The expected outcome of using a LLM to decompile is a binary that is so wildly different from the original that they cannot even be compared.
If you only make mistakes very rarely and in places that don't cause cascading analysis mistakes, you can recover. But if you keep making mistakes all over the place and vastly misjudge the structure of the program over and over, the entire output is garbage.
That makes sense. So it can work for small functions but not an entire codebase which is the goal. Does that sound correct? If so, is it useful for small functions (like, let's say I identify some sections of code I think are important becuase they modify some memory location) or is this not useful?
There are lots of parts of analysis that really matter for readability but aren't used as inputs to other analysis phases and thus mistakes are okay.
Things like function and variable names. Letting an LLM pick them would be perfectly fine, as long as you make sure the names are valid and not duplicates before outputting the final code.
Or if there are several ways to display some really weird control flow structures, letting an LLM pick which to do would be fine.
Same for deciding what code goes in which files and what the filenames should be.
Letting the LLM comment the code as it comes out would work too, as if the comments are misleading you can just ignore or remove them.
While "Empathy for the homeless" can situationally mean talking nicely about them, it also means stopping, blocking, and undoing directly terrible actions against the homeless.
Bulldozing peoples' stuff is in fact pretty bad.
Having laws against giving money to people is in fact pretty bad.
Putting hostile architecture everywhere is in fact pretty bad.
People make decisions, over and over again, to not just hurt homeless people, but also hurt the people trying to help homeless people.
Stopping people from doing that is called "empathy for the homeless". It's called that because saying and feeling bad things about people is part of the process of hurting them. It's how people agree who is and isn't okay to hurt. By stopping group efforts to make things worse, you only have to worry about random individuals trying to make things worse for other random individuals. Which is unstoppable but untargeted.
Sounds nice and virtuous... until you remember there exist gangs of homeless people who mug law-abiding citizens, retreat into the structures that you want defended from demolishing, and cry victim when people want to stop their crimes. Not to mention they use the said structures as a hub to distribute drugs to the local community of teenagers.
You see, the problem with every such discussion is the lack of nuance and the willingness to demonize e.g. parents who want their kids to be safe in their neighborhoods.
What you call lack of empathy for the homeless is, in some instances, the concern and actions of the said parents.
So do these parents truly lack empathy, how do you think? Or they say "no matter what hand life dealt you, please just stay away from my kids"?
I read your message as removing abandoned buildings because they might be used as some sort of gang HQ. Either they are doing illegal things and should be put into the legal system, or they aren't.
Your dislike of "gangs of homeless people" existing shouldn't be directed at the homeless people, but the gangs. In an area where black communities have high crime rates, the answer wouldn't be to go after black people, but address the crime directly. I don't see why this should any different.
Of course that shit happens on a constant basis and it's silly of you to think that my position isn't that shit happens.
Think about it like this: if you had no food, were starving, and the only way to eat for the night is to steal something, wouldn't you do it to? Or are you going to allow yourself to literally die because you're afraid to commit a crime? Nah. You will want to live.
I was once held up at gunpoint by three folk who stole my wallet, keys, phone, etc. Over the next 48 hours or so I watched the phone bill logs to see where they were calling. Hospital and HIV clinic were on the list. I asked the main dude why he was robbing me and he responded, "Man, we're just trying to live."
No, I will not. I was in desperate situations as well, managed to crawl out without robbing anyone.
Again, believe what makes you feel good. I am looking out for myself because I was only backstabbed all my life and I am not far from a desperate situation again... in my 40s and with a supposedly prestigious profession (programmer) but almost nobody is hiring.
My empathy only resulted in my money and literal health going toward people who don't appreciate it. Nobody ever worked for my cause. Ever. Not once.
You are a classic victim of a filter bubble. "Worked out for me, must work out for everyone". No, in fact it does not work for most.
Wasn't meant as an insult, but I'll admit it wasn't kind. It came from a genuine interest in seeing you grow as a person, despite what you might think. To say I've been down on my dumps a few times in the past is an understatement, so I understand. The way I read your post is that you, yourself, are effectively insulting people close to me, including friends and family. It's hard for me not to perceive it as naive dehumanism.
