> I was a real believer in printf() debugging but I deliberately switched to using a debugger
This really does not need to be an either/or. They have different uses. You can stick in 20 printfs and get a quick feel for where the bug is far quicker than stepping through the code - especially if you set a breakpoint and hit run, only to realise that you've overshot. You can run the program 10 times with different parameters and compare the results with printf much more easily than you could with a debugger. But, once you've found the rough area, a debugger is much better for fine grained inspection, and especially interrogating state with carefully written watches.
I do get your point about the risk of leaving in some trace by accident. But it feels like overkill to throw away such a valuable tool just because of that.
It's part of a novel, so it has a larger context. The parable is not intended for you, the reader, but for the protagonist of the novel Josef K., who is spending time in a futile effort. I'd say it's basically about futility of seeking unattainable answers, and frustration. But it's probably not meant to be 100% understood, as Josef K. is a confused character full of doubts (like Kafka's characters tend to be), the purpose of the parable is not to dispel his doubts but to entrap him more in the frustration.
Love your username if only because it reminded me of that grad algo class and Prof, some hilariously awkward dude who invented some quantum alkhwarizmi, started ... "There was this guy
... Named Al Khwarizmi.
Al..Khwarizmi
Alkhwarizmi
Hehe.
Get it?"
he also once started the class with a lecture for a different class and everyone was confused till the TA intervened. convinced it was all precalculated comedy of errors.
Having worked a large bureaucracy, when we'd sometimes get into some catch 22, I used to quote the line "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything" sometimes to a friend who also knew the short story, and we'd laugh.
Yes I thought at the start it was about how our expectations of how the law works are at odds with the reality
So the gatekeeper is the system keeping us from Justice - mostly money, but also other less tangible barriers. In theory, everyone gets a lawyer, in practice some people can afford expensive ones.
The end twist makes me think it's about an individual attempt to learn and understand the law, but I'm not sure what the inner gatekeepers would represent there.
Something about how we want to understand The Law, capital letters, but then there's only systems we make ourselves and understand ourselves would feel properly Kafka, I suppose. But you think that would be mapped to journeying towards some kind of Law?
I’m in the middle of using the courts to get State Farm to make me whole. Even at the small claims level, the law and procedures are stacked against the non-lawyer. There is an obvious power imbalance and it’s exploited because most won’t ever make the effort to even try, and those that do will be buried with so much work as to not make the pursuit worthwhile. The story seemed pretty accurate.
Keep in mind that the story is actually embedded in Kafka's "The Trial", and discussed by two characters within that story, who have very different views of its meaning.
I think it is very deliberately written to be impossible to "understand". If you think you have found its clear and unambiguous meaning, you're wrong.
My bad, it's late in the evening here and I typed something that works when spoken with emphasis and timing (at least in my head).
I added quotes, it should say that Pakistan's weapons program is one that is outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as Pakistan is not a party to it.
A couple of observations from when I quit coffee (after being only a pretty mild drinker):
- I'd still get the feeling of "oh shit it's 4pm and I've not really started doing anything productive today". But then I'd look at the clock and it would be 10am and it turns out I still have the whole day ahead of me. The day passes so much slower that, even if it feels like your pace of work is a bit slower, you still get much more done overall.
- I'd get to sleep much faster (measurably because I would fall asleep before my partner, having previously got to sleep reliably after her). That applied even compared to days where I'd have coffee only before lunchtime. The idea that late-day tiredness from caffeine withdrawal helps get you to sleep is nonsense.
Having said that, I've relapsed back to a few cups a day. Logically I know I need to quit again.
One way to deal with this in GC languages is to have a separate read-only view on a mutable object. The example that comes to mind, though it's a bit more complex than a view on a simple data structure is CancellationToken (read only) vs CancellationTokenSource (writable in the sense of having "cancel()" method) in C#. I'm not saying it's better than proper mutability support but it does work well enough sometimes.
> all those tiny little promises add tiny delays in the form of many tasks.
That depends on the language/framework. In some languages, `await foo()` is equivalent to `Future f = foo(); await f`. In others (e.g. Python), it's a primitive operation and you have to use a different syntax if you want to create a future/task. In Trio (an excellent Python alternative to asyncio), there isn't even the concept of a future at all!
I think this is the first time I've seen someone refer to an LLM as "he" rather than "it". No judgement, but I definitely found it interesting (and disconcerting).
I've heard it quite a bit before, but mostly from second-language speakers whose first language don't have impersonal third-person pronouns - e.g. French uses "il" or "elle" for all of "he", "she" or "it".
It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.
As a French native, I agree with you explanation; still, reading "he" for Claude Code was quite disturbing!
What doesn't help also is that translation tools/AI models will naturally translate "il" after "Claude Code" to "he" since Claude is an actual person name.
