In Norwegian we operate with “førstkommende” which translates more or less directly to “first-coming”. It’s extremely practical when planning dates, because you can always just say “Not the first-coming Thursday, but next Thursday”, or “On the first-coming Thursday”, and it’s completely unambiguous that you mean the first Thursday we encounter from the moment of speaking.

Oh, definitely. But that’s also where the “upfront” part could have saved them: If they had contacted you and been direct about “hey, I’m selling utilities now, would you be interested in switching?”, then followed up with “on another note, it’s been a while, wanna grab dinner and catch up a bit?” That would have been a completely different story.

I would actually prefer that they’re upfront about contacting me because they need a favour, and then using that as an opening to catch up. If they first spend 30 min catching up before jumping to “btw, could you help me out with this” it gives the feeling that they only did the catching up to get me to help them. When it’s the other way around, it feels like they genuinely want to catch up a bit, and used the favour as an excuse/opportunity to contact me to catch up. A personal favourite is if someone wants help with something in the house and asks if I want to come over to help them out and then we can get some beers and a pizza afterwards. Having something to do together can make it a lot easier to pick up the conversation with someone you haven’t met for a long time.

It’s completely fair to ask a favour of an old friend, I’ve both asked and been asked of favours from people I haven’t spoken to in years. However, I think you should be upfront about it, and not act like you’re trying to get in touch for other reasons. Something like “Hey, it’s been a while, but I just came across XYZ and wondered if you could give me a hand?” is completely fine IMO.

Or, as is commonly done elsewhere, get their plates and a photo, and drop by their house later (unless they’re an active threat to public safety of course).

This is literally the SOP in a lot of other countries: You don’t chase someone in a vehicle unless you absolutely have to. You rather just identify them and apprehend them at a later point.

but why countries?

For the same reason as personal property, just on a larger scale. You don’t want some rando to come and set up camp in your kitchen, so we draw lines on a map and say “this is your spot, you make the rules in your spot”. Similarly, we collectively don’t want some other group of randos to show up and tell us what clothes we’re allowed to wear, or that drunk-driving is suddenly allowed. So we draw lines on a map and say “this is our spot, where we make the rules”.

Of course, ideally, the whole world would agree on a reasonable set of laws and mode of administration, and countries wouldn’t be needed anymore. However, we’re pretty far off from that being possible. To put it on point: If we had no countries today, would you prefer the russian, Chinese, German or other set of laws and administration? How would you decide which to apply globally?

See, this is what I mean. I never said that. I never said anything close to that. At this stage you’re just making up opinions you want me to have so that you have something to attack.

It’s obvious that you’ve already decided that you “know” what the person you’re arguing with means and think, and then you’re attacking that instead of recognising that you’ve misunderstood them.

It’s not about the pictures. I honestly think this is just an excuse to get rid of journalists, and a method for hammering home the point that “journalists bad. news fake.” I’m not even sure he’s actually seen the pictures I question.

With that said, I wouldn’t put it past him to actually be so vain that it is really about the pictures. However I think it’s more likely that he would have done something like this anyway, and just picked an excuse.

Viking/Danish

Norse. And it’s more similar to modern Icelandic than anything else, perhaps most closely followed by (distant second place) Norwegian.

You can fine-grain nr. 2 even more: You can give access to e.g. modify files only in a certain sub-tree, or run only specific commands with only specific options.

A restrictive yet quite safe approach is to only permit e.g. git add, git commit, and only allow changes to files under the VC. That effectively prevents any irreversible damage, without requiring you to manually approve all the time.

You’re absolutely right. I mostly run a pretty simple local model though, so it’s not like it’s very expensive either.

Saying that it can serve the same purpose does not mean that I mean the two are equivalent in every aspect.

Just based on how you’ve responded so far it seems like you’re wilfully misinterpreting how I actually use an LLM for this purpose, especially with responses referring to LLMs causing people to commit suicide and offloading decision making or the thought process itself to an LLM.

It really seems like you’re wilfully misinterpreting what I’m writing.

That is correct. However, an LLM and a rubber duck have in common that they are inanimate objects that I can use as targets when formulating my thoughts and ideas. The LLM can also respond to things like “what part of that was unclear”, to help keep my thoughts flowing. NOTE: The point of asking an LLM “what part of that was unclear” is NOT that it has a qualified answer, but rather that it’s a completely unqualified prompt to explain a part of the process more thoroughly.

This is a very well established process: Whether you use an actual rubber duck, your dog, writing a blog post / personal memo (I do the last quite often) or explaining your problem to a friend that’s not at all in the field. The point is to have some kind of process that helps you keep your thoughts flowing and touching in on topics you might not think are crucial, thus helping you find a solution. The toddler that answers every explanation with “why?” can be ideal for this, and an LLM can emulate it quite well in a workplace environment.

Yes, absolutely, but there’s a huge span from completely removing the box to having “just” a chatbot.

For example, at my company, we’ve set up an agent that can work with certain design-files that engineers typically work with through a rather complex GUI. We’ve built a bunch of endpoints that ensures the agent can only make valid changes to the files, and that it can never delete or modify anything without approval. This saves people a bunch of time, because they can make the agent do “batch jobs” that take maybe 10 min in about 10 s. It’s not possible for this agent to mess up our database or anything like that, because all interactions it has with anything are through endpoints where we verify that files, access permissions, change logs, etc. are valid.

I think you’ve misunderstood the purpose of a rubber duck: The point is that by formulating your problems and ideas, either out loud or in writing, you can better activate your own problem solving skills. This is a very well established method for reflecting on and solving problems when you’re stuck, it’s a concept far older than chatbots, because the point isn’t the response you get, but the process of formulating your own thoughts in the first place.

Nah, you can run it in a box and limit its ability to interact with anything outside the box to certain white-listed endpoints. Depending on what you want to achieve, that can be more than safe enough.

Meh, they work well enough if you treat them as a rubber duck that responds. I’ve had an actual rubber duck on my desk for some years, but I’ve found LLM’s taking over its role lately.

I don’t use them to actually generate code. I use them as a place where I can write down my thoughts. When the LLM responds, it has likely “misunderstood” some aspect of my idea, and by reformulating myself and explaining how it works I can help myself think through what I’m doing. Previously I would argue with the rubber duck, but I have to admit that the LLM is actually slightly better for the same purpose.

I mean, there’s a good reason the first rules of firearm safety are to always treat a weapon as loaded, and to never direct the weapon at something you aren’t prepared to destroy. The key point being that you never know when some freak accident can happen with a loose pin, bad ammo, a broken spring, or just a person tripping and shaking the gun a bit too hard.

A gun should never go off by itself. You still treat it as if it can, because in the real world freak accidents happen.