If I may -- please try spending some time at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen, or just volunteer your time to help others. Try to have conversations with people who are affected by homelessness and addiction to understand their struggles. People warm up to genuine curiosity and I think you'll find that there's so much more love out there than you give humanity credit for.
> It came from a genuine interest in seeing you grow as a person, despite what you might think
This is your mistake here, to think I need to grow further. I did. I got to the other end you were scared to explore. I understood that kindness will only get you killed in a back-alley if you kept practicing it.
Purely mathematically, it's a function with a limit. This is the part you refuse to see.
You are the one who both needs to grow as a person and sharpen his analytical skills.
This is what I meant by saying you use roundabout ways of insulting.
> The way I read your post is that you, yourself, are effectively insulting people close to me, including friends and family. It's hard for me not to perceive it as naive dehumanism.
Fair to see it that way. I do not mean offense in particular, I simply don't mince words. To me you are hopelessly idealistic and don't live in the real world. Seeing homeless people struggling to make ends meet? Witnessing soup kitchens?
Brother, I've seen much worse than this but unlike you I didn't quickly get to parade it in the hopes of coming across as kinder than your discussion partner. I'll save the gross details of everything I witnessed for myself. Was not the topic here anyway.
So OK, I don't object to you thinking I am insulting. Was not the original intent but I am aware it does come across aggressive. I am simply old enough to stop caring and write like ChatGPT, that's all.
...Plus I am not from the USA. Here's one strong clue why we are so much... not alike.
> People warm up to genuine curiosity and I think you'll find that there's so much more love out there than you give humanity credit for.
That I never denied and never will. I was talking about the scum; the people who don't want to fight their way out of the dump. They love the dump, and they see you and me as free money, free clothes, free phones, and will never change. Yes, they never will change, you read that right. I've been among those people. Lived around them.
So maybe you are the one who got sidetracked and believed I am some stupido who loves to generalize. That's on you however, not on me.
I know there are people who genuinely want to come back to society and, here is the part where you will not believe me and will be convinced I am only saying it to "win" -- I helped three of them do it. The gratitude I got was that they became even better off than me and spat on me. :)
So yeah, cheers indeed. I'll go drink a glass of wine for humanity's inevitable downfall. Shame I won't live long enough to witness it, I'd laugh and even help accelerate it if I could.
> Sounds nice and virtuous... until you remember there exist gangs of homeless people who mug law-abiding citizens, retreat into the structures that you want defended from demolishing, and cry victim when people want to stop their crimes. Not to mention they use the said structures as a hub to distribute drugs to the local community of teenagers.
There are folks who are not homeless who participate in criminal enterprise.
It's unlikely that a successful criminal is homeless, as doing crime successfully generally leaves you with money.
Like wage theft.
> So do these parents truly lack empathy, how do you think? Or they say "no matter what hand life dealt you, please just stay away from my kids"?
>
> What's your opinion?
Yes, some parents let the empathetic part of their brain that covers people not in their family die. "Fuck you, I got mine" is a popular mentality amongst those who believe in bootstrap and american excepptionalism.
Not retribution. Justice. Mugging / robbing people of valuables is illegal.
> Watching out for others is good and necessary, but in now what is "bulldozing peoples stuff" a real form of watching out for others.
I am losing patience with you. You blame me for not reading while you are not doing it yourself. I said those abandoned / derelict buildings were used as "bases" / "operation centers" if you will. Sigh.
> Violence is already illegal. I am not sure what value you or any one gains by "otherising" a boogeyman rather than addressing the issues that cause violence.
...? Seems you just need somebody to talk with because you are just dissecting words here. Glad we at least managed to agree on something super basic like, you know, that what I described homeless people are doing is actually illegal. It's a start.
> Both myopic and under-informed on that particular subject.
My view is that you cannot sacrifice other peoples' lives and belongings, and call it good, without also sacrificing some of your own. It does not actually have to be "an eye for an eye", the sacrifices do not have to be anywhere close to balanced. But willingly hurting other people and paying no price whatsoever cannot possibly be considered good.
