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dcotter

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But for LLMs, my task might be something like "setting up apache is easy, but I've never done it so just tell me how do it so I don't fumble through learning and make it take way longer." The task was setting up Apache. The task was assigned to me, but I didn't really do it. There wasn't necessarily some higher level task that I merely needed Apache for. Apache was the whole task! And I didn't do it!

To play devil's advocate: Setting up Apache was your task. A) Either it was a one-off that you'll never have to do again, in which case it wasn't very important that you learn the process inside and out, or b) it is a task you'll have to do again (and again), and having the LLM walk you through the setup the first time acts as training wheels (unless you just lazily copy & paste and let it become a crutch).

I frequently have the LLM walk me through an unfamiliar task and, depending on several factors such as whether I expect to have to do it again soon, the urgency of the task, and my interest and/or energy at the moment, I will ask the LLM follow-up questions, challenge it on far-fetched claims, investigate alternative techniques, etc. Execute one command at a time, once you've understood what it's meant to do, what the program you're running does, how its parameters change what it does, and so on, and let the LLM help you get the picture.

The alternative is to try to piece together a complete picture of the process from official documentation like tutorials & user manuals, disparate bits of information in search results, possibly wrong and/or incomplete information from Q&A forums, and muddle through lots of trial and error. Time-consuming, labor-intensive, and much less efficient at giving your a broad-strokes idea of how the whole thing works.

I much prefer the back-and-forth with the LLM and think it gives me a better understanding of the big picture than the slow and frustrating muddling approach.

I was looking for Hungarian and didn't see it, unfortunately. I learned a smattering of it some twenty years ago in a study abroad. I remember it was difficult, but fun, to learn.

Three things made it difficult, as I remember: one, it is agglutinative, so you get strings of suffixes on the ends of nouns, verbs, etc.; two, it has zero overlap with English vocabulary, or even the Romantic & Germanic ancestors of English; three, vowel harmonizing takes a bit of practice. None of these is particularly demanding, but they have no equivalents in English.

But a very aesthetically satisfying language once you get the hang of it.

I can't speak for hummus, but I've noticed ice creams with guar gum, xantham gum, locust bean gum, and so on, have an almost foamy texture that is quite unnatural when compared to ice creams with minimally processed ingredients (i.e. cream, milk, eggs, sugar, etc.).

My guess is hummus would suffer similarly, but I'll wait for a connoisseur to confirm.

Why penalize all truck and SUV drivers for the small number that cause accidents? I'm okay with registration fees being proportional to weight, but raising fees for SUVs and lowering them for EVs? This just smells like culture war to me: EVs good, SUVs bad!

This is the thing I miss most about in-person work. I used to overhear conversations and jump in or just listen and learn something, and this just doesn't happen with Slack, Zoom, etc.

Serious question: Why not plant trees & shrubs & grasses in parking lots? (as in, in containers or medians). Shade the parking lot and make it less hot. Make it prettier to park in and attract birds & other wildlife. You could even charge people for the privilege of parking somewhere nice for a change.

Not silly. Here's why:

1. Passing on the right, i.e. passenger side, means being in the driver's blind spot longer.

2. On- and off-ramps are almost always on the right, as are police making traffic stops, ambulances, cars pulled over on the shoulder, sidewalks, pedestrians, cross streets, etc.

3. Slower traffic is supposed to be in the right lane (because of #2), so a car accelerating to pass the car in front of it, suddenly in a lane of slow traffic, is a safety hazard to the slower drivers, regardless of #2.

I'm writing from the US, so for me left lane = driver's side.

Know what's already illegal? Passing on the right:

Laws that cover passing when crossing the centerline of the roadway is not required (where there are multiple lanes in the same direction), often say something like this:

The driver of a vehicle overtaking another vehicle proceeding in the same direction shall pass to the left thereof at a safe distance and shall not again drive to the right side of the roadway until safely clear of the overtaken vehicle.

source: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/beat-tick...

Off the top of my head: Libraries already exist, and the regulatory regime to oversee subscription services doesn't.

Meaning, no one has to do all the stuff required to bring a new government agency into being (including raising taxes or borrowing money), there are no new regulations to comply with (which would cost the streaming services more, which would cost you more), you don't have an new, unnecessary agency brought into being which will literally never go away and increase the size of permanent government we all have to pay for and live with, you haven't expanded the scope of government intrusion in our lives, etc.

I'm surprised literally no one suggested just cancelling the vast majority of your subscription services and cutting ties with unethical companies. The suggestion that poor people need yet more help from the government because they're too dumb, busy, or gullible to know when they're about to get screwed is condescending. The suggestion that the core audience of WSJ and HN needs this is pitiful.

Want to watch a movie? Borrow the DVD from your local library. Want to watch it repeatedly? Buy it off Amazon. Want to read a book? Library. Amazon. AbeBooks. Want to get fit? Go for a hike. Do pushups. Buy a barbell and free weights.

