mruwnik

Karma: 598

mruwnik 12 Sep 2025 12:29 UTC
7 points
6
in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Trying the Obvious Thing
Aren’t both of these the obvious things? In that the obvious thing is what comes to mind that has a chance of working?
I would say “any direct solution to the problem”. Anything that fits the first line of the Mental Gymnastics meme. (...) I am explicitly asking not for much here, just a token amount of effort.
The main thing is to show proof of work. Any work that isn’t just busy work. You’re showing you’re serious about the problem, rather than just wanting to complain about it.
So if you e.g. complain that you’re fat and can’t seem to get your weight down, then the obvious things would be e.g. going to the gym a couple of times a week for a month or two, or actually properly dieting. If after this you still can’t get your weight down, then you’ve demonstrated that you’ve actually tried to solve your problem.
Another version of this point is this chart for tech support.
There are cases where someone might not be able to come up with any obvious approaches. These are rare. Most people just don’t actually think about problems they want to solve.

mruwnik 11 Sep 2025 12:34 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: AllAmericanBreakfast’s Shortform
My understanding is that it’s not so much very high negative stakes (usually, at least), it’s more a continuous tax. You have to always be playing PR games and be aware that there is a subset of readers that will treat your lack of involvement as surrender and implicitly granting a point. Their numbers will depend on the place and topic, of course, as e.g. I’d expect a lot more of this on twitter than on a random knitting forum. There’s also the additional problem that they tend to be quite vocal.
You can ignore all of this and just be weird, but that has it’s own costs, which aren’t always visible. Cultivating an appropriate image only works if you have a reputation and/or are so obviously strange that you won’t be judged by the usual standards—if you seem “normal”, you get judged by “normal” standards, which depending on whatever someone thinks is normal, can include “if you don’t push back, you’ve lost the interaction”.
edit:
I also think Duncan is doing a different version of this

mruwnik 10 Sep 2025 9:12 UTC
3 points
1
on: How I tell human and AI flash fiction apart
I also got a perfect score, and in general agree with your assessment, but I think it’s more a matter of good vs bad writing in general. I’ve read my fair share of bad fiction (though mainly published—I’m guessing fanfics would be more egregious) and the AI written ones read like a hack author. It reads like someone who has read good fiction and is trying to mimic the style, not understanding the substance.
It’s sad to see how badly the voting went (in the sense that the voters got things wrong). It also suggests that anyone who wants to be an author has to become popular 10 years ago to have a chance. I hope this can be viewed as “models get better, so will soon beat good authors” rather than “models don’t have to get any better, as most readers can’t tell good from bad anyway”.
Specific story notes:
Story 5 was the hardest for me to guess. It’s bad, but just good enough to be written by a good author on a bad day. It has overly flowery prose and metaphors, but it’s not as obvious and direct as the other ones. It leaves stuff to your imagination.
Story 3 was the easiest. It’s just bad. In addition to what you noted, there’s also the final `“Don’t pray. Fight.”`. That’s much too much. It looks like a 13 year old trying to make a story.
I find it fascinating that story 1 was the most voted as AI. Initially I also thought it was, but the final inversion is wonderful. That’s good writing. So much that I’m now tempted to read her other stuff. It’s overly medievalish, what with “granddam”, “brash”, “lamentable” etc., which are often signs of bad writing. But the way she turns the whole premise on its head is really good.

mruwnik 9 Sep 2025 20:33 UTC
10 points
1
on: Immigration to Poland
Yet, despite there being some sour spots, this immigration wave has been absorbed surprisingly well and has enjoyed broad public support.
The two situations are very different.
Ukrainians have been cheap labour in Poland for a decade or so. They look pretty much the same, speak a similar language (Polish and Ukrainian are sort of mutually understandable), have sort of similar culture (at least if you squint a bit), and above all, are oppressed by Russia. Poland remembers Russian oppression, so it’s a lot easier to sympathise. Ukrainians are viewed as hard workers who are willing to do the jobs that no one else wants (basically the role of Poles in other countries). And above all they cross the border legally. They might not always legalise their stay properly, but who hasn’t skirted the law here or there?
The immigrants being pushed across by Lukashenko look different (when a black person started working in a shop in a neighboring town, people would go there specially to see him), don’t speak a common language (they often don’t even speak English), aren’t coming to do proper work (construction and cleaning), aren’t crossing legally, and don’t even really want to live in Poland (they want to get to Germany).
Personally I support protecting the Belarus border (though I’d like it to be done in a way that doesn’t further disrupt the already very fragile populations of bison and lynx) for game theoretic reasons, and support accepting Ukrainians for humanitarian reasons, but from talking to people I often get the impression that for them it boils down to cultural reasons.

