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leethomas

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Cannibalism 1 month ago

Not the OP but this line really got my attention

I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails

If you don't mind could you please elaborate on what tasks or knowledge your job requires that you feel an LLM isn't even _fractionally_ capable of? I understand if you said that out of emotion and frustration, but if you're serious I'm intensely and genuinely curious because nowadays it seems like the frontier models are capable of more programming tasks than not with the proper harness and engineer. When was the last time you tried?

I just want to emphasize that this is not a further provocation, just potentially in awe of what you do at your job and would like to know more.

Hi No Youjin 10 months ago

I regularly feel this connection to others in the past whenever I look at old photographs of people in a city I'm familiar with, and yes absolutely when I'm in historic buildings of any material. Often I've asked people I know if they experience the same and anecdotally it seems to be very rare or otherwise unusual.

The paper also noted that although reading with children is rare, it has not changed much over time.

This part really got to me, reading to one's children is rare? That's so sad. My toddler loves reading with me.

That writing is the only way to do deep, clear, thinking simply isn't true.

You're correct here.

Stephen Hawking is the first example that comes to mind.

The post is obviously speaking of the general population or at best average professional, and in my opinion choosing one of the most brilliant exceptional scientific minds of our lifetimes is not a good counterargument for a piece that speaks of a potential problem with society at large.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like these books that expand on the same concept:

* _Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed_ by Stephen Bertman

* _How to Do Nothing_ by Jenny Odell

The first book more than the 2nd, but the 2nd book is still a lovely read that may help you figure out for yourself how to practically deal with the pacing of modern life.

Why Lisp? 3 years ago

I like lisps syntactically. The only thing stopping me from using it more frequently is the lack of static typing. I wasn't always a stickler for static typing, but I've spent a lot of time working with Scala and TS and the main advantage for me is ease of refactoring and avoiding NPEs.

EDIT: What I'm continuously evaluating for myself is Clojure specifically

The main benefit of knowing multiple languages is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.

Hah, that's the least of benefits IMO. I'm not sure if you have no interest in the following or just forgot them, but these are things I enjoy: literature in the native language, comparing words and idioms and understanding how different languages influence each other and also how different cultures led to the creation of certain idioms. Conversations with people in their native tongue when I travel and the stories, adventures, and knowledge that unlocks.

To anyone reading this who only speaks English, while I agree with this person and the study that I don't necessarily feel smarter, learning another language is absolutely worth it for the advantages I stated above. My life is more rich because of it.

W3C Beta Website 3 years ago

I disagree, I think a degree of homogenization is good for information heavy websites, like government ones [1][2][3] and sites geared towards documentation. Consistency here is good because it makes things familiar and therefore means people spend less time trying to figure things out/find what they're looking for. Creativity isn't necessarily the point with sites like these. Now if you're marketing a product or showcasing something on the creative side, that's a different situation entirely and in that case I agree with you. The Bootstrap wave 10 years ago was indeed excessive.

[1] https://18f.gsa.gov/

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/project-gigabit-...

[3] https://www.healthcare.gov/

So culturally which style of working do you prefer yourself? Or if it’s not binary, are there parts of how software was written yesterday that you’d like to bring into organizations today, whether mentioned in the article or not?

I agree that the article generalizes, basically to the point of condescension.

Were you “there” though? I wasn’t so genuinely curious if his recollection reflects reality.

EDIT: they responded to another parent comment I created and were definitely working at Microsoft during the period.

Could someone of the appropriate age group with experience please confirm for me if everything this guy is saying was true generally speaking?

I’m honestly curious as I’m too young to know myself and I have no way of knowing whether the article was written with rose tinted glasses on.

But wow if it’s accurate the point about meetings and concentration sounds amazing, would love to go back to that.

functional-core/imperative-shell

Lol I’ve been learning Clojure for fun these last few days and I had to read this twice because the first time I thought I was looking at a function from a module.

we can deal with state and I/O with other constructs, like atoms and records

Can you elaborate on what you mean here or link to specific articles? I’m talking about the representing I/O side effects as records part.

While I haven’t read the announcement from Microsoft, it seems to me that the core issues he had were in the downplaying of AppGet and overall lack of attribution, compared to other package managers with less influence:

But the part that hurts the most was the announcement. AppGet, which is objectively where most ideas for WinGet came from, was only mentioned as another package manager that just happened to exist; While other package managers that WinGet shares very little with were mentioned and explained much more deliberately.

He also mentions that he would’ve appreciated better communication. It doesn’t seem to have been about being “entitled to revenue sharing”. He divorced himself from that completely:

Am I upset they didn’t hire me? Not really, after visiting the campus, I wasn’t too sure I wanted to work for such a big company, also moving from Canada to the U.S. wasn’t something I was too excited about.

And

I didn’t create AppGet to get rich or to become famous or get hired by Microsoft.

Whale fall 6 years ago

Thank you, I had recorded the definition of “whale fall” on October 16th last year in my log book as I had just learned about it, but I couldn’t remember from where or how.