> Sounds nice and virtuous
Yeah it is. I care about people about as much as it is possible to care about people, because I can't truly separate myself from anyone. If I know someone is happy, I feel like I am happy. If I am aware of someone on death row, I feel like I am on death row. My brain doesn't actually mix up real and imagined sensations, but I lack the ability to hear of something happening to someone and go "that can't happen to me". In some sense, I "am" humanity: I want everyone to be happy and get what they want. I empathize towards trans people and transphobes simultaneously (though ultimately side with trans people). I feel near-completely unable of actually making a difference with anything, but my mind does give me rather strong yanks to "make this war go away" all the time. Though the one exception to all this is people who hurt other people and call it good, especially if they call it "for their own good". I feel quite a lot of rage when I hear about incidents like that.
If you share goals and desires with someone, you are "the same person" as them. You are a "law-abiding citizen". Their successes are your successes, their failures are your failures. You are not the same person as "homeless people". Their successes mean nothing to you. Same with your failures. They are capable of causing problems to you (as all people do), but your desire to retaliate is not limited by the desire to not "cut off your nose to spite your face" that you would have if the cause of the problem was a "law-abiding citizen".
In my understanding of the world, it is not possible to convince you to care about homeless people. The desires of different people are fundamentally not comparable. My desire to stay alive does not outweigh your desire to not stub your toe, and if those desires come into conflict, it does not matter which one wins. (Though as I also consider myself to be you to some extent, I desire both to stay alive and for you to not stub your toe. And you too are probably also "humanity" to some extent, though probably not as strongly as I am. Not that it actually matters beyond simply describing what happens)
I see groups of parents looking out for their kids and feel good. I see groups of homeless people being hurt and feel bad. You go, "I'm defending the lives and non-drugginess of the kids of my community. That makes me a good person". Does it? You are making a decision to help the people you feel closest to at the expense of the people you feel further away from. On one hand, no such decision is better than any other decision. On the other hand, people are being hurt at all.
> My view is that you cannot sacrifice other peoples' lives and belongings
..."Sacrifice" them? They are already marked for demolition but the local powers work with the speed of a glacier. You are starting on the entirely wrong premise, I am not surprised that you drew very wrong conclusions.
> Yeah it is. I care about people about as much as it is possible to care about people, because I can't truly separate myself from anyone.
You mistake me for somebody willing to discuss hugely unrealistically optimistic philosophy for 13-year olds. But I'll entertain you for a few minutes.
I have a lot of sympathy for people in difficult conditions. I was this close to being homeless 3 times in my life due to bad choices borne out of a toxic family and zero opportunities in life.
Yet I never mugged anyone. Never did one thing illegal. Had opportunities, mind you.
I am not special. I am not a unicorn, not a hero, fairly normal guy with maybe a little more brain that allowed him to do programming. Maybe. Or could be entirely average and be just deluding myself. Ego gets us all.
If I can avoid mugging people, everyone can.
I have sympathy for you until you draw a knife and command me to give you my wallet. There the sympathy stops. Unconditionally.
The rest is really your own philosophical diatribe. As said to another sibling comment -- sorry that you have no people to discuss this stuff with but I have moved past it maximum at 22 years old (and I am ashamed of myself because I believe I did it very late even; I'll again say this is stuff for teenagers to figure out).
So no, I am not everyone else and not everyone else is me. I wanted that. Wanted it with all my heart. I am so sick of all of us only looking after each other and -- in the very very best-case scenarios, looking out for a local community -- but it simply never happened. Got back-stabbed hundreds of times, still do to this day every time I "expose my belly", so to speak, without failure. Received true kindness maximum 5 times in my life, one of which was my wife treating me the way she did on our first date, another one was a true friend now passed away, the other 3 were actual work opportunities that I botched due to being bitter and physically exhausted (technically my fault).
That was it. And I am in my 40s. Five times receiving kindness in a lifetime.
Collectivism is a fantasy. And historically proven to not work (i.e. communism, the Japanese society, and others). And now I know you'll latch to those words in the parentheses and ignore everything else. Surprise me by not doing it. :)
So, one diatribe to counter yours. But IMO that topic(s) will lead us nowhere. I smell deep and incompatible clash of values. You live a life that allows you to be an idealist. I don't.
