bunderbunder

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4 घंटे पहलेdiscuss

I’ve been at companies where just one group - or even just one person - did something unconscionable and kept getting away with it until the story hit the headlines. And I can tell you, it was never just an isolated incident involving just that group. It’s also all the people who knew something was up and didn’t say anything. And it’s the corporate leadership fostering a pervasive culture of turning a blind eye to ethical problems. Often by allowing people in power to ensure that sounding the alarm is a career-limiting move.

10 घंटे पहलेdiscuss

Our commit messages have become useless since we adopted a shared agent skill for making commits.

The LLM tends to fill the messages with irrelevant details while still failing to mention what the change actually does.

10 घंटे पहलेdiscuss

Yeah, NLP is a different beast from human language learning.

The most salient difference here is that NLP wants to automate as much as possible for reasons that are specific to NLP.

But for human language learning a lot of automation is actually harmful because manual effort tends to be good for Ebbinghaus’s arguably more important but less popularly appreciated discovery: memory encoding quality.

11 घंटे पहलेdiscuss

This is a big part of why language learners have largely moved toward sentence mining as the preferred way to build an Anki deck.

Getting your words from real-world contexts, and keeping that context on the front of the card, largely eliminates the ambiguity problem. If a word has multiple senses, it gets multiple cards with different example sentences to illustrate each one.

It also helps a bunch with words that don’t really have a concise translation to your native language. For example the French words “mur” and “paroi” both mean “wall” in English, but the contexts where you use them are quite different. An example sentence helps with that, and getting that sentence from an even richer context such as a book or article you’ve read helps even more.

It’s also, frankly, just more enjoyable. I’ve come to view frequency lists as an antiquated tool. I needed them in the 1990s when good authentic-context study materials were hard to come by, but the modern Internet has made so-called immersion-based learning methods so easy and inexpensive I’m frankly mystified that people still cling to the joyless, almost mechanistic methods we were stuck with in the previous century.

4 दिन पहलेdiscuss

So yeah, half of Python might still be Turing-complete, but it wouldn’t really be Python for any practical purpose.

Just like how a device that can’t multiply or divide is not a 4-function calculator; it’s more like an adding machine. Many of which did multiply by serial addition.

4 दिन पहलेdiscuss

The “status” section of the project’s readme explicitly says that it is not passing the full test suite, and that the AOT compiler passes fewer tests than the JIT one.

It also explicitly says that they’re still working on building out the standard library.

I’m maybe not as pessimistic as leobuskin, but they are absolutely right that this is not the first time someone has tried to build an alternative Python implementation, and that all previous ones have failed because they weren’t able to get close enough to 100% parity to be acceptable to most users. Python is an unusually quirky language. I kind of wonder if “written in Rust” adds an extra headwind here because there’s nothing even remotely memory-safe about Python’s extension mechanism. I don’t know enough to know, but I have read about the death of a few of these projects in the past and a common theme of the post-mortem seems to be, “It went so smoothly at the start that we were caught off guard how much of a brick wall the last 5% was going to be.”

4 दिन पहलेdiscuss

I used to write obfuscated C for fun. I haven’t touched it in a while, but as I recall there are really two C syntax features that unlock most of the “magic”. Whitespace is generally not significant, so you can cram a whole lot onto a single line. And the combination of pointers and weak typing lets you be as anarchist as you like about manipulating data. (Oh, and the preprocessor. The one and - thankfully - only C preprocessor.)

Of the two^H^Hhree, I think that the first is what contributes most to the aesthetic appeal of obfuscated C. The only other languages I’ve used that are as good for making code that looks impenetrable are Forth and JavaScript, both of which share that feature.

(Probably any lisp, too, but for some reason I’ve never actually tried. I can say, though, that the most confusing codebase I ever inherited was written in Clojure.)

So yes, I’m inclined to agree that Rust can be a good language for writing deliberately ugly code, and Go not so much. But for a different, perhaps more trivial reason.

5 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Though, I would point out that where people fall on that seems to correlate very highly with their ability to explain how an attention head works.

10 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Regardless of what happens when you play with an LLM, I hope you can see how there’s room for an interpreter to choose words in a way that’s technically consistent with what Keller really said, but somehow still manages to radically embellish upon it.

Which I think then warrants being cautious about reading too literally into a quote that is certainly evocative, but some of what it evokes are rather Victorian ideas about people with neurological disabilities that might be considered ableist from a modern perspective.

11 दिन पहलेdiscuss

There are real questions about the veracity of some of these Helen Keller quotes, and reason to believe that a lot of it was really coming from Anne Sullivan.

