kerblang

Ever since the first programming language the goal was to make the work easier, although there are different kinds of "easy", and sometimes you end up worse off because tools don't live up to promises.

The human element is "What do I want?" You have ideas about how you need things to work. Some folks don't care much at all about how things work, just that they can shove a thing out the door and get paid with minimal effort. Sometimes their boss is completely in agreement. Sometimes things fall apart because nobody cared enough to bother, and sometimes even that doesn't matter, and everybody gets paid anyhow.

Sometimes you wish things mattered more, and sometimes they do.

Check the 2nd section of article https://github.com/clawkwork/clawk#why-a-vm

A lot of people would yell "docker isn't secure!" but if you're running Docker on MacOS (and Windows, I think) you're already running a Linux VM. But if you really wanna let your agent YOLO their way along, Docker is kinda restrictive, so that a full VM lets it install things, start services, and so on.

In case anyone else read the "flipped on" as "flipped the switch on" rather than "reversed course on", no, it's the latter.

I expect that a lot of bad norms that crop up in various programming communities will get tossed out after years of dysfunction, often as a result of outsiders and younger people arriving, and stating the obvious: This doesn't make sense. It's actually nice to know this when dealing with all of the mess in the present. You can't change it now, but eventually someone will.

But yes, LLMs are likely to force permanent conformity.

One could also talk about how language in general shifts with the population, but LLMs are likely to prevent it. One would think anthropologists are already looking into this experimentally...

It doesn't even matter and isn't worth arguing about what emotional state the submitter obtains. I don't care if they even achieve nirvana and ascend to permanent buddhahood.

What matters is that they are wasting the time & patience of someone who is doing good work that others benefit from.

Any happiness gained from doing that to someone is parasitic.

It's not a lack of respect for you; it's a lack of respect for the work itself. That lack is being rewarded and encouraged.

Managers will be sure to tell you how much they respect you. Ask them if they respect the work and you'll get a blank stare.

Important keyboard design note the author would agree with but didn't point out: Function keys are supposed to be divided into groups of four with a distinct gap between each group. This makes it much easier for the wayward touch-typist to find things.

BTW I've gone back to wired keyboard because most companies assume people who prefer wireless prefer as many unnecessary bells and whistles as possible to the point of compromising the design. There is no concept of some features being better than others, just a black/white everything/nothing.

Also refer to automobiles, tv's, all modern design...

There is very clearly an angry backlash, even if it is a backlash against phantoms, even if people are only demanding a better liar than the previous. There are no psychological black holes; the stress builds and eventually explodes.

... IF that's your main performance problem.

I already know I'm dealing with huge perf issues caused by ORM & lazy-load semantics. I/O abuse is usually going to be so, so much worse than memory/cache issues. Java is mainly used for business information systems, where I/O is king. Plain vanilla memory abuse is also a big one.

But my main problem is a mgmt convinced the magic wand of AI will make all sorts of problems dissapear, and it's going to take 5 years for them to realize nope.

It's still fun to learn about cache optimization though, esp. when someone makes it reasonably digestible like this. And maybe it also helps people to recognize that OOP is not some great over-arching zen truth of truths.

Oh that version actually made sense.

Going back to our newer game, I realized that I am supposed to figure out where the number given should fall on the line.

A case study in modern useability - looks a lot cooler, can't figure it out.

I feel stupid but I could not bring myself to click the "sign" button and continue gameplay.

A lot of electronic contracts are done like that and... nope, not clicking it... Mmmmm.... nope.

One computer scientist speculated that his LLM had attained sentience.

How did he reach that conclusion? Basically, he asked “Are you conscious?”, the machine responded “Yes”, and that was that.

Oh, come on now. This is referring to Blake Lemoine, and while I doubt his conclusions, he wasn't being as simplistic as all that. He's not completely stupid.

