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11일 전discuss

> an environment that favors profit above everything will naturally select for individuals who are unencumbered by such hindrances.

Exactly. Dairy farms optimise for milk production so favour cows that produce the most milk.

The market economy optimises for profit so favours those most willing/able to generate it. Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel, Andreesen and co are products of the system.

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17일 전discuss

I’d hazard a guess they might be referring to an ex-British politician who went on to have a high profile role in comms at meta.

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27일 전discuss

> Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it

Not OP but I can say with 100% truth and certainty that it wouldn’t matter how much money they offered - I would not work for meta. Some things matter more than money.

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지난달discuss

Exactly this. The “one UI to rule them all” paradigm has been a persistent, recurring flaw for decades. It probably hit its lowest (to date) with the exhortations to “mobile first design”. The motivation for that was reasonable: conventional desktop UIs of the time didn’t render on mobile. However the ensuing “mobile first” instead became “mobile only” - and consequently wide screen displays with buttons the size of elephants.

Phones and desktops are so radically different that your sedan/bulldozer analogy seems like shades of grey. It’s more like taking a Saturn V rocket to the local shop for a pint of milk.

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2개월 전discuss

Yes, I would like to see a full cost comparison. Transferring one time digitally will no doubt cost (a lot) less than physical manufacture and distribution. But it’s not one time transfer: it’s streaming on demand, every time each person listens to each track, because the economic model is rental not purchase.

I use streaming services. I like the flexibility and ubiquity of access. But my favourite music I still buy on cd or vinyl. Why? Because it means I’m not subject to the whims of a megacorp removing access and it means more goes to the artist. I’ve been buying music for 40 years and still listen to some of stuff I bought then. I hope to live long enough to do the same for the music I buy now.

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2개월 전discuss

I would like to see a full cost comparison. Centralised storage - replicated, distributed and maintained online as necessary - vs media that, once manufactured and distributed, essentially costs nothing to maintain. iPods/phones get replaced much more frequently than LPs/casettes/CDs. And that’s just the resource consumption comparison. There’s then the economic polarisation of wealth to the small handful of online music renters vs distributed ownership (of copies: the original work of art remains with the artist, at least in theory).

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2개월 전discuss

Instead of what - vast data centres full of electronics, consuming huge quantities of electricity, controlled by techno-feudalistic megacorps who keep almost all of the money and supply a pittance to the artists? Everything has a cost but those records, CDs and cassettes look like a good deal from here. I still have LPs I inherited from my parents. They still play on my 20 year old turntable.

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3개월 전discuss

> But I think it corresponds to 8 separate states in an FSM (or statechart? not sure)

In a conventional FSM yes but not a statechart. Statecharts support parallel regions within a single state. You’d have 3 regions for your example: one waiting for each person. There would be 4 states total: one to wait on each person, each in its own region, plus the superstate. The superstate would exit when all 3 “waiting for person <x>” sub states exited, independent of their sequence.

I’m with you on Petri nets though, very helpful for modelling concurrent behaviour.

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3개월 전discuss

Thanks, that’s helpful. My wife is a teacher and talks about knowledge being recreated, not relearned: IOW it’s new to the learner even if known by the teacher. Hadn’t put those things together before.

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3개월 전discuss

Erm, well, the comment wasn’t AI generated, it was by me - a warts and all human. The sibling comments say TFA is AI generated and I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t spot that. Still found it interesting though.

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3개월 전discuss

Wonderful article and a good fit with HN’s motto of “move slowly and preserve things” as opposed to Silicon Valley’s jingoistic “move fast and break things”.

It highlights the often perplexing human tendency to reinvent rather than reuse. Why do we, as a species, ignore hard-won experience and instead restart? In doing so, often making mistakes that could have been avoided if we’d taken the time or had the curiosity/humility to learn from others. This seems particularly prevalent in software: “standing on the feet of giants” is a default rather than exception.

That aside, the article was thoroughly educational and enjoyable. I came away with much-deepened insight and admiration for those involved in researching, designing and building the language. Resolved to find and read the referenced “steelman” and language design rationale papers.

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3개월 전discuss

This is the biggest risk with the rejuvenated interest in formal proof. That LLMs can generate proofs is useful. Proof assistants that can check them (Lean/FStar/Isabelle/...) similarly so.

But it just moves the question to whether the theorems covered in the proof are sufficient. Underlying it all is a simple question:

Does the system meet its intended purpose?

To which the next question is:

What is the intended purpose?

Describing that is the holy grail of requirements specification. Natural language, behaviour-driven development, test-driven development and a host of other approaches attempt to bridge the gap between implicit purpose and explicit specification. Proof assistants are another tool in that box.

It's also one of the key motivators for iterative development: putting software in front of users (or their proxies) is still the primary means of validation for a large class of systems.

None of which is implied criticism of any of those approaches. Equally, none completely solves the problem. There is a risk that formal proofs, combined with proof assistants, are trumpeted as "the way" to mitigate the risk that LLM-developed apps don't perform as intended.

They might help. They can show that code is correct with respect to some specification, and that the specification is self-consistent. They cannot prove that the specification is complete with regards its intended purpose.