mruwnik 9 Sep 2025 20:06 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Immigration to Poland
Thousands is not a trickle. It’s harder to get over, but it’s just a wall—a ladder is not hard to make and they can keep trying. There are very few asylum applications, because the Belarusian immigrants don’t want to stay in Poland, especially as they know they’re not welcome. They want to go to Germany. Those who do apply, tend to be Ukrainians or Belarusians (at least this article claims that, and I trust that org to get the numbers right)

mruwnik 9 Sep 2025 19:50 UTC

64 points

in reply to: Jan Betley’s comment on: Immigration to Poland

I have personally met those who manage to get over the wall. Each year I go to Białowieża for a week or so of bird counting, which gives me a pass into the strict reservation (i.e. no one other than scientists are allowed in). GPT-5 estimates that 60-80% of crossing attempts are in that border strip of around 60km—mainly because this is dense forest and marshland.

The first year we’d meet wet, tired, hungry and cold groups of 2-3 people every couple of days. These were very scared and confused people who were promised good jobs in Europe, but got bused to the border, documents confiscated and pointed in the direction of Poland. Which in this case was 100 km^2 of virgin forest (the last lowland one in Europe). There were people who would try to find them and smuggle them over to Germany (where they wanted to go anyway), but at the same time you had the border guards running around, and also local toughs who wanted to show those nasty foreigners where their place was. To drive in to Białowieża (the village next to the national park) you needed to have a special pass, and the police would stop everyone driving in or out and check their cars. We’d give whatever food we had to these people, as you could see they needed it.

The next years there were soldiers patrolling the forest and the immigrant groups were better organised. They would be wearing more appropriate clothes (waterproof stuff, mainly) - the previous groups didn’t know what they were getting in to, but these at least came semi prepared. These we wouldn’t give food to, just wave at them and point the way to the edge of the forest.

This year most of the soldiers are gone, as the wall is supposed to stop the immigrants. And we didn’t meet immigrants that often. But when we would, it was groups of 10-20 people, well dressed, with a guide with a GPS (or at least a proper compass) showing them which way to go, along well trampled paths.

When I chatted with the soldiers, they’d complain that they’d catch a group, send them back over the border, just to have to catch them again a few days later. If someone is in a bad state, they’ll keep them in hospital for a bit, then bus them back to the border.

Even if a group gets across the fence, they have to cross something like 10km of real forest (not pine fields) in which it’s really easy to get lost, then once they are out, they need to either go hundreds of kilometers across hostile territory (to the German border) or find someone willing to smuggle them out (which requires coordination and trust). The fence itself is not that much of a barrier—it will slow them down for 10-20 minutes, but it’s not that hard to climb it (with a ladder and a blanket), and there have been multiple attempts to dig tunnels underneath (of which I know of).

It’s hard to know what the real numbers are. All sides try to keep things murky. The ~10 scientists I hang out with there would in aggregate see a group daily, and those are just those they’d see. Sometimes the park guards would tell us to be careful as they knew of a group in a given area. Most of these will be caught, but a lot will get through. GPT-5 gives me the following (note that these are attempts, most of which will be repeat offenders, and there are a lot fewer successes than attempts):

2021	39,697 attempts
2022	≈15,600 attempts
2023	26,000 attempts
2024	30,090 attempts
2025 YTD	≥20,200 (Aug 18) → ≈23,400 (Sep 8)

Most of these are on the border itself, where people trying to climb the fence are stopped. It’s still a lot. Few immigrants want to stay in Poland (why would they? :D) - they want to get to Germany. GPT-5 gives the following numbers from German police reports (I haven’t checked these), which is a lower bound on how many get through:

Year	Detected entries to Germany via “Belarus‑Route”	Notes / sources
2021 (May–Dec only)	11,228	First systematic reporting started 1 May 2021; special (provisional) Bundespolizei tally. (Bundestag DServer)
2022	8,760	Full year, PES. (Bundestag DServer)
2023	11,932	Full year, PES (peak year after 2021). (Bundestag DServer)
2024 (Jan–Jun)	3,117	Official H1 total, PES; monthly path Jan–Jun: 26, 25, 413, 865, 1,125, 663. (Bundestag DServer)
2024 (full‑year, best estimate)	≈5,000–6,000	Two anchors: (i) H1 official = 3,117; (ii) for 2024 Germany counted ~16,000 unauthorised entries at the Polish border, of which about one‑third were attributed to the Belarus route ⇒ ~5,300 (lower bound at that border; entries via Czechia add a bit). (Mediendienst Integration)

The fact that Germany has reinstated border checks for the last year also suggests that a lot are getting through, or at least that Germany believes that they do.

mruwnik 7 Sep 2025 10:59 UTC
9 points
1
in reply to: title22’s comment on: Chesterton’s Missing Fence
Ancient latin didn’t have “u” and “v”, just “v”. So this is a sort of “lets return to the good old times of the roman empire, which we’ll write in the same way as it would look on an old inscription”. They also only had uppercase letters, which is why it’s “RETVRN” rather than “retvrn”.

mruwnik 1 Sep 2025 10:19 UTC
3 points
0
on: Von Neumann’s Fallacy and You
Some of them mention his ability to remember the location on the page the words were
This actually is easier than remembering the actual contents. I used to spend a lot of time doing various Bible studies, where being able to quote a verse supporting whatever you wanted to say was the best way to win arguments. This of course led to people being able to quote obscure verses and precedents from less known places. It was quite common for someone to say something along the lines of “there’s something supporting this in <some book>, around <some chapter> on the lower left side of the page”

mruwnik 29 Aug 2025 11:18 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: bfinn’s comment on: Should you make stone tools?
Knitting is an interesting example, as it’s a relatively recent invention (less than 1000 years old). Previously to make fabric you needed some kind of weaving method, which requires some kind of structure to hold the fabric. With knitting, you can do it anywhere, and just need a stick or two. It’s an interesting technology in how important it was, in a very subdued way. Knitting uses more materiel, but you get a flexible and warm garment which you can produce while on the go (apparently Chinese caravan men would pluck out camel hair to continue knitting).
It’s also interesting in how quickly it was abandoned as soon as cheap fabric was available from other sources—knitting is what grandmothers do (this used to make a lot of sense) and so was low status. It’s only recently become a normal hobby.

mruwnik 28 Aug 2025 13:23 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: Gamblification
One off PoC website/app type things are something where LLMs shine. Or dashboards like “here’s a massive csv file with who knows what—make me a nice dashboard thingy I can use to play with the data” or “here’s an API—make me a quick n dirty website that allows me to play about with it”.

mruwnik 28 Aug 2025 13:21 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Aprillion’s comment on: Gamblification
One the one hand, I understand this approach (firing programmers that don’t use AI), but on the other hand, this is like firing someone for using emacs rather than PyCharm (or VSCode or whatever is the new hot). It’s sad that it looks like people are going back to being measured by lines of code.
I’d like to be able to just provide high level overviews of what I want done, then have an army of agents do it, but it doesn’t seem to be there yet (could be skill issue on my part, though).

mruwnik 28 Aug 2025 13:12 UTC
4 points
0
on: Gamblification
There are a lot of places where I find a lot of use from LLMs, but it’s usually grunt work that would take me a couple of hours but isn’t hard, like tests, or simple shuffling things around. It’s also quite good at “here’s a bunch of linting errors—fix them”, though of course you have to be constantly vigilant.
With real code, I’ll sometimes use it as a rubber duck or ask it to come up with some preliminary version of what I want, then refactor it mercilessly. With preexisting code I usually need to tell it what to do, or at least point at which files it should look at (this helps quite a lot). With anything complicated, it’s usually faster for me to just do it myself. Could just be a skill issue on my part, of course.
They are getting better. They’re still not good, but they’re often better than a random junior. My main issue is that they don’t grow. A rubbish intern will get a lot better, as long as they are capable of learning. I’m fine starting with someone on a very low level, as long as I won’t have to continuously point out the same mistakes. With an LLM this is frustrating because I have to keep pointing out things I said a couple of turns previously, or which are part of those cringe IMPORTANT prompt notes.
I still prefer to just ask an LLM to write me my CSS :P

mruwnik 28 Aug 2025 13:10 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Thane Ruthenis’s Shortform
I get the feeling that it can remove blockers. Your effectiveness (however you want to define that) at programming is like Liebig’s barrel, or maybe a better example would be a road with a bunch of big rocks and rubble on it—you have to keep removing things to proceed. The more experienced you are, the better at removing obstacles, or even better, avoiding them. LLMs are good at giving you more options for how to approach problems. Often their suggestion is not the best, but it’s better than nothing and will suffice to move on.
They do like making complex stuff, though… I wonder if that’s because there’s a lot more bad code that looks good than just good code?