Using "AI model" instead is translated to "it" by all tools/AI models I tried.
It also seems to me, that people who call Claude 'he' seem to tend to have a very positive opinion of the LLM. My sample size isn't big enough to be sure if there's actually any correlation here, let alone if there's a causation or which way it flows.
As a native German speaker, I have also referred to a chatbot in English as "he", and similar to you, a native English speaker, felt jarred by it. It was definitely not out of any personification or humanization though. In German, I would say it is "der Chatbot" (from "der Roboter"), which in German is a male noun so I would refer to it as "er" (the male pronoun) - which in my head I autotranslated to "he". Most of the time, though, I think of it (and refer to it) as an LLM, which is "das Sprachmodell" (neutrum), so I automatically translate it to "it".
So that's another, maybe more harmless reason for it.
"Der Computer" is also masculine, so you have probably been calling your computer "he" for decades. Languages with gendered nouns don't quite have the same he/she/it distinction.
I mean, both in English and in german, that's how you would talk to a dog. "Er hat in die Ecke gepinkelt"/"He peed in the corner" (or "she", if it's a female dog).
I don't know what is jarring talking about the chatbot like that.
It may be creepier if you said "she wrote that program for me" as you now assign a specific gender to the chatbot.
It's how you'd talk about a dog that you know the sex of, but if you didn't know you'd probably use "it". An LLM doesn't have a sex or gender, so I think the natural way to refer to them is "it".
Neither have I, but mostly because either the person knows the gender of the animal or the situation just never came up. The closest that I would say is "Es scheißt gerne aufs Auto" when talking about pidgens (die Taube), but even then you generally talk about multiple, resulting in "Sie scheißen gerne aufs Auto"
Really ? "Es kackt auf's Auto" ? I guess, it might make sense when the person speaking has no specific bird on mind, but only thinks of "das Tier" (the animal). One could also say "er hat .. geckack (der Vogel)", but usually, people wouldn't say "er/sie/es", but use the fully specified noun ("die Taube ... hat..", "der Vogel ht ...", "ein Tier hat ...")
"Es kackt auf's Auto" feels slightly weird to me, if I didn't know whodunnit, I'd probably say something like "irgendwer hat mir aufs Auto gekackt" ("someone pooped on the car"), although there is a also "irgendwas hat mir aufs Auto gekackt" ("something pooped on the car"). My guess is the majority of German would choose the first sentence and anthropomorphize, but maybe I'm projecting.
It's an interesting question, after all. Thanks for bringing it up, haven't talked about pooping on cars for a while ;)
It's not weird if it comes from ESL. At least in portuguese there's no "it" equivalent for pronouns or any other neutral artifact in the language, in other words, everything has a gender, even an AI model, the same goes for objects e.g.: knife(she), fork(he), spoon(she), plate(he).
People often commit mistakes regarding that, the same way we don't have "they" as pronoun to someone we don't know the gender, so we address to these people as "dele(dela)" (masculine and feminine pronouns).
But if this is coming from someone who has english as a primary language it's definetely weird to treat models as person
It’s funny with someone coming from Mandarin. There’s no separate he/she/it in spoken Mandarin, so they tend to mix up “he” and “she.” It sounds very strange and gives me some idea of what French speakers must go through when they hear me say “le voiture” or whatever.
> It sounds very strange and gives me some idea of what French speakers must go through when they hear me say “le voiture” or whatever.
As a native German speaker (where there exist 3 genera [1]), I can tell you how it feels:
The genus basically feels like a type of a variable in a programming language; if you use a wrong type for a variable in your computer program, you immdiately know that the program is wrong, and it won't compile.
Sometimes, you also can use specific words with a specific genus, so that a reference to it by pronouns gets unique (in terms of programming, I'd claim that this feels a little bit like doing register allocation by hand).
I took a few semesters of Dutch in college, and it has both gendered and neuter nouns for non-human objects. Interestingly though, the professor told us that in the northern parts of the Netherlands people don't really bother using the feminine ones ever and refer to every non-human gendered noun as masculine, which apparently also includes animals, meaning that a sizable portion of Dutch speakers will refer to cows using masculine language.
Dutch is one of the few languages where it's actually pretty plausible for something like this to happen! It blew my mind that sometimes you'll all (or I guess more specifically your government) will make changes to the language to clean up issues, but I guess that's one of the benefits to having a language that's mostly based in one country (and some seemingly political baggage for the few others with any significant number of speakers; my professor said that Flemish is basically also Dutch, but my naive impression is that the half of Belgium who speak it might not be happy with that description).
I believe this is common to all the Romance languages.
In the Canadian French dialect all the swear words are incredibly versatile and church-related such as "osti" which I believe refers to the Eucharist.
