The vast majority of the time it’s help is in the form of quickly pulling the specific line of info I need from thousands of pages of (insert tool here)'s documentation
It’s mostly saving me time on quickly locating the specific documentation I need, so I can jump straight to it and then read the surrounding info, or double check if it’s had changes lately, etc.
Vector database fuzzy searching goes brrrrrrr
Just one example, we have many population groups that live in areas where groundwater is used for drinking that also live near a firefighting training base/station that has released huge amounts of PFOAs into the aquifers
Crazy as it sounds but living next to a firefighting training station still biases you towards certain living conditions
Scientists are perfectly fine with using lab, mouse, and emprical cross-sectional studies - that’s all valid scientific evidence.
Yeah obviously, but that’s still evidence, not proof, I used the word proce there intentionally.
I’m not suggesting they actually do it, I’m calling out people that take a bunch of very good evidence and then treat it like it’s proof. That’s all
And I’ve been using the words proof/prove this whole time.
There’s lots of evidence, but there’s not enough yet to do more than draw an interesting corollation.
But there’s definitely no proof and click bait videos that word it as such are trash
Thats what I am addressing, numties taking this evidence and running off with it to spread disinformation framing it as proof via their choice of words.
Jesus. Fucking. Christ. People need to learn to read.
I’m not sitting here saying PFAS dont cause issues
I’m sitting here calling out clickbait youtubers who frame evidence as proof via poor wording to incite people
God fucking damnit I hate how much people on the internet are so focused on bring right they won’t even read what you write properly just so they can find things to pick a fight over. Fuck off lol
No.
There’s a huge difference between rejecting data and just pointing out that nearly every single study is too small and underfunded and nearly every one of them is preliminary.
There’s a reason all these papers are careful to say stuff like “more research is needed”
The goal of science is to try and prove the negative
You never actually can sufficiently prove your goal, but you can disprove other possibilities to narrow alternative reasons down until you get as close as possible to your outcome being the only remaining reason left.
This has not been achieved with PFAS studies yet simply due to a lack of time and quantity. Most of these studies are either too small, or too specific to do anything more than conclude “well, this definitely is interesting and should be investigated more”
Because proving it actually for sure does something is incredibly challenging, because there’s thousands of other variables at play, and many of the studied symptoms don’t display massive magnitudes in change.
Not enough to be very certain that they aren’t being caused by some other factor that pairs up with PFAS exposure.
For example, PFAS exposure also will correlate with other possible exposures to pollutants simultaneously for the same reason you got exposed to PFAS.
Air pollution levels also correlate, once again, same reason.
It’s devilishly challenging when the people with above average PFAS exposure also are getting exposed to other pollutants to then narrow down to just PFAS being the cause. It could be the wrong chemical causing issues… or ot could be 100% the cause.
It’s not like Asbestos where we could find villages with clean drinking water and air quality with zero other concerns that had huge issues due to being downwind of a mine.
If they managed to find a large group of people downstream of a plant that only dumped PFAS in the water and not other pollutants too, you’d be in business.
But that isn’t a thing, they dump all manner of shit in there with the PFAS, so can you see how that fucks up the numbers?
You clearly didn’t read it, it’s just a giant metastudy gathering up tonnes of research but it’s basically just a shotgun paper covering all the “maybes” that have been highlighted
It cites dozens and dozens of papers, most of which highlight “maybe possibly potentially PFAS levels corrolate with (insert health effect here)”
However it also glosses over tonnes of other studies that havent found links to be statistically significant.
I want you to read this XKCD comic and try and understand how it relates to the discussion
I think trying to label on demand streaming as a public broadcaster is dumb.
You can’t control what people prefer to watch.
Broadcasters had limitations cuz you can only broadcast 1 thing at a time on a channel
You couldn’t play more than 1 TV show on the same channel, obviously.
But Netflix can serve 1000 different TV shows to 1000 different households simultaneously.
