I live in a college town. There are now commercial bar crawl operators. They make the T shirt, develop an itinerary, coordinate with the bars. It’s a weirdly infantilized form of debauchery. Can’t frat boys be trusted to make bad decisions on the spur of the moment any more?
Does this apply also to std::shared_mutex in C++? This is a timely article if so; I’m in the middle of doing some C++ multithreading that relies on a shared_mutex. I have some measuring to do.
Stalin is said to have gifted a large amount of Georgian brandy to Churchill at Yalta, which made Churchill more pliable during the proceedings. Until now, this is all I knew about Georgian food and drink.
There’s a palpable assault on expertise afoot in the Anglosphere. It’s been going on for decades, at least since the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s, but what’s new is how pervasive it feels. Even software companies, once the nerdiest of institutions, would now rather fail to produce functioning software than identify and cultivate expertise. Ten years ago, we, or at least I, failed to recognize “nerds are cool now” as the cultural trojan horse it was. Nerds, experts, were never going to be cool; the cool kids saw money and power accumulating around nerds, and they muscled their way in.
A good abstraction relieves you of concern for the particulars it abstracts away. A bad abstraction hides the particulars until the worst possible moment, at which point everything spills out in a messy heap and you have to confront all the details. Bad abstractions existed long before React and long before LLMs.
What then am I meant to take away from the piece on Zoroastrianism? I don’t know enough about the subject to navigate to the point around the distortions.
It’s an interesting blog, he seems well read, but surely he knows better than “Plato lived in a placid static Greek aristocratic world.” Plato lived through the execution of Socrates, the fall of the Athenian democracy, the tyranny of the Thirty, the humiliation by Sparta, the demolition of the walls. I’ll grant him “aristocratic”, but that’s all he gets. Makes me wonder whether he mischaracterized Zarathustra too, and my suspicion is yes.
Unfortunately, hoppy IPA seems to constitute the majority of the survivors. I have no interest personally in suffering through another hazy sour grapefruit triple ipa, but that seems to be about 90% of craft brewery output these days.
Gotcha: once you get into it, hacking the game gets to be way more fun than actually playing it. Way back in the day I used the DOS debug utility to edit my Bard’s Tale savegames. But once everybody has 127 hit points and -10 AC, the game gets way less interesting.
And like the article says, early computerization produced way more output than anybody could handle. In my opinion, we realized the true benefits of IT when ordinary users were able to produce for themselves exactly the computations they needed. That is, when spreadsheets became widespread. LLMs haven’t had their spreadsheet moment yet; their outputs are largely directed outward, as if more noise meant more productivity.
This is my process as well. I find it’s a good way for clearing out bad assumptions. Usually I’ve committed to my first idea, and writing it down gives me space to consider the alternatives. Usually I have a better idea that I haven’t worked out because the first one was lodged in my brain, and once that first idea is out on paper, I don’t have to worry about losing it anymore. The second idea is almost always better.
Making illegal states unrepresentable sounds like a great idea, and it is, but I see it getting applied without nuance. “Has multiple errors” can be a valid type. Instead of bailing immediately, you can collect all of the errors so that they can be reported all together rather than forcing the user to fix one error at a time.
A generic rejection is more than I got for feedback; I never heard back. Still, I thought the process of writing the materials was great. I don’t usually take the time to think about the arc of my experience in a holistic way. Do it for yourself if you do it at all; don’t go into it with high expectations for feedback and you won’t be disappointed.