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strawhatguy

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strawhatguy
·3 месяца назад·discuss
It's one of the reasons the US military is so good. As a soldier, you know they will come for you, behind enemy lines, so you can fight like hell, knowing that your fellows have your back.

The gains in morale can not be underestimated.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Yes it's quite the blend!
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
There's probably a case for both. Core logic might benefit from hard types deep in the bowels of unchanging engine.

The real world often changes though, and more often than not the code has to adapt, regardless of how elegant are systems are designed.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
I actually wonder about his conclusion that 50 years hence English will be unrecognizable.

There will be changes of course. Yet we are also more connected than ever, whereas the next town over would be a whole day trip in the past. The separation allows for more divergence.

Well, maybe if we get to Mars, differences might crop up again.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
In fairness , Dickens is quite dry. My mind would wonder off.

In some sense, it's better these days, competition has led to care for the reader that probably didn't exist as much then, since so few people can read.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
The alternative is one type, with many functions that can operate on that type.

Like how clojure basically uses maps everywhere and the whole standard library allows you to manipulate them in various ways.

The main problem with the many type approach is several same it worse similar types, all incompatible.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Iterating often is not helpful for stable systems over time.

I like go's library it's got pretty much everything needed out of the box for web server development. Backwards compatibility is important too.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
But open source didn't do the Linux model. It did the GitHub model of open to anyone.

If anything the heirarchy of trust the Linux model uses will be more important now.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Possibly, but AIs might shift to more curated content, which has it's own dangers I suppose.

There are definitely challenges, but I've been around long enough now that we'll adapt, and muddle through.

The trouble will come from humans' reaction to the changes, less from the changes themselves
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
God please no. Do not involve government in this. That's a terrible terrible idea, and would do the opposite of intended.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
It could push back more, true. Although it's role in pair programming is the driver, you are the navigator. I often begin a session with exploring and asking it questions of the code as I would a junior developer.

Saves this old man from typing anyway.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
If all software could be as good as sqlite, I would not care how they do open source
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Yes; yet... I thought the efficiency per compute has to do more with the nm process shrinking the die than anything else. That and power use is divided by so many more instructions per second
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Actually, I wonder how they measured the 'speed' of coding, maybe I missed it. But if developers can spend more time thinking about the larger problems, that may be a cause of the slowdown. I guess it remains to be seen if the code quality or feature set improves.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Speaking just for myself, AI has allowed me to start doing projects that seemed daunting at first, as it automates much of the tedious act of actually typing code from the keyboard, and keeps me at a higher level.

But yes, I usually constrain my plans to one function, or one feature. Too much and it goes haywire.

I think a side benefit is that I think more about the problem itself, rather than the mechanisms of coding.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Yep, I can't trust software that has shone clear instructions to produce incorrect results, like Gemini did with it's image generation famously.

If nothing else, it means Gemini's team has priorities other than the results. Necessarily that means they will lag behind others who have clearer focus

Then the only way for Google to get ahead is to help promote regulation of AI to do what they're already doing. I know it's coming cuz regulators can't help themselves, but No thanks.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Okay. If you’re being vague, you get vague results.

Golang and Claude have worked well for me, on existing production codebases, because I tell it precisely what I want and it does it.

I’ve never found generic “find performance issues” just by reading the code helpful.

Write specifications, give it freedom to implement, and it can surprise you.

Hell once it thought of how to backfill existing data with the change I was making, completely unasked. And I’m like that’s awesome
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
You could fix versions, and probably should. However willful disregard of prior interfaces encourages developers code to follow suit.

It’s not like Clojure or Common Lisp, where a decades old software still runs, mostly unmodified, the same today, any changes mainly being code written for a different environment or even compiler implementation. This is largely because they take breaking user code way more seriously. Alot of code written in these languages seem to have similar timelessness too. Software can be “done”.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
All I know is that claude code is pretty dang good, grok's nice for searching info, and Google's Gemini hasn't really been in my workflow at all. Neither chatgpt, beyond when it first came out.

Maybe I'm odd, but a Google search is even rare (usually use duck duck go) so I don't know, Google may have problems on it's hands. Possible anyway.
strawhatguy
·5 месяцев назад·discuss
Spending is the issue. That money is spent on something, and it isn't (all) teaching either.

The chart in the link below shows employee vs students headcounts over 6 years. Even though student rolls went down almost all employment in the school system went up. Do we really need a +22% increase in Student Support Services when there are fewer students? Even teachers (only?) went up by 2.8% according to this (and again, students went down)? And why would librarians of all positions seem to be the ones whose positions were cut?

Basically, 'education' is nothing more than a jobs program for the politically connected, as clearly the focus is not on kids. And education is safe, because it's hard to argue against it, even if you're not talking about actual teachers.

Honestly I would expect if funding were cut, and particularly the admin, support, 'paraprofessional', and other non-teaching staff were fired, you'd find those test scores approach the pre-pandemic levels.

Will that happen? Of course not. These are politically connected people after all. We should all be angry.

https://x.com/johnfaig/status/2019108852365656477?s=20