Then you are deeply out of touch with communities. I rarely encounter anyone who hasn’t used LLMs in their coding workflows in some way at all.
it states that the indirect genotoxic (and thus carcinogenic) potential of PFOA cannot be dismissed
Its important to understand that “cannot be dismissed” is not the same as “we think it does do this”
It’s a double negative, its “we dont not think it causes it”, but waaaaay more study is needed.
Serum Concentrations of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances and Risk of Renal Cell Carcinoma Actually is a new one for me, I havent seen this one, and it does look much more compelling than the other smaller studies, this one is more concerning than the others.
The Panel determined in 2012 there was a ‘probable link’ (i.e., more probable than not based on the weight of the available scientific evidence)
Fourth link is a lot of nothing, why did you bother linking it? It just discusses other studies but doesnt add anything new of substance.
Fifth link is pretty sketchy, theres many other variables that also associate, and they didnt even find a link between specifically PFOS anyways
while no significant association was observed for PFOS (OR = 1.14; 95% CI 0.98-1.34; P = 0.09)
Its important to note that every single one of these studies is empirical post exposure which means many other associated variables can also contribute.
People with low PFAS vs high PFAS exposure almost undoubtedly are also exposed to many other things… like pollution in general
It’s borderline impossible to actually separate out PFAS levels from these other entangled variables, people who are heavily exposed to 1 type of pollution will also be exposed to many others, and theres a heavy association between living situation and PFAS exposure.
That is why its so damn hard to get any conclusive proof on this, the only way to truly figure it out would be to purposefully administer PFAS to people intentionally in a controlled environment, to try and separate out variables.
The relationships that do show up are all very tenuous, and could easily be also explained by the dozens of other variables, so thats why you keep seeing the wording of “may contribute” or “requires further study” or “associated with”
No, there’s a very minor causational link that has been classified as “needs further study”
Its extremely far away from “concrete evidence”, that’s what Im talking about when saying this video was hypebole.
Many places are classifying it as potentially hazardous to be safe, because:
I also participate in nearly a dozen different coding oriented discord channels over numerous frameworks/languages
Across countless individuals ranging from total newbs to professionals, basically everyone at least to some degree uses LLMs in some manner for coding, and it’s an openly discussed and common topic.
You are deeply out of touch with what programmers are actually doing if you seriously think folks who still havent worked an LLM into their process somehow arent the minority.
No, I watched it, and the end result is a lot of hyperbole.
we do care that it’s unintelligent
Lol, wait, is that why you were contending the “AI” title?
lmao
… No? I consider myself pretty well read.
If you have any conclusive peer reviewed papers that prove PFAS are poisonous if ingested at such microscopic scales, please by all means… link them
I have been keeping an eye on the progression of study on PFAS for nearly 6 years now since they started finding it all over the world. Im not gonna claim it isnt poisonous, but I certainly am gonna say despite all the studying, no actual issues have been found with them yet that have been repeatable in peer reviewed studies.
Everything seems to still be quite a bit inconclusive so far. Albeit I also chalk a lot of that up to a pretty heavy amount of muzzling on actually researching the impact of PFAS. If you have anything that proves otherwise though, by all means share it with the rest of the class.
Now, if you wanna talk about inhaling vapors from burnt PFAS, now we are talking about potential poisons that can really fuck you up.
But the quantity of PFAS in things like drinking water seems to be so incredibly low and some studies have shown that boiling water actually helps remove many different types of microplastics, including PFAS, due to interesting effects of sodium deposits in the water forming that bind to them sorta Katamari Damacy style.
But other than that, no, I havent seen anything else, just a loooot of “inconclusive, needs further study” stuff published time and time again.
I haven’t actually yet seen any conclusive proof that PFAS are poisonous to ingest, however
Sure, it’s present everywhere, and I wouldn’t be shocked if we found out it’s bad for us.
But it has to actually be a poison to call it poison.
Pollutant? For sure. Poison? No proof of that yet. Just very annoying but the very principle that makes it hard to scrub out of water (very non reactive and tiny) is also what makes it seem to, so far, show no negative side effects on stuff.
It’s there but kinda just, doing nothing as far as we can see… so far
We need more funding into studies on it.
