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StableAlkyne

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Meta didn't buy pants

They also succeeded in the monumental task of making VR look boring.

VR platforms are an escapist's dream: you can be anything you want doing whatever you want. And how did they show off their fantasy world machine? They did office meetings in avatars of their real life selves.

Just spend one night in VRChat and everything Meta did will look like Plato's cave shadows.

Any performance gains caused by the internal bandwidth of the card will evaporate once you spill into system RAM, because now your bottleneck is probably a slow PCI lane.

And if your jobs do fit onto a 24GB card, then you are not the target user for the "AI mini PC" niche that these guys are trying to carve out

Exapunks (2018) 20 days ago

Exapunks and TIS-100 were a huge influence on my career trajectory.

I was always scared of assembly and low level stuff as a kid / college student, who mostly was trying to learn from random sites that assumed a lot of CS background.

Even though they're not near the complexity of x86, these games made me realize that assembly isn't really that scary. I still don't daily drive x86, but they gave me the confidence to go through a few Advent of Code and Project Euler problems. Having a really stripped down assembler was a fantastic learning tool!

Without them, I'd probably still only be working in Python (which is a great language, but abstracts a lot)

Clicking through to https://git-annex.branchable.com/no_llm_code/

It looks like git after 2.22 was dropped because it took an LLM commit. Same with ghc.

If I have to choose between this or git and the latest ghc, I think I'm going to just wait for someone to fork annex.

I don't even feel strongly one way or the other on AI stuff; pragmatically, I'm just not going to stop using the most widely used version controller, or Haskell, just for some guy's (forkable, AGPL licensed) hobby project.

UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing.

I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward.

Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR.

Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc.

Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.

These days I like to turn my work Mac off at the end of the week just so I feel a literal sense of closure

It's also just nice to start Monday with a fresh boot.

If nothing else, it keeps me from getting to the point of 200 tabs open that I'm totally definitely going to need again "soon"

Academics base their careers around citation numbers. You need publications and a high H-index to make it anywhere. Self-plagiarism reduces the effectiveness of that metric, which makes it harder to evaluate the actual impact of a researcher.

It should be no surprise that republishing in multiple journals was accepted in the pre-computer era, where citations were inherently harder to track (and thus less valuable as a metric).

Quoting Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I typed the project name into Google, and my repository appeared in the results. I entered the same query into Bing, and someone else’s repository appeared in the results

Side story, this kind of thing is what made me stop using Bing.

I had been using it as the default for searches (it sucks, but it's at least not Google), until I landed on a phishing page for my bank (I haven't committed it to memory yet). The page was a near perfect copy, and I would easily have gotten pwnd by it if they didn't have a modal asking me to run some code in my terminal for "security activation" that made me go "that's a little odd... Is this the right address OH SHIT that's a .ru domain"

I never see Google return phishing pages or typo squatters in the first page. Bing constantly returns that stuff in the first several results.

I would argue it's not even old people. Most people do not have any understanding of what's going on when you click a button. Website either acts as expected, or it doesn't "work"

If the button doesn't work, the average user is going to say "this most be broken" and then use a competitor (or contact your support). That's why it's really important to error-proof one's design (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke).

So instead of the button failing because you didn't check a box, pop up with a message telling them "Please click $box before continuing". Or if you want to be fancy, feed them whatever form you're giving them piecemeal, so that they can't continue until they finish this small part (e.g., have them input a name, then the next page only has a spot for an address, then the next page only has a spot for card information, then the next only has a spot to select shipping). Simple bite sized chunks anyone (well, anyone you would ethically want to sell to) can understand.

You could always do this, though.

Before gen code killed the freelance business model, there were hoards of people on Upwork/Fiverr willing to fuck other freelancers over and underpay themselves to make whatever barely-working slop you wanted.

Hell, before managers got the idea of AI layoffs, they had been off-shoring to low-quality code sweatshops for years. That was supposed to kill software engineering in the States 20 years ago. And it was just as frustrating (if not moreso) to get them to actually fulfill the project requirements.

you can hide and worry about protecting yourself in an ever more dangerous world

This is a childish mindset. It would be worth taking a defensive driving course if you haven't done so, it may be helpful.

join people like him and me and take a stand against bad behavior

Ironically, impeding faster traffic by camping the passing lane is also illegal in several states (yes, even if you're going the speed limit).

The graveyards are filled with people who had the right-of-way, who died knowing they were in the right.

And even if it's a slow speed accident, who cares about being right if you get a disability in the process? It is safer to let them through so they don't plow into you when you have to suddenly stop.

The only reason to LARP as a highway cop is just ego.

Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters.

This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison.

For better or for worse, people are cursed with ego, and we need to account for that when communicating with others. It is a failing of the platform (and a tragedy, because it is healthier to learn from a human) that it was unable to foster a positive environment.

I can at least see where those people are coming from

AI can be a phenomenal tool for development when used correctly...

... But there is also now a trend on GitHub of low to no-skill individuals going around spamming garbage work in order to play the numbers game for their resume. When asked why they did something or to change it, they just act as a middleman for the robot and show no understanding or initiative.

So I can understand how it's become a turnoff for some people. I used to think it was a dumb rule until a project I work on started being spammed with said junk PRs

That's the thing though, it was voluntary.

If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day.

I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.

IMO it was a combination of moderators and users

Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).

decades-outdated "scientific software" [still DOS prompts, in mid-2000s?!?!] to perform calculations in support of since-disproven theories (mostly: his).

Most computational chemistry is still done on the command line using decades old codes.

Gaussian is from the 70s, and it's still a major workhorse for small molecules. CP2K is from 2000 and is still popular for solid state.

It's actually a big barrier to entry in the field, because in addition to learning theory, you also have to know the Linux command line and whatnot

The original statement was about there being little incentive to create a work you don't "own"

Difficulty in copying is irrelevant to owning it.

Moreover, this does not address music or spoken word. A pre-copyright musician can just listen to a piece and play it in the next town over. A poet or storyteller can just memorize a work and retell it.

If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things

How do you explain the creative works of writing, music, and art that existed in the millennia of human history between the Mesopotamians and the Enlightenment era?

Mobile marketshare is probably an indicator of some kind of their future prospects.

I don't like Google either, but I don't think this is a fair comparison.

It's easy for anyone to beat Google in China when the state has decided to block their servers.

Bluesky is much better for this type of thing. It functions like X did 10 years ago: anyone can read the posts and subsequent thread, even if they don't have a Bluesky account.

The main non-political issue with X is that those without an account (or who are unable to login) may not be able to access it, which isn't ideal for a backup communications channel. Best of both worlds is to set up mirroring where you post to bluesky and automatically post a copy to X.

I use VSCode more often than PyCharm nowadays (same reasons as TFA, it's just too heavy), but unless something has changed in the last couple of months, you can disable the AI completions