> Pre-merge, this took 5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, and 72 billion cached input token reads — around $165,000 at API pricing. By hand, I think this would've taken 3 engineers with full context on the codebase about a year, during which time we wouldn't be able to improve Node.js compatibility, fix bugs, fix security issues or implement new features. We never would've done that. The realistic alternative was to do nothing and keep fixing the bugs at the top of this post forever.
Building it out and maintaining it isn't free. And per a friend who's been selling consumer solar installations for years in the North East and gotten disillusioned: the equipment maintenance, repairability, and replacement story isn't great at the company they last worked at and results in a lot of environmental waste. One of the reasons they left. Of course, this is just second-hand information - I don't personally have much intuition for how widespread the issue is.
I do type Z with little finger, etc, because that's how the typing software I used long, long time ago taught it. But I don't accommodate by messing up my wrists, which are still in a natural position. My fingers just adapted to the needed flexibility. My left pinky hitting the Z is trivial and less effort, IMO, than my right index finger hitting Y.
And yes, I use a conventional straight keyboard, not an ergonomic one.
I was confused by this at first since `&T` clearly allows aliasing (which is what C's `restrict` is about). But I realize that Steve meant just the optimization opportunity: you can be guaranteed that (in the absence of UB), the data behind the `&T` can be known to not change in the absence of a contained `UnsafeCell<T>`, so you don't have to reload it after mutations through other pointers.
So, I'm not pretending that certain kinds of jobs aren't going to be obsoleted. Lots of responsibilities went by the wayside as a lot of things were automated with technology and algorithms - I mean, this is not just an AI thing. But I also see it as many people not even executing certain creative visions that would be out of reach due to the mechanical (not creative) cost of doing things. That's where Jevons Paradox really shines and I do think that's where the explosion will happen. Of the (very few) people I know who do editing and have to rotoscope, rotoscoping is one of the things they really don't enjoy, but they do it anyway.
I think it makes some sense to allow leeway for intelligent "signal processing" using AI (separating out individual tracks, clean-up, etc) vs generating new content with AI.
Similarly, say, for video editors, using AI to more intelligently rotoscope (especially with alpha blending in the presence of motion blur - practically impossible to do it manually), would be a great use of AI, removing the non-creative tedium of the process.
It's not clear where the line is though. I was quite impressed with Corridor Crew's (albeit NVidia+Puget-sponsored) video [1] where they photographed dolls, motion-captured human actors moving like the dolls, and transferred the skeletal animation and facial expressions to those dolls using GenAI. Some of it required nontrivial transformative code to accommodate a skeleton to a toy's body type. There's a massive amount of tedium being removed from the creative process by GenAI without sacrificing the core human creative contribution. This feels like it should be allowed -- I think we should attempt to draw clearer lines where there are clearly efficiency gains to be had to have less "creative" uses be more socially acceptable.
Agreed about POP Shop being slow. I recently learned that they were working on its replacement: "COSMIC store" (written in Rust + Iced), and it's super-fast. You can try it with `sudo apt install cosmic-store`.
Reference counted pointers can deference an object (via a strong pointer) without checking the reference count. The reference count is accessed only on operations like clone, destruction, and such. That being said, access via a weak pointer does require a reference count check.
A less unflattering interpretation might be that once they saw the level of skill required to contribute to a field, they switched to a field that they could more meaningfully contribute to.
Haha, yes! I'm a software engineer and it took me a decade of smartphone usage before I realized that long-pressing various keys (e.g. vowels, symbols) shows a pop-up allowing you to enter related characters (e.g. á, æ, ¡, ₹, ±, ·, ½, ²)†. Blew my tiny little mind! If I were using a language that required the variants menu in its native keyboard layout, I might have discovered this a decade before by explicitly searching for how to enter certain characters.
† Typed these on mobile, of course. Android, in case you're wondering.
> 11 days (May 3 → merged May 14) · 6,778 commits
> Pre-merge, this took 5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, and 72 billion cached input token reads — around $165,000 at API pricing. By hand, I think this would've taken 3 engineers with full context on the codebase about a year, during which time we wouldn't be able to improve Node.js compatibility, fix bugs, fix security issues or implement new features. We never would've done that. The realistic alternative was to do nothing and keep fixing the bugs at the top of this post forever.