stcg · HackerLangs

I like the word "botspeak".

Another example of typical botspeak is "smoke test". Why not just say "test"? It feels like a way of downplaying the ability to detect problems.

stcg

6 days agodiscuss

What makes you think it is slop? The emdash?

stcg

19 days agodiscuss

A letter from me addressed to the agent, describing me and the goals of the project. Not AI-generated, no code or commands.

Nothing specific to the technology, because that gets out of sync fast, or might steer the agent in the wrong direction.

Smart models can figure these things out themselves.

If for example the agent repeatedly wrongly guesses the command to run tests, I prefer to change the code so the wrong guess will actually work the next time. Or I will find what in the project lead to the wrong assumption and fix that.

stcg

19 days agodiscuss

This is like saying "A slow leak is cheaper than a burst pipe"

Yes, okay. But with both you will have a bad time cleaning up.

There is a third option: good abstractions.

I did see this pattern described in the blog in practice a lot (and fell victim to it myself) and I think that in general this comes down to inexperienced programmers. Object oriented programming makes it worse.

Teaching these programmers that they should not abstract is not the solution. It is blocking their growth.

Teach them how to make better interfaces instead.

stcg

20 days agodiscuss

> That sure looks like software to me!

> But, at the same time, the user experiences it as a graphic. An animated GIF, for example, contains a small amount of code-like data to say how long each frame should last for and when to stop running. Is a GIF software? Is the basic circle above software? How much code do you need before something becomes software?

To me, from an ontological perspective, it's software if you wrote it like software: starting from the text form in a text editor. But it's an image if you made it in a graphical editor like Inkscape, just like how you could make an image in GIMP. The format just happens to be SVG.

I think this might also make sense from a legal perspective, as copyright law seems more focussed on the creation (how it is made / who made it / what was the purpose), and less on how it is used.

stcg

20 days agodiscuss

In the referenced benchmark GLM-5.2 (max) got 25% of all questions correct. GPT-5.5 (xhigh) got 57% correct.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience

I'd much rather have some answer that I can verify than no answer to verify.

I don't want a model that says "I don't know", because I will verify the answer anyway.

stcg

20 days agodiscuss

Anyone know why there is a high frequency signal on top of the long term trend in that graph?

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

stcg

20 days agodiscuss

I wonder what is the difficulty in rewriting strncpy uses that makes it take six years? Was it widespread? Or was it more of a long going effort, where it was only changed if there were some changes in the same file? Or is there some other thing that makes it difficult?

stcg

20 days agodiscuss

Beter wording: your brain is made for detecting dangers and attention grabbers are taking advantage of that

stcg

6 months agodiscuss

Other advantages to generating content: (1) fewer copyright issues. (2) No creators to pay, just GPU bills scaling with the use of the platform. (3) a much smaller critical mass.

Given these advantages I expect the current "social media" to be replaced with a new one, rather than them pivoting. The next big thing after tiktok might be something that only has generated content, where a last final bit of "social" is taken out of "social media".

stcg

10 months agodiscuss

I don't see consistent and correct as separate. Consistent is correct, and correct is consistent.

stcg

3 years agodiscuss

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (Goodhart's law)

stcg

3 years agodiscuss

"Wishful thinking is the weakest form of hope."

stcg

3 years agodiscuss

It's wrong if they share it. But then they did not 'steal' the information. They shared it (wrongfully).

stcg

3 years agodiscuss

> If you disagree I'd appreciate if you could tell us your credit card information.

I'm not talking about being obliged to share. Of course people should have the right to not share their credit details. My point is that if you receive information from someone, then choosing to share it with a third party is not stealing.

Actually, an obligation to share information is a restriction on freedom just like copyright, which can prohibit sharing information.

stcg

3 years agodiscuss

Let's say Alice took a photograph and sends a copy of it to Bob.

Are you then saying that when Bob sends another copy to Charlie, Bob is taking something? What is Bob taking?

stcg

3 years agodiscuss

Also in these transitive definitions, stealing is about taking. And in the case of piracy (communicating information to others without permission of the original source), nothing is taken.

The person that came up with the idea still has it. The photographer still has the picture. The programmer still has the program.

It's just about what another person may do with it, the one receiving the picture. May they also send it to someone else? We could have different ideas about that, but calling it "stealing" is inaccurate.

stcg

3 years agodiscuss

It's not stealing. It's communication. You can't "steal" ideas, information or facts. To steal means to physically take someone's property without their consent.

stcg

3 years agodiscuss

I'm doubting the validity of the proof. It seems to assume that there is exactly one least interesting article (the least interesting article). But maybe there are hundreds of articles that have the same lowest amount of 'interestingness'. I would say that then those hundreds of articles are uninteresting.

stcg

3 years agodiscuss

This is the nicest solution I've seen so far.

I believe that for the operation of randomly sampling a single row, only the consecutiveness invariant is needed. The random permutation invariant is unnecessary, because the choice from the range (1, N+1) is random anyway.

However, I can imagine the random permutation invariant being useful for other operations (although I can't immediately think of one).

EDIT: the random permutation invariant could maybe be useful for a list that can be displayed to the user. I can imagine some cases where it is nice to have an order that doesn't change a lot while you don't want it to depend on any property in particular (like the order in which the rows were added).

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