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fmbb

1,307 karmajoined 3 years ago

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fmbb
·5 hours ago·discuss
> For example, I would argue that for someone with no experience, figuring out how to copy a file from one folder to another is easier in Windows Explorer than learning how to use cp.

I don't believe this.

If you find a person (well, two I guess for this experiment) with no computer experience and want to teach them how to copy files, your first step will be teaching them what is a file and how they are organized in the computer.

Explaining what a file is takes the same amount of time for both cases (we can ignore how devices and processes are files in Linux and how files in Windows contain many data streams and extra metadata).

In both cases you need to teach them the file system is hierarchical and folders can be nested and can contain files.

For Windows you have to teach them how to double click to open folders. They can double click "My Downloads" to see their downloads. They can double click "My Music" to see their music files.

For the CLI you have to teach them that `ls` can list the contents of a directory. They can `ls Downloads` to see their downloads. They can `ls Music` to see their music files.

For Windows you then teach them they can open multiple windows (assuming you want to copy from one folder to another folder). And you teach them they can click, hold and drag and drop a file to move it (but sometimes it will be copied when they do that) and they can hold in Control while dropping to copy the file to the destination instead. Or you teach them they can use Ctrl+C to mark a file for being copied and then navigate to the destination and use Ctrl+V to copy the file. Or you teach them to right click for the right click menu, and that "copy" means "mark this file for being copied", and that a right click in the middle of a window displaying the target folder lets them select "paste" which means "copy the marked file here".

For the CLI you teach them `cp Downloads/foo.mp3 Music/` copies foo.mp3 from their downloads to their music directory.

The CLI is also infinitely easier to help newbies use over the phone!
fmbb
·3 days ago·discuss
The Blue Lagoon is more like using waste cold than waste heat.
fmbb
·6 days ago·discuss
make no mistakes
fmbb
·12 days ago·discuss
I have not seen Kent Beck argue for eXtreme Programming or other Agile methods in nuclear power plant software or aviation. These are niche industries and constitute a vanishingly tiny part of all the lines of code out there I presume.

The fact that short iterations adding features incrementally leads to better outcomes for software project is something professionals have known and argued for since the 1960s.
fmbb
·13 days ago·discuss
Well he makes software and writes about software development doesn’t he?

Hardware has some hard limitations. The reason software was even invented at all was precisely to escape those limitations.
fmbb
·13 days ago·discuss
All tech debt I have ever seen in my 15 years of professional software development has been someone building too many abstractions or generalizations trying to future proof stuff.
fmbb
·15 days ago·discuss
Human talent or LLM talent?
fmbb
·16 days ago·discuss
> I always thought this complexity was there for some good reason (security?).

It's just design by committee.
fmbb
·18 days ago·discuss
> Economics is downstream of physics.

I don’t think this is true if finance is included in economics.

… unless of course by physics you also mean metaphysics.
fmbb
·last month·discuss
> Some times one will spin for a long time on certain problems where the other has no problem finding the appropriate parts of the codebase and getting an efficient solution.

Surely this is just to the random nature of these stochastic parrots?

Do you mean you have identified a class of problems Claude always stalls on and another class of problems Codex always stalls on? What identifies these different classes of problems you see? How would you say Claude is stronger than Codex and vice versa? Why?
fmbb
·last month·discuss
You prevent the LLM from deleting your instances by not granting its AWS user that permission. Whatever tool you let it use to talk to AWS is irrelevant.
fmbb
·last month·discuss
I’m not sure it can ever be cheaper than a human cleaner so maybe the hotel industry does not want to subsidize the training.
fmbb
·last month·discuss
Seems like there is some synergy to be found here!
fmbb
·last month·discuss
Solution: take turns every other year.
fmbb
·2 months ago·discuss
Not putting all your eggs in one basket is a good choice. I think the AWS service catalog makes you adopt more than you need or want anyway, it is a great way of locking people into one vendor.
fmbb
·2 months ago·discuss
A lot of the alternatives there are tagged "EU hosted". Some are not.

Are the ones that are tagged "EU hosted" among the ones you mean host on Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft?
fmbb
·2 months ago·discuss
I don’t thing maintaining and testing support for an extra runtime is free.

It is by definition cheaper to not support extra runtimes like Kaluma, Elsa, WinterJS. Adding support is not just the initial work of adapting CI and writing policies, maintenance and support is ongoing work.
fmbb
·2 months ago·discuss
Proactively removing work, yes.
fmbb
·2 months ago·discuss
Well if you promise support you promise support.

You cannot take back a promise after you make it. So if you discover bugs later you cannot just leave.

This script is just a JavaScript helper to bring full YouTube support to some media download tool. It does not seem important to anyone that executing it using Bun is supported. They support the Deno and Node runtimes.
fmbb
·2 months ago·discuss
Adding support again later is cheap.

Stopping maintaining and testing support for upcoming versions is cheaper than doing that work.

Sure it’s political but it is also just a sane approach, to stay away from such disruptive change and treat it as wait-and-see instead of tagging along for the ride. There is not really any technical upside to tagging along and promising support.