If the only point you can make is picking apart that LLMs don’t “count” as AI, then sorry mate but 2022 called, ot wants it’s discussion back.
No one really cares about this distinction anymore. It’s like literally vs figuratively.
LLMs are branded under the concept of AI, arguing it doesn’t count is not a discussion people really care about anymore in the industry.
I work at a very big company with humdreds of debelopers.
We gotamdatory training awhile ago, and it’s now very much normalized as a concept.
It’s no longer a question of does a dev use it, it’s a question of how much
Some use it rarely, others a lot.
Well there’s a huge difference between “slop” and actually fine code.
As long as the domain space isn’t super esoteric, and the framework is fairly mature, most LLMs will generate not half bad results, enough to get you 90% of the way there.
But then that last 10% of refining amd cleaning up the code, fixing formatting issues, tweaking names, etc is what seperates the slop for them “you can’t even tell an AI helped with this” code
I have projects that prolly a good 5% to 10% of the code is AI generated, but you’d never know cuz I still did a second pass over it to sanity check and make sure its good
All over tbh, most devs are using it to some degree now.
However it’s not an “AI” FOSS contribution, it’ll be Doug contributing, or Pardep, or whatever.
They just quietly used AI like a normal person for some basic parts of the code to get it done faster, then tweaked it to look better.
I’d expect most FOSS projects with contributions in the past 6months have bits and pieces, a line here or there, written in AI
That’s the thing, when the AI performs well, you wouldn’t even be able to tell AI was used
Everyone is using it for a reason, as long as you arent doing anything esoteric or bleeding edge, gen AI is about 60% accurate at producing pretty useable results for code. And I say that as a developer with 15 years experience.
If you try and point it at some niche library or framework, or a new version with stuff that just came out, yes, it shits the bed.
But if you just prompt it to do an extremely bog standard task that is already a very well solved problem, 99% of the time it mostly gets it right, right enough that all you gotta do is clean up the formatting and maybe organize it better, make it tighter or better looking, etc, but it’ll complete about 90% of the work up front.
Its extremely good at when all it has to do is just replicate code you already wrote but slightly different, like when you need to just invoke some logic for 1,2,3,4,5… You do it once for 1, start typing for 2 and it’ll just autocomplete it.
Mind you, in neovim Shift+A can do the same pretty well too if you know what you are doing.
But nonetheless, everyone uses this stuff because it works, not amazing but its really really good at doing a lot of the boring/repetitive/easy boilerplate kind of stuff.
If you arent using it, you’re going to start falling behind as other people get better and better at using it.
If you label your stuff as ZERO gen ai being used in it, I would damn well expect you truly mean that.
Otherwise it is 100% false advertising.
And, as a result, I classify everyone who uses this label as false advertising, and as a result am 0% interested in buying their stuff.
There’s a huge difference between AI Slop churning to produce a garbage product, vs trying to outright lie to me and try and pretend you didnt use AI at all to make your thing, in any way.
Thats just not how reality works.
You used it, admit you used it, everyone uses it, and thats fine
But theres a difference between using AI to make the output, vs making the output with AI
I give zero fucks if your team used, for example, AI to generate placeholder images for your game development to act as sort of templates for the developers, so you can make your game way faster, and then replaced them with real actual art made by humans, ensuring key things in the art are roughly in the same spots so stuff like hitboxes and etc still line up.
Or using AI generated music placeholders so you can asap start testing your sound engine actually works, as well as a way to convey vibes and what you want to your music engineers so they can make something better.
Or using AI to assist with generating the code for your project, because everyone already does that and you are huffing copium if you think the industry isnt rife with that already
Okay?
Oh yeah, super high quality journalism here folks. This entire articles premise boils down to “They asked something (unknown what) of ChatGPT related to this hike, and they got something (unknown what) back, but we’re gonna go ahead and mention it and write a whole article about it”
For all I know, they just asked gippity for tips on good ideas for trail mix, who knows! We sure never will because this entire article doesnt actually bother to tell us
FFS, can we please downvote this low quality garbage pretending to be journalism? Give me facts people