Earl
@markdennehy not quite the first lecture, but we went through airflight and spacecraft disasters, and then had a whole deep dive on why voting machines are simply wrong (for the Irish system, the same speeches being given to powers that be shortly before they were shelved). I tell people about the implanted medical devices, from companies that no longer exist. Don't fuck up is a good lesson.
Mar 1 at 2:36pmWeb
Show threadMark DennehyMar 1

@chebe One of the things that's stuck with me is that the tacoma narrows bridge footage is now preserved in the library of congress as culturally significant. So it doesn't matter that the engineer discovered the issue well ahead of the collapse, was working on a fix, or that the cause was previously unknown; all anyone remembers is that Leon Moisseiff built bad bridges and killed a dog *and that's what's recorded forever in the library of congress*.

I mean, that's *terrifying*.

Show threadchebe / Shhh EarlMar 1
@markdennehy if it helps, in chemistry they taught us about chirality by the problems with Thalidomide. It's kinda part of the whole 'progress' thing
Show threadMark DennehyMar 1
@chebe yeah, but the "whoa, let's be careful here" bit seems to be utterly missing in our industry 😡
Show threadchebe / Shhh EarlMar 1
@markdennehy they don't think we actually have an affect on the world, that we just type money, like golden geese, that can be replaced with code. Reality is not our strong suit.