That comment you're complaining about is a useful signal for me who only watches zig from the far periphery. I feel like I'm getting good mileage out of it, just like I do from other, different ones. I'm glad it's in the mix.

RLHF = Right Left Hand Foot. It's a technique in Bavarian interpretative folk dance where you jump around, artfully hitting the soles of your feet with your hands in order to court women who are busy carrying unbelievable numbers of beer Steins into the mountains.

That's what came to mind when I saw the abbreviation. Then I looked it up:

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.

"Rood Luck, Have Fun!" A rood is a unit of area that is equal to about one fifth of a football field.

Um, isn't it also a synonym for the cross?

Indeed. But the area conversion tool appeared first when I went looking for it.

Text editors are for cleaning up after the agents, of course. And for crafting beautiful metaprompt files to be used by the agentic prompt-crafter intelligences that mind the grunt agents. And also for coding.

The way you phrased it reads very much like you started an argument about definitions.

I think requiring the title of dictator is not how the term is being used these days, on our side of the late Roman republic. It's more of a duck-typing situation now.

I think it's safe to assume the original comment meant it that way.

> The number of persons that have and will ever live is countably infinite

I don't think you can say that their number is infinite. Countable, yes. But there is no rule that new people will keep spawning.

Pah, I gave you an upvote just to spite you. ;p

To me, the current AI boom is more like when McDonald's became available in my neck of the woods after '89. Amazing at first, but then you realize it's mostly sloppy grease that has its uses.

The wild technology race of the 90s, on the other hand, felt like a magical new dimension opening up. Maybe just because it took much longer to get thoroughly turned into a vector for BS.

Your quote leaves out the most interesting part: the word is now associated with some particularly folksy folk who notoriously used it in their. genocidal ideology

> The concept was notoriously embraced by the newly founded Nazi Party in the 1920s, and eventually became strongly associated with Nazism after Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

(From your Wikipedia link.)

Yeah - I thought people would make the connection from the bit I posted.

‘Folksy folk’ is a great euphemism.

It sounds like a good way to make sure you don't overcharge your customers when handling such requests at scale. Failure and duplication will happen, and when serving enough requests will happen often enough to occupy engineering with investigation and resolution efforts forwarded from customer support.

Being prepared for these things to happen and having code in place to automatically prevent, recognize and resolve these errors will keep you, the customers and everyone in between sane and happy.

These are all important concerns, but I'd go for an off the shelf library that does it for me (disclaimer I work at https://github.com/dbos-inc)

You can just hire one person who will handle double charge issues and refund them when necessary. Might be much simpler and cheaper.

Pressing a refund button is not why engineering gets involved. It's the cleanup of the related data, metadata and automatically generated documents, because these are not consistent anymore. Of course you can automate that, or make at least create more buttons for non-engineering people to push, but then we're back to spending effort to anticipate these problems and enabling the system to prevent and/or handle them.

You also need to think about what it means to double-charge your customers, what it means to them and their wallets, and to their relationship to you. Do you want their repeat business? What sums are we talking about? How do you find out about these double-charges, and how quickly? Do the customers have to complain to you first, or did you anticipate the problem and have things in place to flag these charges?

Yes, you can hire people in place of the code you didn't write, but that only makes sense if continuing to pay them is cheaper than writing the code once and then maintaining it, which also probably means the manual work generated should not scale in proportion with your business.

Finally, developing for more than the happy-path is not overengineering, it's plain old engineering. There is a point, a kind and size of business, where it makes sense to do these things properly, and then TFA comes into play. The cost of just winging it goes up and up, until you need to do something about it.

Don't mix up UX with UI.

The experience is not the interface, but how you accomplish what you set out to do. Unobtrusive UI that helps you get things done is what part of the experience should be.