Right and wrong are forms of judgement, subject to debate, and sources of resentment.
Correct and incorrect are at least possibly quantifiable and do not intrinsically involve subjectivity.
In other words, my being incorrect is something others can help me to understand and rectify. My being "wrong" is a position which can yield second order harm.
A friend of mine used to work at Veritas[0] making enterprise data retention solutions. When I spoke about their product as being "making backups", he corrected me by saying:
We are not in the backup business. We are in the restoration
business.
"You know how to take the backup, you just don't know how to restore the backup. And that's really the most important part of the backup, the restoring. Anybody can just copy a file!"
Restores can be Very exciting. I worked tech support and got trained on an email server backup program. I was alone for my first call on the program.
Before I could finish the greeting I knew it was going to be a wild call as I could hear in the background someone shouting and someone sobbing, the guy actually on the phone sounded like he wasn't planning on making it home that night.
Turned out they were testing out some sync software and after a test they deleted the sync without turning off the app which then did its thing and now nobody could log in except admin who was the only user left.
I was able to find and confirm that the backups were in place and accessible. Which was good, I could hear them breathing again. But I had no way to get the restore going because the source server was so hosed.
Just then the dev walking by and I got him on the call and he did some outright hacker magic to get things to the point that a restore could function.
I thought about writing my notes into a troubleshooting guide but then realized it would be better to skip the hacking and make a setup guide that showed them how to set it up properly in the first place.
No. But, well, yes: if you use BE - you will need a restore pretty soon.
I'm the person who actually experienced BE walking around the file server and deleting files. Helpful suuport person had done the needful and said what this is not an issue and it wouldn't be reported as a bug.
> I'm curious what people are sending to Claude that is so secret.
When Claude is used in a professional setting, any or all of:
Proprietary intellectual property (a.k.a. system code)
PII[0] of the employee, customers, or both
HIPAA[1] data known to a system
Internal communications not meant to be publicized
Sensitive data, such as SSH keys and the like
Pretty much anything on a machine which uses Anthropic/OpenAI native tools is a candidate to be compromised really.
Anthropic will sign BAAs. They are HIPAA compliant (we used them.)
I understand people’s hesitation but the business agreements are different. The business risks of misusing HIPAA data is not only being banned from a massive enterprise market (last I checked, there were about 1.2m jobs related to claims billing and adjudication) and significant legal repercussions.
Other companies like AWS also handle HIPAA data. Are we afraid they’re stealing it? I don’t believe it, nor that Anthropic is training on HIPAA data.
The simulated dialog you have provided is very much representative of what many of us have heard first-hand. However, I disagree with:
Most businesses don’t care about later risk or any future
planning beyond the quarter horizon, they’re not concerned
about how it will effect their performance in 3 quarters or
lead to instability or issues, those are future problems
for a future person and we’re here for money now.
Businesses care about "later risk" and what it implies.
Individuals within an organization do not unless it will specifically affect their bonuses/promotions.
> If your house burns down because of known flaw in Microsoft Windows they are not liable (well as far as EULA let’s them, you can most likely still sue them).
A EULA does not obviate responsibility of a company for its products. Continuing with your example, while it may be very difficult to prove a known flaw in MS Windows was the cause of your house being set afire, if one had said proof, a EULA would not absolve Microsoft.
> What is "await" if not a synonym for "suspend"?!?
The `await` keyword in most languages is not a synonym for suspending thread execution so much as it is an effectual attempt to replicate the functionality of `coreturn`[0]. To wit, if an underlying `Future`/`Promise` has completed before the `await` instruction is evaluated, the thread executing same will not be suspended.
> has anyone found a good way to improve code quality? just wondering ...
- keep prompts focused on atomic tasks.
- use expert prompting[0] when possible.
- require coding agents to verify changes.
- require coding agents to create/update unit tests with 100% coverage.
- use git to commit/revert atomic tasks manually.
- leverage planning capabilities to review instead of recover.
- consider using something like Karpathy guidelines[1].
- leverage Constraint Programming[2] concepts when
formulating prompts.
> Optimizing for fewest LOC is probably slightly more bad than more LOC, and both are bad for the same reason - it makes it harder for humans to interpret and understand ...
Correct and incorrect are at least possibly quantifiable and do not intrinsically involve subjectivity.
In other words, my being incorrect is something others can help me to understand and rectify. My being "wrong" is a position which can yield second order harm.
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