HN user
Same story here. After installing dwm years ago, I've more or less stopped thinking about window managers as an open problem to be solved. I suppose one could run into trouble if they started patching it a lot, but in my experience you don't need to do that.
It's painfully apparent when you've reached the limitations of an LLM to solve a problem it's ill-suited for (like a concurrency bug), because it will just keep spitting out non-sense, eventually going in circles or going totally off the rails.
Van der Kolk lost his job due to pretty extensive sexual misconduct, so I think he's a pretty poor person to hold up as a hero.
I was curious about this accusation, so I read a bit about the scandal. [0]
It seems you are actually talking about Joseph Spinazzola, the executive director of Van der Kolk's trauma center, who was fired for sexual misconduct while Van der Kolk was on sabbatical. Van der Kolk was fired two months later, not for sexual misconduct, but for denigrating and bullying employees.
[0] https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2018/03/07/allegation...
preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14367
In my limited experiments with Gemini: it stops working when presented with a program containing fundamental concurrency flaws. Ask it to resolve a race condition or deadlock and it will flail, eventually getting caught in a loop, suggesting the same unhelpful remedies over and over.
I imagine this has to to with concurrency requiring conceptual and logical reasoning, which LLMs are known to struggle with about as badly as they do with math and arithmetic. Now, it's possible that the right language to work with the LLM in these domains is not program code, but a spec language like TLA+. However, at that point, I'd probably just spend less effort to write the potentially tricky concurrent code myself.
Personally, I don't trust LLMs to write code for me, generally speaking. That said, as of late I've been very pleased with the whole "shoehorn your problem to fit code examples found online" thing these LLMs do, in the very special case of massaging unix scripts, and where the "code examples found online" part seems to mostly amount to making fairly canonical reference to features documented in man pages that are plastered all over the web and haven't changed much in decades.
For questions that I know should have a straightforward answer, I think it beats searching Stackoverflow. Sure, I'll typically end up having to rewrite most of the script from scratch; however, if I give it a crude starting point of a half-functional script I've already got going, pairing that with very clear instructions on how I'd like it extended is usually enough to get it to write a proof of concept demonstration that contains enough insightful suggestions for me to spend some time reading about features in man pages I hadn't yet thought to use.
The biggest problem maybe is a propensity for these models to stick in every last fancy feature under the sun. It's fun to read about a GNU extension to awk that makes my script a couple lines shorter, but at best I'll take this as an educational aside than something I'd accept at the expense of portability.
Mathematics texts with titles that would mislead a beginner who naïvely takes words such as "basic" and "elementary" at face value are a bit of a running joke, particularly when you go past the undergraduate level.
Just look, for example, at the table of contents to André Weil's "Basic" Number Theory book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-61945-8#toc
FWIW, Colbert quipping that "reality has a well-known liberal bias" was clearly satirical of conservatives' tendency to trot out the canard of "liberal" bias.
You could just as well say he still agrees with your point about reality comporting more with a progressive understanding of ethics, while at the same time parodying Fox News for incoherently making spurious charges of "liberalism" at every turn.
Rather amusingly, the author recently espoused the viewpoint that bloggers who wanted to stand out should avoid using tools like ChatGPT: https://youtu.be/avASDgtw9k0?t=678
It's not obvious to me that this blog post was synthesized whole cloth from an LLM. On the other hand, in that same interview, the author encourages the use of LLMs for idea exploration, and it's entirely possible that this is what he did.
In fact, using an LLM in this way may itself may be an SEO trick, in the sense that he simply wanted to boost his search rank (inasmuch as it's still the case that longer articles are more highly ranked) by beefing up what would have otherwise been a very short article.
Interesting. This is actually behavior that I already prefer and enable in Firefox. It makes sense when you leave browser instances open for long periods of time (with multi-account containers for a large number of tabs that you save and restore the session of) and use a password manager to sign in when you do restart.
"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."
—Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
Hacker News lacks a few distinguishing features that are characteristic of modern corporate social media: in particular, algorithmically driven feeds based on engagement metrics optimized for an advertising business model. The closest you get to that on here is the main page featuring YC companies from time to time (which is a far cry from a Tik Tok rabbit hole).
That being said, voting mechanisms which change the order of user-contributed content is hallmark of social media shared by Hacker News. I like to think, though, that this place has a strong enough community to prevent the voting dynamics from devolving to what you see on the most politicized subreddits. (I'll mention that the quality on here is in no small part the result of dang's diligent moderation, btw!)