I'm not actually an idealist. I think all humans are more trouble than they are worth, but that isn't actually a good reason to hurt them.
Doing physical violence does not make someone any more of a problem than they already were just by being alive. Is lying to get someone fired any better than beating them up and stealing their car? Of course not. Violence is substrate-independent. If something matters, humans will both use it to hurt others and hurt others to keep them from using it.
Yes, humans are collective. The tricky part is that they are only as collective as they need to be. Humans adaptively adjust how evil they are to take as much as they can without being retaliated against or burning everything down. Mostly. All the hardwired instincts are buggy and outdated, so they often vastly misjudge the situation.
People do in fact do good, mostly when their surroundings are too broken to survive being evil. But quite a lot of people mostly do good most of the time, because evil is so good at destruction that you need an awful lot of good to even come close to counteracting it.
I mostly think of myself as a good person, but I know that unless the local community is really good at keeping people from hurting others, doing good deeds mainly just supports other people doing bad stuff. It is theoretically possible to go an entire life without hurting others or having your works twisted to hurt others, but your descendents will have the same statistical chances of being evil as everyone elses'. (Plus, minds nudge people to cheat and do bad things whenever they can still think of themselves as good. I am not immune to that. I cannot rewrite my mind to remove the rootkits installed by evolution)
> ..."Sacrifice" them? They are already marked for demolition but the local powers work with the speed of a glacier. You are starting on the entirely wrong premise, I am not surprised that you drew very wrong conclusions.
If people have tents filled with whatever they can get their hands on to help them survive, having the police force everyone away so they can destroy everyone's stuff does in fact count as sacrificing their belongings. You are still only focusing on the ways homeless people slight you, and not on the way homeless people are hurt. "How dare they use buildings we aren't using and haven't cared enough to destroy! Something must be done immediately!". But you just ignore police destroying tents and sleeping bags right before winter, like that isn't going to be directly responsible for a lot of people's deaths.
I understand that in this terrible world everyone is drowning, but that isn't an excuse to pull down other people again and again.
Though the sacrifice part is more for things like civil asset forfeiture. If you let the police seize large amounts of cash from people, you shouldn't let the police keep it. In fact, seizing property should decrease the police budget by a small amount, so they only do it when they think it is actually important. If you claim that hurting another person is super important for society to do, you should willingly hurt yourself to show you are selfless in your intentions.
> I have sympathy for you until you draw a knife and command me to give you my wallet. There the sympathy stops. Unconditionally.
I have slightly more sympathy for people who use physical violence than people who hurt in other ways. Or at least I think people overreact to it because it's pretty much the easiest form of evil to detect. If a doctor systematically doesn't actually attempt to diagnose problems reported by women and just tells them to lose weight, they can easily do as much damage as a cannibal serial killer, and be as deserving of death, but it's way harder to tell they are doing it. (And if an organization were to be created to investigate doctors for this, it would either be irrelevant or twisted into a weapon at the expense of its purpose. Nothing that matters can be good)
So do I like everyone? Do I want everyone to die, including me? Am I an optimist? Am I a pessimist? It changes from moment to moment.
So, since you no longer come across as a brainless optimist, let's continue.
> I understand that in this terrible world everyone is drowning, but that isn't an excuse to pull down other people again and again.
Absolutely not what I was talking about. My point from which we started was this: if you use those seemingly-innocent structures as a base from which to mount assaults on hard-working people, the gloves must come off. (And I have witnessed this, a number of times.) You are owed no grace from that point and on.
That was it. Nothing else. Everything else you kind of inferred and started going on side quests. Which I found a little sad because again, maybe you have nobody to talk with about those things. But I am the wrong person for that discussion.
I am not here to discuss the most minute of nuances on how much kindness must we give to less privileged people.
My view is fairly straightforward: I pay taxes, I expect that the-powers-above-me must take care of the people less lucky than me and the actual criminals (two separate groups). I owe society nothing more than my time (my only true limited currency so I am already giving it way too damn much!), my health and part of my resources. I give quite enough already. Those who are paid to figure society out -- well, frakkin figure it out already, what are we paying you for?
