Understood. My point is that the job requirements are almost mutually exclusive: must be physically and mentally fit enough for arduous travel and harsh work, yet basically suicidal.
I'd be surprised if there's a single person alive who would volunteer for a suicide mission to a miserable cold dark planet and could travel there for nine months in a tin can through a harsh radiation/muscle atrophy/psychological environment and arrive in any condition to conduct useful scientific work.
It seems quite common for the infrastructure teams to put up a dashboard just to keep a sense of what is going on, but it is then misinterpreted as a “leaderboard” and encourages the most prolific users to find creative ways to squander more to stay the “winner”. Management is slightly disappointed by the waste but also happy that staff are engaging with their future replacements.
For a while we’ve been fixing telemetry-reported crash bugs in the project I maintain, and now hardware bugs are showing up with some frequency. I was amazed how common they are. Sometimes data values (e.g. SP register) are corrupted, but other times even infallible operations (e.g loads of rodata constants) crash, indicating that the instruction itself was corrupted. So, yeah, I believe you’ll eventually see UUID collisions, but not because the underlying cryptanalysis was wrong.
Does the ground source heat up (or cool down) over time, making it less effective? The deep ground is very well insulated, which is why after a century of operation the London Underground is 10 degrees warmer. I wonder whether GSHP users need to balance their load by (say) consuming more heating than they actually need in winter so that summer cooling remains effective.
Another situation to avoid the XOR trick, even when registers are tight, is when swapping pointers in a garbage-collected language, since the intermediate bit patterns are invalid pointers: if a GC mark phase occurs at that moment, you might lose some objects, or spuriously mark others as live.
I once wrote a contract document in PostScript that changed the wording based on the date. Two parties could cryptographically sign an agreement in the document, which would change when printed on a later date.
One of the reasons we don’t use PostScript so much any more.
Also weird phrasing: "a staggering 1.8 degrees" begs the reader to think of it as a large number (which in fact it is, as you point out) yet their intent seems to be, ironically and paradoxically, to diminish it.
> The “will lead astray” part is concerning. If you already have a clear idea in mind, you probably don’t need to have the debate with coworkers.
Yeah, I certainly wouldn't trust it to run any distance unattended, and I started this project with strong ideas about the parameters of the design, so I know what I want and what won't fly. But as you say, it can help tease out unexpected pros and cons of certain choices along the way.
> In summary: obviate experts, receive correct guidance, save time —- pick any two.
It's simpler than that: it can't do the first, nor reliably the second, but it has saved me time.
I’ve been an overt AI hater but have found very recently that, though I still hate a great many things about AI, it has become useful for coding.
In 10m Gemini correctly diagnosed and then fixed a bug in a fairly subtle body of code that I was expecting to have to spend a couple hours working on.
I spent much of the past week using Gemini to build a prototype of a clean new (green field) system involving RPCs, static analysis, and sandboxing. I give it very specific instructions, usually after rounds of critical design discussions, and it generates structurally correct code that passes essentially valid tests. Error handling is a notable weakness. I review the code by hand after each step and often make changes, and I expect to go over the over the whole thing very carefully at the end, but it has saved me many hours this week.
Perhaps more valuable than the code has been the critical design conversation, in which it mostly is fluent at the level of an experienced engineer and has been able explain, defend, and justify design choices quite coherently. This saved time I would otherwise have spent debating with coworkers. But it’s not always right and it is easily led astray (and will lead astray), so you need a clear idea in mind, a firm hand, and good judgment.
One annoying trope I keep seeing in Gemini output is the punchy invented concept name in a tripartite list:
- “The Pledge”:…
- “The Turn”:…
- “The Prestige”:…
(For this particular example I used real terms from the stage magic world, at least according to Christopher Nolan’s film, as it captures the same meaningless-to-the-uninitiated quality.)