or_am_i · HackerTrans

vor 8 Tagendiscuss

The article explicitly calls out selection bias (this is entirely based on 90% that opted into using the tutor, there was no control group), I wish the headline did as well. "Engaged students score 0.71 - 1.30 SD better in tests" sounds like a much simpler explanation.

or_am_i

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Brilliant! IMO could be even better if the number of points/comments was easier to scan.

or_am_i

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Lemmas ~ library code, theorems ~ application code.

or_am_i

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Same. Plenty of perfectly valid reasons to outright ban generated PRs, but "Look, I asked ChatGPT to generate a PR which would break SDL, and it did not bother reading AGENTS.md" is a pretty weak take - gotta know thy enemy a little bit better than that.

or_am_i

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

It's always easier to blame the model and convince yourself that you have some sort of talent in reviewing LLM's work that others don't.

In my experience the differences are mostly in how the code produced by LLM is prompted and what context is given to the agent. Developers who have experience delegating their work are more likely to prevent downstream problems from happening immediately and complain their colleagues cannot prompt as efficiently without a lot of hand holding. And those who rarely or never delegated their work are invariably going to miss crucial context details and rate the output they get lower.

or_am_i

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Have owned a couple iPads starting ~2010 -- mainly for reading pdfs, and comics in electronic form. Occasionally drawing / jamming some tunes - almost all via 3rd party apps. There are still plenty of decent apps in the ecosystem, even though their eventual obsolescence is as good as built in, and a lot of stuff I previously loved the platform for has now been gone for years with no replacement. Native apps have never been great at pretty much anything, with a notable exception of Garage Band which is an absolute banger for its money. Books is... passable I guess?

But the reading pdfs part is important -- and really hard to beat for me, the iOS drag/scroll/pinch/zoom UX perceived responsiveness is still unmatched IMO. It would take some real creativity beyond liquid glass to enshittify this aspect out.

or_am_i

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

Steam phone incoming in 3... 2... 1...

or_am_i

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

Wish it was only the keyboard enshittified. Literally everything became worse with the update, I had to google how to turn off the silly transparency (Accessibility Settings -> Display -> Reduce Transparency) so that the battery that used to happily last for the entire day on iOS 18 does not die in a matter of some 4 hours. And don't even get me started on now-always-lagging home screen swipes and the Safari overhaul madness! Wanna close the active tab? That will be three taps, thank you very much. Oh, you want them taps to register _every time_, too? This basic phone UX used to be Apple's major USP over Android, now fewer and fewer reasons to stick to this ecosystem.

or_am_i

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

The subscription revenues is a decent chunk of your lifetime value (LTV) as a customer, but it's not all of it. The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet, and the indirect "engagement" value measured by the KPIs (think daily, weekly, monthly active users) that go into the quarterlies. The more time you spend on the platform, the more "things" you have got used to interacting with (aka day-to-day, week-to-week "retention"), the more they can potentially "sell" to you -- and it's not just ads / youtube subscription upsells, it can be and often is other "products" on the same platform: their music streaming, their search, their documents and emails, maps, drive, etc. etc. And it just so happens that the short format is _really, really_ engaging for many folks.

The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.

or_am_i

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

Jonathan Blow's The Witness is a notable example (minor spoiler alert)! Past a certain point in the game, it becomes REALLY challenging to just walk through the IRL woods without over-concentrating on things.

or_am_i

vor 9 Monatendiscuss

In JetBrains editors it's possible to highlight mutable variables, at least in the languages where the distinction exists. My go to setting in Kotlin is to underscore all `var`'s, for two reasons:

- this makes them really stand out, much easier to track the mutation visually,

- the underscore effect is intrusive just-enough to nudge you to think twice when adding a new `var`.

Nothing like diving into a >3k lines PR peppered with underscores.

or_am_i

vor 10 Monatendiscuss

Mathematics trains a lot of skills that are generally applicable in engineering. Decomposing complex problems into non-trivial sequences of manageable steps, being able to prove that the design works, spotting appropriate invariants to build type hierarchies/abstractions around, communicating it all in an intentional and comprehensible way where each of the next steps follows from some of the previous, etc., etc.

or_am_i

vor 11 Monatendiscuss

Yes, and the press release makes no mention of this extra context -- hardly good journalism.

or_am_i

vor 11 Monatendiscuss

Yeah, the `numpy` version still looks relatively cryptic (like, "line > 0" is still fine, but the numpy arrays broadcasting rules can quickly get out of hand) compared to the author's Javascript example, or any decent collections API in a typed "enterprise" language like C#/Java/Scala for that matter. Here's my personal favorite, a Kotlin version:

  diffs.countIf { line -> 
      line.all { abs(it) in 1..3 } and ( 
          line.all { it > 0} or
          line.all { it < 0}
      )
  }

or_am_i

vor 11 Monatendiscuss

It sucks when your communication preferences are overridden! To be fair though, many valid reasons to prefer a quick call over a message (a potentially infinite sequence of messages, really). Even on the receiving end of a request: perhaps I want to poke around the context behind their non-urgent ask, like what they are _actually_ trying to achieve, why not do X instead etc. -- often easier to call and solve all the follow-up questions interactively on the spot.

or_am_i

vor 12 Monatendiscuss

“If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing — court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie.” E. Hubbard, ca. 1989

or_am_i

vor 12 Monatendiscuss

> If you try to humanise the place you will lose your mind. If you ask yourself what the woman at the hair-braiding stand left behind to be here, and why, you will lose your mind. If you accept the kindness of the staff with whom you make a paltry effort to speak each morning as they clear your dirty breakfast plate, you will lose your mind, because your tip is the only kindness you can meaningfully offer in return. Trying to attend to your own towel by the pool might cause the man who stands for hours in the ferocious sun to do so for you to lose his job. Being served makes us cruel infants. It demeans us all.

I understand this passage and can relate, "self-evidently awful to them only" seems a bit of a stretch. There are places on Earth where "being employed for tourism" means job security, worker rights and social protections, where staff is treated with respect and are allowed dignity.