That's all. I have nothing else to say on this topic and I'll ask you to not raise it further. I am seriously not interested in any other aspects of it.
> I think all humans are more trouble than they are worth, but that isn't actually a good reason to hurt them.
First part: GOOD! 99.99% of all humans deserve nothing more than indifference in the best case scenario. Second part: I am not hurting anyone. I only wish to be left alone. And even that was too much for way too many pieces of crap out there. Hope that clears it up.
> I have slightly more sympathy for people who use physical violence than people who hurt in other ways. Or at least I think people overreact to it because it's pretty much the easiest form of evil to detect.
Again, stuff for 13-year olds, dude. Of course physical violence is the easiest to react to. Of course our instincts are EXTREMELY outdated and inadequate and of course that is the reason for so much evil going on out there?
You want a medal for what I and a company of semi-drunk teenagers figured out one clear night gazing the stars 30 years ago, when most of us didn't even turn 15 y/o yet? :P
All of this is well-known and understood by many IMO.
Nowadays indeed the non-physical violence is more, by several orders of magnitude sadly, and that's partially my original point: normal hard-working people are pressed from all directions and some of us will not tolerate some homeless cretin thinking he'll get away with my phone. Nope. No chance, no but-s, no if-s, no kiddie philosophy about some imagined kindness. Nuh-uh. I'll die with my wallet in my pocket if I have to and I've proven it (I chased away guys who thought me and my wife were easy targets before).
But physical violence is indeed the easy mode, I'll agree on that.
We can't fight back against so much: inflation that is being shoved down our throats because it's the eternal band-aid and the rulers are too lazy and stupid to formulate something better, the new era of us needing new labor protections because as it is currently capitalism is so rampant and unregulated that we absolutely need another Henry Ford not yesterday but like 20 years now, and all the charming effects of globalism that I won't go deeper on (like the leeching migrants in the EU), that most people simply get severely depressed and just coast on life. And are leeched on.
You want a sad story? That is a sad story. Crush people's will so much that they completely disengage and become worker drones. That, my friend, is the actual tragedy, not the hobos whose biggest problem is where can they secure a few glasses of whiskey for the night.
So yeah, the non-physical violence is way too real in this age.
> This is a gross oversimplification. So after emailing, do you wait for the rust bindings to be fixed? Do you just get your changes merged regardless? Does the rust bindings maintainer have a say in what form your change takes? Can this hold back a release?
I'm pretty sure they are just asking for emailing. Just a short shift to getting changes in advance some of the time rather than none of the time. It didn't sound like they were asking to cross the divide from Partition Tolerance + Availability to Partition Tolerance + Consistency, merely shifting things a step in that direction (I think the CAP theorem applies everywhere).
Straightforward intelligence boosting genes are valuable enough that unless they are very recent, they should already have spread everywhere.
It's more likely that developing brains have a huge number of potential tradeoffs to make for what tasks they are good at and how much energy they use. Genetics and epigenetics are merely one of the tools a brain uses to decide what shape it takes, and aren't even close to the whole picture.
You could say the same about genes in tons of other areas, and you'd be completely wrong. That's now how evolution works. "Beneficial" genes don't just get to spread everywhere quickly, otherwise parapatric speciation could never occur. Read the wikipedia article for Parapatric Speciation. What does "incomplete geographical barriers" remind you of?
The author of the article has had their understanding of systems eat their understanding of humans. Every time they make a realization about people, it immediately gets turned to getting more understanding and control over the world. Which doesn't leave any room to grow for their understanding of humans.
This makes it really hard for them to write an article for non-technical people. To do so, they would have to connect the human side of things to the systems theory side of things. Which they can't do, because they don't understand the human side of things.
They aren't using bad-faith arguments to convince you that they are correct. They simply have no idea how to talk to you. They are in fact trying to be helpful, by presenting what they think is really useful information to understand and control the world with. Their help is useless to you, but they are trying.
If you only make mistakes very rarely and in places that don't cause cascading analysis mistakes, you can recover. But if you keep making mistakes all over the place and vastly misjudge the structure of the program over and over, the entire output is garbage.
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