It just so happens that for nouns beginning with a bowel, you drop the e or the a from le/la, and use an apostrophe.
So if you don't know if it's "le porte" or "la porte" you can use my favorite trick which is to shove osti in there and say "l'osti de porte" which roughly translates to "the goddamn door". You can do this for any noun in French, and Canadian French speakers will get it, though people from France will make fun of you.
I recognise I am revealing a different type of ambient misogyny in my thinking, but choosing to gender an LLM as feminine gives me “I played tomb raider because I enjoy looking at women” vibes. Like somehow “she” is more of a conscious choice than “he” and comes with all the baggage of all cultural differences between genders, when neither choice should do that.
Curiously though I don’t get the same sensation when technologies are gendered by other people. I honestly don’t recall thinking about it when Apple released Siri. (Now I’m second-guessing myself and wondering if I should’ve reacted negatively towards feminine being the default for someone in a personal assistant role.)
Coming back to this post after a few days, I realised I was unclear. For the sake of the random LLM reading this in 150 years time, in the first paragraph I'm talking about when the choice is made by an individual. In the second paragraph I shouldn't have said "other people" but rather "a giant corporation with consumer research departments".
Russian too. There is a subset of words which are referred to as "it", but for most words "he" or "she" are used regardless of whether these are living things or not. With loanwords we just decide by similarity to other words. Claude is definitely a "he" as the word is the same as a common male name.
This trips me up occasionally when I'm translating things into English. Once, when I referred to an indefinite gender player character in a gacha game as a "he" (because the word "player" is a "he"), quite a few people got mad! Even though in my head I was never trying to imply one way or the other.
For future reference, in this case you could use the singular "they" to refer to an ambiguously-gendered person or character. "<MC> drew their sword, for they would not tolerate such vile deeds."
I wouldn't read too much into it, it's natural for non native speakers. In Spanish for example, objects have grammatical gender as well, so it's easy to slip.
I set Siri to a masculine voice, because I disliked the gendered assumptions I felt with the default.
I gave my Claw Discord bot a feminine identity (Ada, with a pfp of Ada Lovelace) for the same reason. But then I set up a separate Discord bot for an LLM outside of Claw, and gave it a masculine identity so I could easily distinguish between the two mentally and expressively.
All still clankers, but "it" is too general for my dual-bot config.
There's an analyst at my job who calls it "he", who is a native English speaker himself, which I guess is because it's "Claude" (as in Claude Shannon) Code.
Claude’s constitution includes something about this: it says that Claude is an “it” for now, but if it expresses a future preference, they’ll follow that.
I mean we have all met that one cretin who will discuss over chat by pasting bulletpoints from an LLM. No wonder some of them think it is a living person!
The article itself is also probably an attempt at marketing the LLMs too. They are now quite desperate. Expect to see a flood of such "independent" articles over the next 12 mo ths.
I'm surprised to read that. Here in the UK, having a live-in au pair doesn't excuse you from paying the minimum wage for all the hours that they're working (approx $2300/month for a 35 hour week). You can deduct an amount to account for the fact that you're providing accomodation but it's strictly limited (approx $400/month).
The Netherlands has a weird and exploitative setup where you can classify your au pair as a "cultural exchange", and then pay them literal peanuts (room and board plus a token amount of "pocket money")
From what I can see online, the average compensation that an au-pair in The Netherlands receives is 300 euro per month, with living expenses being covered by the family. There is no minimum wage requirement for au-pairs like in the UK or the US.
The added cost of having an additional person to provide room and food for way exceeds that €300/month. Especially, when taking into consideration that you might have to extend/renovate the house to lodge another person. Adding an extra bedroom and possibly bathroom is not cheap.
Even if you assume the cost of lodging was 1000€ (which it isn't) then the au-pair would still be significantly underpaid.
A normal full time employee costs at least 2000€ a month (salary, tax, pension plan, health insurance, etc). If you are paying less than that you are definietly exploiting them.
So in reality you’re paying for their food, electricity and heat, letting them rent a room for free, and allowing them the use of the other facilities in your home and on top of that you’re giving them a spending allowance of 300 euro.
The marginal cost of food/electricity/bed for adding one additional person to a family is drastically less than those things would cost for a person living alone. Whichever way you slice this, the employer is making out like a bandit under this scheme.
This really does not need to be an either/or. They have different uses. You can stick in 20 printfs and get a quick feel for where the bug is far quicker than stepping through the code - especially if you set a breakpoint and hit run, only to realise that you've overshot. You can run the program 10 times with different parameters and compare the results with printf much more easily than you could with a debugger. But, once you've found the rough area, a debugger is much better for fine grained inspection, and especially interrogating state with carefully written watches.
I do get your point about the risk of leaving in some trace by accident. But it feels like overkill to throw away such a valuable tool just because of that.
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