There's no need to be snide

Adjusted for inflation?

edit - sorry, it is in fact adjusted, text is kinda hard to see

This is not a writeup of "Ada is better than everything else". The author is explaining how Ada achieved safety/reliability goals that your favorite language independently evolved much later on. That is why they kept bringing up year-of-arrival for comparison.

Examples would be a nice bonus but I think the author eschewed such because they weren't interested in writing a tutorial. They had a very specific point to make and stuck to it, resulting in a very informative but concise article that reads well because of its highly disciplined authorship.

How about "Working with AI just feels like having a team of junior employees who are completely unscrupulous, sychophantic and sometimes profoundly stupid psychopathic liars"?

oh. sorry, had a decent excuse for its horribility, now i have less of one.

Am a middle-aged man, don't have kids, don't see it as a trifling problem, and I don't agree with the libertarian free-speech-at-all-costs angle.

Instead I think a) kids shouldn't be on the internet and b) the public school system is a barely supervised dumpster fire.

Am amused that someone feels compelled to justify writing a db in C#. Such conscientiousness!

I'm not sure authors of Cassandra, ElasticSearch, MongoDB (and more...?) ever had the slightest twinge of uncertainty about whether a managed memory env would cause far more problems than it fixed, even with less native tooling than in C#. Java bros DGAF

I really like the idea of implementing the std lib separate from the language. I think that would be a huge blessing for Java, Go and others, ideally allowing faster iteration on most things given that we usually don't need a reinvention of the compiler/runtime just to make a better library.

Try replacing the battery. Seems accessible enough at first, but ingenious engineering has made batteries the modern rubik's cube of auto maintenance.

This meant I could start the computer, log in, potentially start and use several applications and only then turn on the screen.

I mean... well... responsiveness matters to me too, and I am impressed by such inspired productivity, but... I'm also confused. Why not turn on the screen - the monitor, right?

Now thinking about how gui lag might impact the sight-impaired, tangential as that is...

They are trumpist, because Trump is highly narcissistic and disgusted by _weakness_ in others. They are elitist Nietzschean social darwinists at heart and believe IQ should determine social status.

The populism stuff doesn't mean "We're protecting the little guy from elites who conspire against him." It means "We're protecting ourselves from other elites who conspire against us - but the little guy will still be better off with us as the authoritarian elite."

The most consistent answer I see here, in the article, and in people I've talked to is: Taking responsibility. It becomes a moral question. I think if you want to be seen as an adult - as many kids desperately hope to do - responsibility is the most reliable way to get that perception from others, especially from actual adults. The popular alternative of pursuing vice is not going to be so effective.

Quite a few folks will push back and insist that such an assessment is unfair, which is fine, if the world agrees with you, or if you just don't care.

It means, I passed the text.

Ha. Well I guess you did, _this time_.

Can we not just ask an AI to correct our spelling mistakes and leave the rest alone?

The patient (the article's author) is a covered entity. Patient data does not pass thru email, period. Even if the patient wants to send email and says, "Just blame me, I don't care!" The answer is a flat no, and nobody is going to risk getting in trouble for that.

I'm not gonna say "incorrect" like the absolutists. It's an interesting hypothesis, at least.

But I will insist that executives are more driven by FOMO than a teenager.

Under HIPAA requirements emailing personal medical info is a massive no-no. Admittedly, this is for the patient's protection, and of course being blind is not much of a secret... but it's completely understandable that email would be strongly discouraged. Nobody wants to get in trouble for breaking the rules.

Honestly, being able to accept a fax is great, although I would think any properly outfitted modern office that does accept fax would be able to route them straight to document storage rather than a printer. There are probably even internet services that can just act as a fax dumpster and hold PDF/image file for perusal at one's leisure. Yes even the govt can figure this sort of thing out.

Many Americans turn on subtitles when watching tv/movies

Gone are the days when American actors flaunted those crisply enunciated albeit preposterous "continental" accents

The soviet empire collapsed, even in the same lifetimes of many who saw its rise.

Lasted longer than the Nazi empire, I'll admit, but both were weak