> Consider this, if the mod interface was C/C++, do you think those poorly optimized mods could be trusted to also not leak memory?

Garbage collection does not solve memory leak problems. For example

- keeping a reference too long,

- much more subtle: having a reference to some object inside some closure

will also cause memory leaks in a garbage-collected language.

The proper solution is to consider what you name "poorly optimized mods" to be highly experimental (only those who are of very high quality can be treated differently).

> Garbage collection does not solve memory leak problems

It solves a class of memory leak problems which are much harder to address without the GC. Memory lifetimes.

It's true that you can still create an object that legitimately lives for the duration of the application, nothing solves that.

But what you can't do is allocate something on the heap and forget to free it. Or double free it. Or free it before the actual lifetime has finished.

Those are much trickier problems to solve which experienced C/C++ programmers trip over all the time. It's hard enough to have been the genesis of languages like Java and Rust.

I do wonder then how difficult it would be to mod games written in D

I don't think D has a "must use GC" mode, so probably easy to hit a footgun. It's the footguns that make things hard (IMO).

There is no "must use GC" mode, as far as I'm aware, but the footguns you describe only exist if the programmers opt-out of the GC. It's somewhat similar to using JNI/FFM in Java: it's possible to escape the safety of the VM. Though it's much easier to do so in D.

> When things in your life provide net negative value it's in your best interest to ditch them.

Let's ditch politicians. :-)

> I assume if someone used an LLM to write for them that they must not be comfortabley familiar with their subject.

This statement assumes that the writer is a native speaker in the language in which he writes the text.

If you're not a good enough speaker to write it, you're not good enough to proofread it, either.

> I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something.

You can: the words are in the G-code language.

I mean: you are used to learn foreign languages in school, so you are already used to formulate your request in a different language to make yourself understood. In this case, this language is G-code.

This is a strange take; no one is hand-writing the g-code for their 3d print. There are ways to model objects using code (eg openscad), but that still doesn't replace the actual mechanical design work involved in studying a problem and figuring out what sort of part is required to solve it.

Funny you should mention that.

I spent years writing a geometry and gcode generator in grasshopper. I wasn’t generating every line of gcode (my typical programs are about 500k lines), but I write the entire generator to go from curves to movements and extrusions.

I used opus to rewrite the entire thing, more cleanly, with fewer bugs and more features, in an afternoon. Admittedly it would have taken a lot longer without the domain expertise from years of staring at geometry and gcode side by side.

Produce the g code needed to 3D print the object of the attached illustrations from various angles.

Produce the 3D images of xxx from various angles.xxx should be able to do yyy.

Re: Produce the 3D images of xxx from various angles.xxx should be able to do yyy.

This is the tricky part. Do you know anything about mechanical engineering?

What you are looking for (as an employer) is people who are in love of AI.

I guess a lot of participants rather have an slight AI-skeptic bias (while still being knowledgeable about which weaknesses current AI models have).

Additionally, such a list has only a value if

a) the list members are located in the USA

b) the list members are willing to switch jobs

I guess those who live in the USA and are in deep love of AI already have a decent job and are thus not very willing to switch jobs.

On the other hand, if you are willing to hire outside the USA, it is rather easy to find people who want to switch the job to an insanely well-paid one (so no need to set up a list for finding people) - just don't reject people for not being a culture fit.

But isn't part of the point of this that you want people who are eager to learn about AI and how to use it responsibly? You probably shouldn't want employees who, in their rush to automate tasks or ship AI powered features, will expose secrets, credentials, PII etc. You want people who can use AI to be highly productive without being a liability risk.

And even if you're not in a position to hire all of those people, perhaps you can sell to some of them.

Honestly, it seems worse than web3. Yes, companies throw up their hands and say "well, yeah the original inventors are probably right, our safety teams quit en masse or we fired them, the world's probably gonna go to shit, but hey there's nothing we can do about it, and maybe it'll all turn out ok!" And then hire the guy who vibecoded the clawdbot so people can download whatever trojan malware they can onto their computers.

I've seen Twitter threads where people literally celebrate that they can remove RLHF from models and then download arbitrary code and run it on their computers. I am not kidding when I say this is going to end up far worse than web3 rugpulls. At least there, you could only lose the magic crypto money you put in. Here, you can not even participate and still be pwned by a swarm of bots. For example it's trivially easy to do reputational destruction at scale, as an advanced persistent threat. Just choose your favorite politician and see how quickly they start trying to ban it. This is just one bot: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1r39upr/an_ai_a...

(It'd be for selling to them, not for hiring them)

I wrote:

> I guess a lot of participants rather have an slight AI-skeptic bias (while still being knowledgeable about which weaknesses current AI models have)

I don't think that these people are good sales targets. I rather have a feeling that if you want to sell AI stuff to people, a good sales target is rather "eager, but somewhat clueless managers who (want to) believe in AI magic".

Couldn't you simply increase the temperature of the model to somewhat mitigate this effect?

I kind of think of that as just increasing the standard deviation. Its been a while since I experimented with this, but I remember trying a temp of 1 and the output was gibberish, like base64 gibberish. So something like 0.5 doesn't necessarily seem to solve this problem, it just flattens the distribution and makes the output less coherent, with rarer tokens, but still the same underlying distribution.

you have to know that your "simply" is carrying too much weight. here's some examples of why just temperature is not enough, you need to run active world models https://www.latent.space/p/adversarial-reasoning

When applied to insightful writing, that is much more likely to dull the point rather than preserve or sharpen it.

> my employer has told me that it's an expectation for me and that if I don't use it i'll be replaced

This does not imply that you cannot use the AI "badly". Call it "malicious compliance" if you want ... :-)

> I'd like to do something that is worth doing in the sense that it's worth discussing in your "free" time too. And most programmers feel like the show Severance (yeah I know it's the other way round).

This does not fit my experience. It's rather that many passionate programmers are rather eager to talk about what they do at work (at least if they are allowed to), but the common situation is that what they do at work is barely interesting to people who are not at least somewhat interested in programming topics.

> "There are programmers, and there are system programmers, and ultimately there are kernel programmers"

... and "ultimore" there are assembly programmers, machine code programmers, ASIC microcode programmers, ... :-)

Exactly. Pick one that excites you, and paint a picture that you are special in a list. I think that definitely excited me and put a meaning, however small, into my very boring and mundane life. Dogs at least have freedom.

BTW definitely would love to do more professional assembly or microcode, if possible! I'm planning to migrate a very old kernel to different architectures and there is tons of assembly code, or, to be more precisely, more cursed GCC inline assembly code in the kernel. E.g. everything in string.h is in asm.

> “I’m a null pointer exception debugger.”

NullPointerException is the Java world. In C++, dereferencing a null pointer is rather undefined behaviour.

So it's perfectly fitting the noun for c++ dev is undefined behavior :D