There are really three main observations that give pause. First, after she started working with Sullivan, Keller apparently developed a writing style and nuanced opinions reminiscent of a college-educated person virtually overnight. That’s pretty surprising for any child, let alone one who had only recently acquired language. Second, all of that disappeared overnight when Sullivan died - Keller’s writing style changed drastically, becoming much simpler, and all that eloquent insight also disappeared along with Sullivan. Finally, we’ve never since seen another Helen Keller. On the contrary, later observation of deaf-blind people who don’t acquire language until later in life is part of what inspired a variant of the critical period hypothesis that posits that people who don’t learn their first language (doesn’t matter whether it’s spoken or signed) in early childhood are never able to acquire any language to a particularly high level of proficiency.

That said, even if that Keller quote is now considered dubious, it may not be entirely off base. Supposedly people who don’t acquire language in early childhood also tend to show less capacity for abstract reasoning tasks. Which is still a far cry from the “no-consciousness” that Keller-maybe-Sullivan describes, but does still suggest that language and reasoning are mutually supportive.

11 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Actually effective, human-powered recommendation systems already exist, and they’re great.

My favorite implementation of this is talking to the clerks at my neighborhood bookstore. But the New York Review of Books is an alternative that’s easier to enjoy from home. For romance novels I like the blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books. Also this is kind of cheating but I have a family member who reviews books for a library journal so a lot of the time I just let her tell me what to read.

11 दिन पहलेdiscuss

In the USA you could possibly just contact your credit card company and have them issue a chargeback. And then Kobo might just let it go because it costs more to contest it.

11 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Yes. I use both at home because reasons, and despite the much lower per-computer price tag PCs cost me about twice as much money on an annualized basis because they need to be replaced so much more often.

But for a lot of people a Mac is still out of reach because they don’t actually have that much disposable cash on hand at any given moment. Which might not be how the situation has to be, strictly speaking, but I’m not here to bother them about their spending patterns.

Also for most people who don’t have the computing needs of your average Hacker News follower, Chromebooks might be the real elephant in the room. The Chromebook users in my life seem to have easily the fewest computer worries.

11 दिन पहलेdiscuss

I don’t think things are quite so dire for Windows. People (including me) have been predicting the end of Windows due to losing mindshare with builders since the turn of the century, and it still hasn’t happened.

The harsh truth is that most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs. Businesses pick them for employee computers for the same reason.

And Windows Server more or less became a moot point when the cloud took over. They don’t want you hosting your own Exchange server anymore, they want you in Office 365. And they’ll just as happily sell you Linux compute instances on Azure because lower COGS means more profit.

12 दिन पहलेdiscuss

And the flood really is overwhelming. This weekend my mom was complaining about having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle Unlimited. I mentioned that the relative lack of slop is one of the major reasons I chose Kobo over Kindle. Even before this latest AI boom I was already starting to view less content as a feature, not a bug, because it seems that on subscription services “more” is increasingly just a polite way of saying “more crap.”

Similar feelings about Nebula vs YouTube, although Nebula straight up doesn’t have entire genres, or videos in languages other than English, so it doesn’t really work as a general recommendation.

16 दिन पहलेdiscuss

I’ve seen many products die sudden, violent deaths due to unmanaged technical debt. If you have customers who care about quality and reliability, you simply cannot set up a false dichotomy between selling product and managing technical debt.

That said, I would also concede that over the past decade or two the clean code movement has made a damn strong effort of poisoning the term by trying to characterize technically inconsequential aesthetic concerns as technical debt.

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It’s not like countries that decided against kleptocracy are drowning in unemployment. On the contrary, they often enjoy a happier population, a better standard of living, or both.

16 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Perhaps, but one does have to wonder why the US favors making life easier for founders and venture capitalists over making life more livable for people who aren’t already rich.

Like, a while back my employer had 10% layoffs, and their most profitable year ever, in the same year. There’s a real reason why that happened, ans the reason is that the C suite seriously fucked up on managing the company’s finances. In a sane world they should be the first to bear the consequences. Instead they got fat bonuses while hundreds of people who had no part in creating the problem lost their jobs. And the moral justification for a society that allows this is somehow, “But isn’t it great that it’s easier for privileged people to play fast and loose like that?” That is, at best, circular reasoning.

17 दिन पहलेdiscuss

I do think there’s a difference between charging a price and creating artificial scarcity.

This isn’t to say that the entertainment industry hasn’t pulled some awful shenanigans. But they’re generally willing to sell to as many people as are willing to pay the price they set. For the most part they haven’t tried to place hard limits on how many total people are allowed to watch a movie and control it with some sort of limited edition resellable token. That was an innovation of the NFT folks.

18 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Though, there’s a part of me thinking that the basic idea of creating artificial scarcity for profit is hard to separate from scamminess. It’s giving De Beers.