An interesting message board to compare Hacker News with in this regard is actually 4chan. The former is maybe less social media like inasmuch as we have no inline images here, so there is no room for the sort of meme culture you see on the latter. On the other hand, 4chan is entirely bereft of voting (and even accounts to assign karma to, although reusable tripcodes come the closest), and as such is in some ways even more egalitarian (in contrast to non-anonymous social media).
My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would want to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far left rage).
Since we both seem to use Facebook in the same way, I'll just point out that you can reduce the junk to 0% by skipping your timeline, and going to Feeds: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
That will give you a feed of pages you've followed, and doesn't have any algorithmic or suggested content. I think the only pitfall is that it only shows you recently posted content.
Browser extension solution to that problem: https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions
Check out Conrad Barski's Land of Lisp: http://landoflisp.com/
The phrase was made famous in an influential essay[0] by Richard P. Gabriel, where he laments Lisp's relative failure to compete with Unix.
In Gabriel's opinion, Unix proved to follow the more adaptive design strategy in certain ways (in spite of his involvement with and admiration for Lisp), and the phrase "Worse is better" is meant to capture the essence of that advantageous strategy (as outlined in the essay).
The essay is worth reading and is a bit more elaborate than just saying "less is more", or "keep it simple, stupid".
You jest, but as famously emphasized by Steve Ballmer [0], Microsoft was (is?) all about developers!
Pardon me, but can we clarify what you mean by saying that "masks aren't helping much"? Do you mean that masks are not effective in stopping the spread of COVID on an individual basis? Or do you simply mean that as a matter of policy, mask mandates have failed to stop the spread of the virus throughout the population in general?
What would be particularly nice is if it became the norm for LLM users to be expected to not only supply the log of prompts that produced a given output, but also the specific LLM, making the entire process reproducible and verifiable.
Of course this would possibly exclude using SaaS-based LLMs like ChatGPT in places like schools, and as such it might make sense to require students to only utilize open ones. Or maybe, if OpenAI provided a verification service whereby a prompt could be checked against the output it supposedly produced in the past at some point (even if the behavior of the chatbot had since changed).
They're busy thinking about much more important things.
Generally I agree (because the content of modern mathematics is largely abstract), but to nitpick a bit, number theory is part of mathematics too!
Ramanujan and Euler, for example, certainly cared a lot about 'arithmetic', and historically, many parts of mathematics have been just as 'empirical' in terms of calculating things as they've been based on abstract proof.
Notably, this material is based on an earlier paper on the design of algorithms by induction, also by the author: http://akira.ruc.dk/~keld/teaching/CSS_e10/Manber88.pdf
Interesting work! Thanks for putting this together.
One potentially problematic thing about the new Imgur policy is that it will break machine learning projects that depend on Imgur for NSFW data. For example, here's a project relying on Imgur links in order to train a classifier that detects adult content:
Hmm, I suppose I'm inclined to agree with you here.
If Wikipedia chooses not to adopt a style guideline on matters like this, his little quest to robo-edit this phrase is unrepresentative of Wikipedians.
Pedantic, perhaps, but within the purview of an editor of an encyclopedia enforcing a style guideline!
One thing I missed from Frank Herbert's work in watching Villeneuve's adaptation was the intimate connection to the characters you get from reading all the dialogue. I suppose a film version is going to cut some things, but Villeneuve takes the other extreme, being so minimal with dialogue, that I felt it unnecessarily suffered here.
Not Wang tiles, but a quasiperiodic tiling discovered by Robert Ammann: https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~greg/floors.html
Yep! Evil for Emacs, IntelliJ, ranger, ksh93 shell history editing (this one includes search!), DuckDuckGo, Fastmail, Gmail....
"Shards are the secret ingredient in the webscale sauce": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
Google turns up a Clojure library called Avout [0].
The library itself isn't too important here, but its website cites the philosophy of Rich Hickey and Alfred North Whitehead on state being an illusion:
Rich Hickey has spoken eloquently on mutable state in his talk "Are We There Yet?" [1]. To summarize, Rich and Alfred North Whitehead [2] don't believe in mutable state, it's an illusion. Rather, there are only successions of causally-linked immutable values, and time is derived from the perception of these successions. Causally-linked means the future is a function of the past; processes apply pure functions to immutable values to derive new immutable values, and we assign identity to these chains of values, and perceive change where there is none.
Hickey's talk itself is quite interesting and goes into detail on the relevance of Whitehead's ideas in his book Process and Reality to concurrent programming.
[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hi...
[2] https://archive.org/details/AlfredNorthWhiteheadProcessAndRe...