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4개월 전discuss

Jolla has announced a new phone using its Sailfish OS so providing a full-stack European alternative to the Android/Apple duopoly.

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4개월 전discuss

That’s beautifully done, thanks for posting. As helpful again to an ML novice like me as Karpathy’s original.

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5개월 전discuss

All true but it's a circular argument: these are unhealthy products because they're _designed_ that way. That design is directed from the top - no more so that Facebook/Instagram. Zuckerberg retains a controlling interest in Meta so he can't use the excuse of other public firms where CEOs throw up their hands and say "yeah, but we need to deliver shareholder return - it's out of my hands". Zuckerberg could choose differently. As GP notes, he hasn't - he's gone consistently hard the other way.

> It’s clear, people want to be addicted to social media

I'd say people are susceptible to addiction rather than wanting it. Suppliers of any addictive product - whether its tobacco, class A drugs, alcohol, gambling or social media - know that. Going too hard the other way into full prohibition is impractical because it starts to impinge on civil liberties: as a capable adult, why shouldn't I be able to smoke/drink/doomscroll instagram if I want?

That's why it's dificult; neither extreme liberty nor extreme prohibition is the answer. It's a grey area as GP notes. The trouble is it creates opportunities for people like Zuckerberg to exploit the middle ground and amass huge personal wealth paid for, in part, by the health detriment of those unable to self-regulate the addiction.

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6개월 전discuss

I think that's the point. The underpinning exhortation is to "think about design" where the outcome is something that successfully addresses users needs, is feasible to create, and commercially viable.

"Design Thinking" as a brand has codified that in several ways - not all successful. But the underlying principle is sound: there are plenty of examples of products/services that failed to address one or more of the 3 dimensions.

I found this quote from the linked article [0] more helpful:

> Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

[0]: https://www.designorate.com/design-thinking-guide-what-why-h...

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6개월 전discuss

I’m going to presume good faith rather than trolling. Some questions for you:

1. Coding assistants have emerged as as one of the primary commercial opportunities for AI models. As GP pointed out, LWN is the primary discussion for kernel development. If you were gathering training data for a model, and coding assistance is one of your goals, and you know of a primary sources of open source development expertise, would you:

  (a) ignore it because it’s in a quaint old format, or

  (b) slurp up as much as you can?

2. If you’d previously slurped it up, and are now collating data for a new training run, and you know it’s an active mailing list that will have new content since you last crawled it, would you:

  (a) carefully and respectfully leave it be, because you still get benefit from the previous content even though there’s now more and it’s up to date, or

  (b) hoover up every last drop because anything you can do to get an edge over your competitors means you get your brief moment of glory in the benchmarks when you release?

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8개월 전discuss

Extend your reasoning.

> it's really just a spec that gets turned into the thing we actually run. It's just that the building process is fully automated. What we do when we create software is creating a specification in source code form.

Agree. My favourite description of software development is specification and translation - done iteratively.

Today, there are two primary phases:

1. Specification by a non-developer and the translation of that into code. The former is led by BAs/PMs etc and the output is feature specs/user stories/acceptance tests etc. The latter id done by developers: they translate the specs into code.

2. The resulting code is also, as you say, a spec. It gets translated into something the machine can run. This is automated by a compiler/interpreter (perhaps in multiple steps, e.g. when a VM is involved).

There have been several attempts over the years to automate the first step. COBOL was probably the first; since then we've had 4GLs, CASE tools, UML among others. They were all trying to close the gap: to take phase 1 specification closer to what non-developers can write - with the result automatically translated to working code.

Spec-driven development is another attempt at this. The translator (LLM) is quite different to previous efforts because it's non-deterministic. That brings some challenges but also offers opportunities to use input language that isn't constrained to be interpretable by conventional means (parsers implementing formal grammars).

We're in the early days of spec-driven. It may fail like its predecessors or it may not. But first order, there's nothing sacrosanct about the use of 3rd generation languages as the means to represent the specification. The pivotal challenge is whether translation from the starting specification can be reliably translated to working software.

If it can (big if) then economics will win out.

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9개월 전discuss

Related: Michael Kennedy moved TalkPython [0] hosting to Hetner in 2024. There's a blog about the move here [1] and a follow up after Hetzner changed some pricing policy [2].

He's also just released a book on hosting scale production Python apps [3]. Haven't read yet though would assume it'll get covered there in more detail too.

--

[0] https://talkpython.fm/

[1] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/we-have-moved-to-hetzner/

[2] https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/update-on-hetzner-changes-p...

[3] https://talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production

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9개월 전discuss

yes, though perhaps stating the obvious: it depends what they do with it.

Ladybird currently has 8 full-time devs [1] and is making impressive progress on delivering a browser from scratch. Wise investment in small, focused, capable teams can go a long way if they're not chasing VC-driven Unicorn status (or in stasis as a Google anti-trust diversion).

That's not challenging your point though: in the face of competing budgets at US tech giants, EUR17Mn still barely registers above noise level. Nevertheless, it's a start. We can only hope it grows and doesn't get shut down by some political lobbying by the aforementioned US behemoths. A modest budget might actually help there - not yet big enough to cause concern to incumbents.

[1]: https://ladybird.org/

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