mruwnik 28 Aug 2025 13:04 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: Thane Ruthenis’s Shortform
I did something similar a couple of months ago, asking it to make me a memory system (Opus 4 and o1-pro for design, mainly sonnet 4 for implementation). Initially it was massively overengineered, with a bunch of unneeded components. This was with Cursor, which changes things a bit—Claude Code tends to be much better at planning things first.
The results were very similar—handholding works, looking away results in big messes, revert rather than fix (unless you know how to fix it), and eventually I got something that does what I want, albeit more complex than I would have made by myself.

mruwnik 28 Aug 2025 12:40 UTC
9 points
3
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Gamblification
No, no—you misunderstand agile! See, in our company, we have AIgile! It’s a slightly modified version of agile which we find to be even better! The scrum master is GTP-4o, which is known to be wonderful at encouraging and building team spirit.
I have yet to have worked in a company that actually implemented agile, rather than saying they use agile, but then inventing their own complicated system involving lots of documentation and meetings.

mruwnik 24 Aug 2025 11:44 UTC
1 point
0
on: Why Latter-day Saints Have Strong Communities
If this feels like you would be unwilling to do some of the tasks or that the tasks are beneath you, then I claim that this attitude is a barrier to forming a close community. Being willing to do the things that other people are doing builds camaraderie, and having done lots of the particular tasks needed to support a community gives a real sense of oneness with the community.
This is very important. Though the details matter. Telling someone that they now are responsible for cleaning the toilets is a lot different from asking someone to help you clean those toilets or to switch jobs with you. This seems to be well addressed by what you say about how callings get passed around, as you can expect to have both high and low status jobs, which on average should result in relatively equal status between members?

mruwnik 24 Aug 2025 11:28 UTC
4 points
0
on: Why Latter-day Saints Have Strong Communities
Apparently, in their community, if you travel with a letter of recommendation from your bishop, people will let you stay in their house instead of staying at a hotel.
This is something I used to experience in Brethren communities as a child. Both staying with random people when going somewhere, but also having random people stay over for a couple of nights, or come for a meal. The letter of recommendation was also something you’d always get before going somewhere.

mruwnik 22 Aug 2025 9:51 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: SatvikBeri’s comment on: Debugging for Mid Coders
This is a large part of why functional programming is so nice—you try to always have pure functions (which just transform stuff) and move anything that is nondeterministic to the very edges of your program. State is the source of all evils, so the less you need to worry about things changing under you, the easier it is to reason about a program.

mruwnik 22 Aug 2025 9:45 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Debugging for Mid Coders
This is something that came naturally to me, so much that in the beginning I was surprised at people saying that they can’t remember code they wrote previously.
One actionable thing here would probably be “remember abstractions/patterns” rather than “remember code”. Sort of like how grandmasters remember generic patterns of chess pieces rather than where each one is (I could be very mistaken here). The first level of this is remembering which folders do what, then which file, then which functions etc. Then you don’t need to remember what the exact code does, as you can treat it as abstract units.
This is the flip side of what @RobertM was saying about code quality—this makes remembering where things are massively simpler, as you can expect things to conform to the same approach everywhere. Reading (and understanding) a badly written piece of code is much harder than doing the same with a well written piece of code, because you have to keep much more working parts in your active memory. This is also part of where the heuristics to keep code snippets short and use lots of functions comes from.

mruwnik 21 Aug 2025 14:30 UTC
1 point
0
on: Debugging for Mid Coders
Expand your working memory somehow. Take notes about the scope of the problem as you understand it.
This seems important. I dunno how good of a debugger I am, but I have a much better memory of where things are in a codebase than the average person. i.e. in large codebases, assuming I’ve touched the affected place, I can usually recall exactly which file contains a given piece of code that is of interest. This translates to better and more granular models of what is happening and where it makes sense to look for things. There have been many cases where someone mentions a bug/error and I have a fix 2 minutes later, because I can ~recall the flows where that bug may appear.