Mastodon does not have persistence of data though. Your instance shuts down? All your posts are gone. I naively assumed I could just move them to a new instance and found out the hard way. I have felt disillusioned with Mastodon ever since.
Why is a format string or string concatenation (or interpolation, what I would use) the “wrong way” when all user input (more precisely: all string literals) are properly escaped?
The main reason is that a lot of the reason comes around that it is incredibly difficult to do this in a general case just because of the grammar of SQL. Especially with the very different dialects, in the worst case you can get unintended remote code execution[1]
There's an incidental performance benefit on some database engines as well. When you write a SQL query, in general the database engine has to compile this to a form it can use
If you use raw string concatenation, "SELECT USERS FROM table WHERE id=1" might compile to something like (pseudocode below)
def prepstatement1():
...
So if you use an explicit prepared statement[1], something like "SELECT USERS FROM table WHERE id=?" might compile to something like
def prepstatement2(id: int): # <--- notice the new parameter here
...
Some database engines also have the ability to cache a prepared statement and so these are a lil bit faster. Remember, your database has to still compile the string concatenated case, it's just a little bit hidden.
I can tell you about my experiences with this, which from what I hear are unusual. I first learned programming in C128 BASIC. Then on the PC it was QBasic and Turbo Pascal, and later Perl.
What all of these languages have in common is that you can write meaningful programs entirely without pointers or manual memory management. In particular, all of these languages handle strings in a natural, high-level way (treating them as a value) and don't require you to allocate and free buffers for them. Perl goes a step further with arrays and hashmaps and employs a full garbage collector.
I have vague memories of trying C for the first time and getting completely lost and bogged down by all the pointers and memory management. My reaction was the same as yours: how does anyone program in this. Why bother with this complexity when you can just use Pascal where you simply don't have to.
Of course, the Pascal compiler was likely written in C or assembly and all the memory management still had to happen even if it was hidden away from me. To some people, this might mean that I “lost” something, but to me, it meant greater freedom as I was able to explore the world of higher-level programming which I found interesting, and not have to bother with the low-level details which I found tedious and even infuriating.
> how do you take the shape of the human corpus and all its gradients and [somehow] arrive at something greater than human, where was the missing information hiding?
Well, how do humans do it? Scientists discover new stuff that isn't in any corpus. Even I as a lowly computer user occasionally figure something out about a software without reading a help screen. It's obviously possible to arrive at new information by interpolating existing information.
yes and it is imposible to verify and evaluate appropriately such information without empiricism. Any empricism LLMs show is stylistic mimicry not a hard coded operational constraint. You can prompt an LLM to test its claims but what it is really doing is still genrating plausible completions not following a proceedure. So of course new things can be discovered. The point is for them to be useful requires iterative real world grounded refinement and or subject matter expert judgment. The error is assuming scaling magically turns a prediction algorithmn into a cognitive agent that can exceed its masters. it doesn't. even if llms generate profound insights accidentally by definition if such insights are not in the corpus they are not retained given frozen weights and if beyond the human capability envelope the epistemically blind llm has no way to ensure retention if they arise during training.
> But that’s not how humans writing code generally think about ambiguous expressions. You can see that by how few precedence rules programmers tend to internalize
I'd argue that it is how humans think about ambiguous syntax, except in the special case of operator precedence, which is the most complex example. A more salient example to me would be, say, the case of an ‘else’ block after a double-‘if’:
if (c) if (d) X; else Y;
It's technically ambiguous, but you only need to run into it once, see how your IDE auto-formatter indents it, and then you've internalized the precedence rule immediately.
I actually hung out in their IRC for a while hoping to maybe form a social connection and then get an invite, but somehow it just never materialized, and the chat wasn't engaging, so I stopped coming back...
> "Matter" is an abstaction. Mind, properly considered, (i.e. not with words) is not.
> Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically.
Did you mean to say “matter” where you said “mind” and vice versa? It’s obviously the reverse of what you said; everything consists of matter, but what specific arrangements of matter you want to call a “mind” is obviously the abstraction.
Ockam’s razor is not really applicable here. Unless, that is, you want to ascribe something mythical to the mind that exists beyond matter — then it’ll trigger.
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