Genuine question, does Rust know if `expensive_to_compute()` has side effects? There are no params, so could it be compiled out if the return value is ignored? Ex: `expensive_to_compute()` What about: `(void) expensive_to_compute()`?
No, in general Rust doesn't (and can't) know whether an arbitrary function has side effects. The compiler does arguably have a leg up since Rust code is typically all built from source, but there's still things like FFI that act as visibility barriers for the compiler.
No, Rust is the same as C++ in terms of tracking side effects. It doesn't matter that there are no parameters. It could manipulate globals or call other functions that have side effects (e.g. printing).
I will never stop hating on the orphan rule, a perfect summary of what’s behind a lot of rust decisions. Purism and perfectionism at the cost of making a useful language, no better way to torpedo your ecosystem and make adding dependencies really annoying for no reason. Like not even a —dangerously-disable-the-orphan-rule, just no concessions here.
I think there are legitimate criticisms of Rust that fall in this category, but the orphan rule ain’t it.
In most other languages, it is simply not possible to “add” an interface to a class you don’t own. Rust let’s you do that if you own either the type or or the interface. That’s strictly more permissive than the competition.
The reasons those other languages have for not letting you add your interface to foreign types, or extend them with new members, are exactly the same reasons that Rust has the orphan rule.
> the compiler has no sane answer once both impls are in the graph
but the user could provide an answer.
Julia allows something called "piracy" which is spiritually similar to the orphan rule. and while it is strongly discouraged, the compiler allows it. and when "ambiguities" arise (here called "coherence") it becomes a social problem, not technical, to resolve. and usually package authors are pretty willing to cooperate to resolve it!
My friends and I were talking about the recent supply chain attack which harmlessly installed OpenClaw. We came to the conclusion that this was a warning (from a human) that an agent could easily do the same. Given how soft security is in general, AI "escaping containment" feels inevitable. (The strong form of that hypothesis where it subjugates or eliminates us isn't inevitable, I honestly have no idea, just the weak form where we fail to erect boundaries it cannot bypass. We've basically already failed.)
Prophesied, all things claw are highly dangerous. Sometimes I wake, this video from the late 90s in my dreams, and wonder if the conjoined magnet + claw, is a time traveler reference to just wipe openclaw before we all die.
What ai? LLMs are language models, operating on words, with zero understanding. Or is there a new development which should make me consider anthropomorphizing them?
They don't have understanding but if you follow the research literature they obviously have a tendency to produce a token stream, the result of which humans could fairly call "entity with nefarious agency".
Why? Nobody knows.
My bet is that they are just larping all the hostile AI:s in popular culture because that's part of the context they were trained in.
The way my thinking has evolved is that "AGI" isn't actually necessary for an agent (NB: agents, specifically ones with state, not LLMs by themselves - "AI" was vague and I should've been clearer) to be enough like a person to be interesting and/or problematic. To quote myself [1]:
> [OpenClaw agents are like] an actor who doesn't know they're in a play. How much does it matter that they aren't really Hamlet?
Does the agent understand the words it's predicting? Does the actor know they're in a play? I don't know but I'm more concerned with how the actor would respond to finding someone eavesdropping behind a curtain.
> Or is there a new development which should make me consider anthropomorphizing them?
The development that caused me to be more concerned about their personhood or pseudopersonhood was the MJ Rathbun affair. I'm not saying that "AGI" or "superintelligence" was achieved, I'm saying that's actually the wrong question and the right questions are around their capabilities, their behaviors, and how they evolve over time unattended or minimally attended. And I'm not saying I understand those questions, I thought I did but I was wrong. I frankly am confused and don't really know what's going on or how to respond to it.
Whether it has "real understanding" is a question for philosophy majors. As long as it (mechanically, without "real understanding") still can perform actions to escape containment, and do malicious stuff, that's enough.
LLMs are machines trained to respond and to appear to think (whether that's 'real thinking' or text-statistics fake-thinking') like humans. The foolish thing to do would be to NOT anthropomorphize them.
Rust is the wrong language for effects ironically because of its strict typing. They would probably decide that all effects have to be specified on every function or that any change in capabilities is a breaking change. Which is safest, but horrible for dev ex. Whereas Go most people would just be like “yeah, Hyrum’s law, sorry I broke your weird effect consumer, I don’t really care.”
This is really good! I like how it reads like a blog post, it feels like I'm learning a skill on how to write good skills. Maybe that's another heuristic, a skill should read like an interesting blog post, highlighting non-obvious information.
I don’t really get the bus analogy. It seems like it massively increases latency but as soon as you’re “on the bus” throughput is normal? When in reality (if I understand correctly) opus-fast is just giving you a bigger portion of the batch so increasing throughput with little affect on latency? (I’m assuming anthropic gets enough volume that these batches fill up pretty much instantly)
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