Here's my personal finance plan: Check your bank account daily. Cancel services you don't need. Don't do 30-day trials. Don't sign up for overdraft "protection" at $40 a pop. Use cash if you can't handle plastic, and don't use credit cards. Just don't borrow money, period, if you're not using it to buy a house. Don't let anyone take money out of your checking account but you. If a company screws you, never do business with them again. Pay up front for a year of service and mark when it renews. Write checks before you give out your card numbers.

I know, Stone Age, right? But I like to keep my life simple.

A Theory of Grift 3 years ago

In my experience, small businesses often charge more than larger businesses, perhaps because they don't benefit from an economy of scale or increased negotiating leverage with suppliers. For example, compare Wal-Mart to a small general store or Home Depot to a small hardware store. It's much more common that the big box stores charge less for the same products.

Also, from what I remember of microeconomics, the free market model assumes a number of things that are not always true in reality, at least not all at the same time: robust competition among suppliers, perfect knowledge among consumers, rational decision-making behavior. Like any model, the more reality differs from the assumptions, the worse the model is at prediction, but the basic laws of supply and demand, where the price of a good is where the supply and demand curves meet, still hold.

Clojure to die for 12 years ago

Perhaps an HN article analyzing which HN articles sink and which swim sometime in the future?

I would like to see keyboards with flexible layouts, where you could reconfigure the positions and sizes of the keys as you choose, so that if you wanted to replace half the spacebar with backspace or move the numbers from the top row to a 3x3 grid on the far side of the keyboard, you could do that. Hackable keyboards, in essence.

Why not replace caps lock with a double-tap of the Shift key? This has the advantages of distance (still close at hand when needed) and memorability (Shift upcases temporarily, Shift-Shift upcases indefinitely) and eliminates one of the less useful keys at the same time.

Yeah, the whole restaurant metaphor was distracting. Twitter has always seemed to me more like an infrastructure project: we build the highways, you supply the vehicles and the destinations. The thing I've never understood is how that model is supposed to be sustainable -- in a real infrastructure project, everyone chips in, through taxes. With Twitter, no one chips in and everyone complains about the ads. How is that supposed to work?

My Paleo Media Diet 14 years ago

You should check out Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not A Gadget. Very thoughtful philosophical treatment of digital technology and its limitations.

Personally, in the last year I've drastically cut back on my time online and upped the time spent in the real world, whether visiting with friends & family, playing pool at the pub down the street, biking in the city, whatever. It's a much more immediate, and in many ways richer, source of information than Twitter, Facebook, etc. Oh, and I've gone back to a feature phone from a smartphone after realizing it was basically a shiny tracking device in my pocket with an expensive monthly upkeep ;-)

If their ranking algorithm is pushing reviews with high page-views to the top, then perhaps it's as simple as negative reviews getting more attention, either because negativity draws people in or because people are more interested in trying not to have an awful experience than in having a great one. On the other hand, if the algorithm is optimized around other values (credibility, for instance), then it wouldn't make sense for reviewers with no history to get their reviews pushed to the top. Hard to say, given that it's a trade secret.

To my mind, it already is creepy. In fact, I wonder why anyone continues to use Facebook with all its potential for leaking sensitive personal information? It seems like every day I hear another story of someone embarrassing himself on Facebook when it reveals, unbeknownst to him, that he's been watching Arabic dance party videos for 2 hours, etc.

I totally agree. Personally, I've been using checklists. I use them to remind myself to put good architecture in place. I use them to remind myself to check for common bugs (calling functions or methods of null objects, forgetting to update the database schema when I update the model, etc). I use them to remind myself to go ahead and add the sorts of features that make a new feature more complete (email alerts, audit trails, reporting, etc). It may be a basic step, but it makes the development and testing go much more smoothly, and in my opinion, most web devs would become better developers faster by boning up on the basics than by learning more advanced subjects like algorithms and functional programming.

Clojure 1.2 RC1 16 years ago

I'm from a C#/.NET background, but have been incorporating more functional programming techniques into my programming in the last couple of years. This, combined with my deepening understanding of the f.p. aspects of JavaScript (after reading JS: The Good Parts) and an interest in Lisp (after reading On Lisp by Paul Graham) got me really interested in f.p., and I started picking up Clojure in my spare time. It struck me as a standardized Lisp with access to lots of great libraries, which overcomes two of the main previous disadvantages of Lisp. I'm hoping it becomes more mainstream in the years to come, as it's a lot of fun to work on, but not something I can make much use of at work, unfortunately.

Personally, I lean toward thinking that sort of thing is too complex and unpredictable to determine algorithmically, but then again, dating sites have evidently done well in the last 10 years, and analog matchmaking sites did well before that, so maybe. My problem with solving the friendship/dating problem algorithmically is that it seems like a good answer to the wrong question. My best friends are the ones that I have a ton of shared experiences with (going to high school or college together, knowing each other for 10+ years, etc.), and the best "dates" I've been on have happened serendipitously. I don't know how you'd address those dynamics with something as necessarily superficial as a questionnaire. If anything, I could see a questionnaire being a good screening device for people you almost certainly would not click with, but I think it'd be almost impossible to predict the opposite. Just my two cents, though.