jasonhanley

I’ve recently been perplexed by the new policy to charge 25% tariffs on incoming goods from America’s two closest suppliers: Canada and Mexico.

So I decided to put the question to 3 of the most advanced AIs I have access to using their “reasoning” models.

You know what's wild? Not ever having heard of him, I can find out who he is and how this relates to the conversation in milliseconds.

For others' benefit:

"Kurt Vonnegut explored themes of humans being observed by extraterrestrial beings in a zoo-like setting in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. ... While this scenario involves humans being placed in a zoo by aliens, it does not specifically depict artificial intelligence (AI) as the captors. However, Vonnegut did address the impact of automation and machines on human society in his debut novel, Player Piano."

Amazing times we live in. Strange and scary, but also amazing.

As far as I can tell, the training is still going pretty well.

Once humans learn enough, they are able to start coming up with and evaluating their own ideas.

This ability isn't 100% apparent with current public AI models, but I strongly suspect that this is happening behind the scenes.

Certainly researchers are already using AI extensively to improve AI, and that really has the potential to go exponential.

I agree the multimodal stuff is amazing. I'm seriously impressed with the new Gemini 2.0 family of models and can't wait until the full multimodal capabilities are in general release.

In terms of the HeyGen vid, it's passable, but that was something I literally whipped up in 10 minutes. You can make ones that are much, much better if you invest in creating better training material. The voice and video model in this case only used the one 3-minute source video.

Funny you mention the "people zoo" thing. That's actually part of a sci-fi story I've been trying to write since I was in my teens. Roughed out here: https://youtu.be/2KLdaVs_ugw

I've quit caffeine several times on and off, but overall I think that a small amount of caffeine does more for mental acuity than none at all, even considering sleep quality.

But it's really easy to overdo. And really easy to keep ramping up your dose as your body adjusts.

If you just want to _reduce_ your caffeine intake, I found that the easiest way is to pre-mix different ratios of regular and decaf in a container and use that. You can make 50:50 or 25:75 regular:decaf and easily taper off your intake (especially towards the afternoon/evening) while still enjoying a nice cup of coffee :)

Dare I say there's a mini-movement starting? :D https://www.jasonhanley.com/blog/2018/09/making-websites-eff...

Here's hoping...

If anything, the rants about this are getting better. That's probably a good sign. This rant is at least 10x better than mine from last year :) https://www.jasonhanley.com/blog/2017/08/when-did-software-g...

To the author: I'm with you. Recently rebuilt my website and blog as an experiment in efficiency.

Down here. Hardly news considering it's Twitter :P

I feel like stuff like this is why golang and rust were created.

(edit: Forgot about Rust, sorry!)

Windows NT4 was "peak stability" in my experience.

Although some have said that Windows 2000 was more stable, I found the fusion of 95/98 into the NT kernel made it less so.

As a software developer and manager of software development projects, I wouldn't say that software quality has increased significantly since I started working professionally in the industry (1997).

As mentioned elsewhere, web apps frequently "crash" (ie. fatal JS error) and have strange behavior.

And those bugs are often platform/browser/version-specific so very difficult to fix.

Thanks :) That's what I was hoping for.

It's a serious problem with no clear solution.

Didn't really expect to hit HN front page with my random rant :)

In any case, glad I was hosted on Google infrastructure but embarrassed by the bloated, default Blogger template.

Interested in suggestions for simple, lightweight alternative.

Medium, Square, WordPress, etc. all seem to suffer from similar insane bloat.

Agreed. I used Office XP (2002) until... I think about 2013 or so where I started running into incompatibility problems that just couldn't be resolved no matter what I tried.

This is true. Except that now the "desktop" apps are even worse!

Now they've taken web apps and packaged them up to run their own web server and browser locally with even more abstraction layers that chew through your system resources.

What a strange world.

The irony is not lost on me.

The unfortunate thing is that Blogger started out being fairly light and clean -- at least it was back when I migrated to it.

At least static site generators are coming back into fashion. I've always considered them a better solution for media/news/blog type sites.

I was actually just thinking about this.

Yeah, it probably doesn't really help the situation when you build several layers of abstraction in an interpreted language that runs in a virtual space on a virtual machine using another abstraction layer running on virtual cores that go through complex OS layers that somehow eventually possibly map to real hardware.

That's the type of example I've come across all too frequently. Software that's 5-10 years old, has all the same functionality, uses a fraction of the resources, and is often "better" in several ways.

Older versions of Android Facebook seem massively faster and use a fraction of the RAM while providing (nearly?) the same functions and features.

As a developer and development manager, I haven't personally noticed major improvements in any of those metrics over the past 20 years.

But I'd definitely be interested in any studies that have tried to measure these over long time periods.

This is all very true, but I feel like we (as users) haven't really gained proportionally compared to the increase in computing power and storage.

For example IDEs: Visual Studio in 2017 is certainly better than Visual Studio in 1997, but do those advancements really justify the exponential growth in hardware requirements?

How'd we get so little usable functionality increase for such a massive increase in size/complexity?

I considered that but worried the comments might get unruly. But perhaps I'm prematurely optimizing :)

Does anyone know a good way to do this with MediaWiki? (I'm new to the platform)

Is the Comments extension a decent way to go?

I'm the CTO of an organization that has been delivering cheap tablets with educational content to rural areas for several years: http://www.rumie.org/

Some of the challenges: 1) Making sure the tablets actually make it to the people that need them and aren't repurposed/resold 2) Lack of internet so all content and apps need to be offline-friendly 3) Loading the tablets with content appropriate to the region (language, cultural)

These should be normalized for the number of births per year.

My wife and I both have Moto G's and they are amazing value. I couldn't imagine spending the kind of money some people do on smartphones when great options like the Moto G are around.

TL;DR “That's a problem for future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy.”

This is such a huge indication of the horribly sad state of interviewing and hiring programmers.

The current process results in hiring people that are awesome at interview quiz questions, but can't sit down and do the actual day-to-day work.

I'm pretty sure Terrafugia is much further ahead: http://www.terrafugia.com/aircraft/transitionR

But competition is always good!

Simple 5-step methodology: http://blog.pmrobot.com/2011/09/5-steps-to-estimate-software...

My favs: 1) Don’t Wait to Be Told What to Do 2) Take Responsibility for Your Mistakes 3) Speak Up, Not Out

PHP is a solid workhorse. Quick to prototype, and once a PHP app is up and running, it just works.

Wikipedia, Facebook, MailChimp, WordPress, tons more -- they all load fast and are hardly ever down.

You can argue all day about the fine details of programming languages, but PHP is popular for good reasons.