I feel compelled to point out that “back door man” was already a common expression in blues lyrics.

I assume that’s what was being referred to.

I was thinking a nice golden throne. More appropriate for a god-emperor.

I’ll just write thousands of lines of code inside a global object… I’m sure I won’t put a semicolon where a comma should be…

Can I teach you a lesson?

Yep. But I refuse to use their damn app. And they deliberately make the interface on the mobile site cumbersome. It’s tons of fun.

Excellent! So immersive!

Where’s the dedicated DRADIS monitor?

A similar phenomenon is knowing you’re going to need to go back and update some older section of code and when you finally get around to it, it turns out you wrote it that way to begin with. It’s like… I didn’t think I knew about this approach before…

Do you have any theories as to why this is the case? I haven’t gone anywhere near it, so I have no idea. I imagine it’s tied up with the way it processes things from a language-first perspective, which I gather is why it’s bad at math. I really don’t understand enough to wrap my head around why we can’t seem to combine LLM and traditional computational logic.

It really is. With a dash of cognitive dissonance thrown in.

My sense in reading the article was not that the author thinks artificial general intelligence is impossible, but that we’re a lot farther away from it than recent events might lead you to believe. The whole article is about the human tendency to conflate language ability and intelligence, and the author is making the argument both that natural language does not imply understanding of meaning and that those financially invested in current “AI” benefit from the popular assumption that it does. The appearance or perception of intelligence increases the market value of AIs, even if what they’re doing is more analogous to the actions of a very sophisticated parrot.

Edit all of which is to say, I don’t think the article is asserting that true AI is impossible, just that there’s a lot more to it than smooth language usage. I don’t think she’d say never, but probably that there’s a lot more to figure out—a good deal more than some seem to think—before we get Skynet.

14 years myself. More than a third of my life. Your bad relationship analogy is a pretty good one (the analogy, that is). I was in a real life one of those about the same time I joined reddit. Glad that one didn’t last nearly as long!

It’s probably also related to when a person first encountered JS. If you learned it pre-2015—even if you’re aware of the changes made in ES6—I can see how it would be hard not to view JS as cumbersome. I personally love to use it, but I can’t imagine that would be true without let, const, classes, etc.

Edit also block scoping and arrow functions!

A boring dystopia.