quanticle

Mail delivery doesn't seem to be working, or, at the very least, is considerably delayed. I just sent an e-mail to my primary Fastmail-hosted e-mail address from my secondary GMail, and it hasn't shown up despite several minutes having passed.

No you cannot. Copilot plugins are currently only supported for NeoVim, VS Code, and JetBrains IDEs. Emacs is not on the list.

ActiveX just had the nice side effect of only running on Windows and IE.

It also had the nice side effect of being the security equivalent of a sucking chest wound. Flash and Java Applets were bad too (c.f. the famous Java classloader vulnerability, which could be exploited by loading a malicious applet), but they didn't seem to be nearly as bad as the horror that was ActiveX. Perhaps it was because ActiveX was intentionally designed to integrate with the host OS, or because it was more deeply integrated into the browser, but my recollection of ActiveX is that Microsoft never managed to get security right for ActiveX, and the way that ActiveX security was "solved" was by ditching ActiveX entirely.

    ATT has provided the best service of any carrier while traveling, so I will use them.

One of the issues with many of those studies is that they track per-pupil spending and track educational outcomes without actually verifying that the per-pupil spending is actually being spent on pupils. If a significant fraction of the per pupil spending is being spent on facilities maintenance, then the water, so to speak, is evaporating before it reaches the mouths of the thirsty.

I don't think that there will be a collapse. The linked post [1] has this telling line:

    Because I’m in a very very blue state and city

Suburban school districts are smaller, have more children (which equates to more funding) and generally have newer buildings and facilities, so they're not in the same dire shape as city school districts. For that reason, you hear much less about them. After all, who wants to write a news story that reads, "Okay, everything is actually functioning as it more or less should?" This leads to a mistaken impression that all school districts everywhere are on the verge of breakdown when in reality the failures are localized to city districts like San Francisco or Chicago.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/11620il/the_us_is...

Currently? You don't know for sure. It might be possible to make some guesses by examining how the model responds to various prompts, and checking the output of the model against the output from the same prompt against known models. But that will at best, give you a good guess, not certainty. This is why the FLI's proposal for AI regulation [1] suggests that AI models be both watermarked and that the output from AI models be clearly identified as such. In a world where most people use regulated models, this would enable you to identify which model generated a certain piece of content.

As for applying a delta to the weights, that would likely break the model. It would be like randomly scrambling bytes in a compressed file and then expecting the file to decompress properly.

[1] https://futureoflife.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/FLI_Poli...

I look forward to reading breathless thinkpieces in the New York Times about how "techies" are keeping their kids away from AI, written in the same tone as articles written today about how they're limiting the "screen time" of their children.

This reminds me of how NASA would never have a Shuttle in flight during the transition from December 31 to January 1, because they were unsure as to whether the shuttle's computers could handle the rollover correctly [1]. Sure, they could have updated the software to make sure that the rollover was handled correctly, but that would have required them to recertify the entire OS running the Shuttle, and it was easier to just plan missions such that the Shuttle was never flying on New Year's Eve.

[1] https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-11-0...

I'm not going to respond to your points one by one. My overall response to you is that the system you're describing, with its multitude of RAID controllers, ancient webcam, overclocked CPU, etc, etc, wouldn't even have been possible to put together in the '90s. You'd have ended up spending all your time debugging random crashes and failures, and figuring out how to get stuff working. Whereas today, it's usable and functional and, while it still might have issues, it at least all works most of the time.

As far as the system not recognizing newer processors without a BIOS update, that was also true in the '90s. It's just that, back then, things changed so much, you'd just end up tossing the entire motherboard when it came time to install a new CPU, and you'd "upgrade" the BIOS that way.

When was the last time you had to debug an IRQ conflict? I remember when "Plug and Play" was derisively nicknamed "Plug and Pray". Today, it all just works. When I'm assembling a computer, I don't have to set jumpers. I don't have to fiddle with making sure the boot drive is at the end of the IDE cable rather than the middle. I can just snap all the pieces together like Lego, hit the power button, and be assured that I'll get a bootable system (assuming, of course, that I haven't been a dolt and forgotten to plug the video card power cable in).

When was the last time you had an application blue-screen/bugcheck/kernel panic your machine? Yes, Windows still blue-screens from time to time, but over the past decade, I've found that 100% of my blue-screens have been caused by faulty drivers, rather than application code or bugs in the OS itself. This wasn't always the case. I remember, on Windows 98, there was one particular game that my brother had (I think it was Reader Rabbit), which would repeatedly and reliably blue-screen the machine when we got to a certain level. I haven't seen any errors like that in more than decade. And even the driver blue-screens are getting better. I remember not too long ago, my Windows PC's monitor blinked off, then came back. When I looked in Event Viewer, I saw that the GPU driver had crashed and had been automatically restarted. This is something that still causes kernel panics on Linux and MacOS, but Windows just shrugs it off and keeps on chugging.

With regards to Linux, when was the last time you had to mess with xorg.conf? Wifi drivers? WPA supplicant? I remember when I had to download the Windows drivers for my wireless card, extract the binary blobs, compile NDISWrapper, and then pray that I'd set everything up correctly, before unplugging the Ethernet cable to test whether my wifi was working. Now? I browse Hacker News while Linux is installing, because wifi drivers have been part of the kernel for years.

As for programming tools, they're more stable, robust, and widely available than ever. When was the last time you had to pay for a compiler, interpreter or language runtime? When was the last time GCC or LLVM crashed? Today one can write code in C, C++, Java, Python, Go, Rust, and a plethora of other languages... all for free, even on Windows! This is a huge improvement from the bad old days when your choices were to either pay for Borland or pay for Visual Studio. And as for web programming, do you really pine for the days when your only option for a backend language was a collection of perl scripts in `cgi-bin`?

The one regression, in my opinion, is with communication software. We used to have open (or "open-enough" i.e. reverse engineered) protocols that enabled multi-protocol, multi-platform clients such as Pidgin. That world is gone. Our communications are now siloed into proprietary, hostile software stacks, such as Slack, Google Meet and Teams. And our personal communications are siloed between Discord, WhatsApp, and the multifarious other messenger apps that we have to install in order to communicate with that one person who refuses to use anything else.

But other than comms, has software improved? I have a hard time arguing otherwise.

    while Java originated the billion dollar mistake

[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...

    There, you can $$$ your way out of data corruption. You can even loss all the data if you have enough replicas and backups.

You can't buy your way out of having to deal with the fundamental problem of, "How do I provide the illusion of a single unified system for a highly distributed swarm of microservices?"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...

Is it just me, or does Ed Huang skip over the most important part of database design: actually making sure the database has stored the data?

I read to the end of the article, and while having a database as a serverless collection of microservices deployed to a cloud provider might be useful, it ultimately will be useless if this swarm approach doesn't give me any guarantees about how or if my data actually makes it onto persistent storage at some point. I was expecting a discussion of the challenges and pitfalls involved in ensuring that a cloud of microservices can concurrently access a common data store (whether that's a physical disk on a server or a S3 bucket), without stomping on each other, but that seemed to be entirely missing from the post.

Performance and scalability are fine, but when it comes to databases, they're of secondary importance to ensuring that the developer has a good understanding of when and if their data has been safely stored.

Testing delete code against production isn't that big of a deal. If you screw up, the "oops" is immediate and obvious, as is the recovery strategy — restore from backup.

The real fear with deploying code directly against production is data corruption. I've seen more than one instance where two pieces of code, both of which had impeccable unit test coverage, interacted in strange ways to cause data corruption, because of mistaken assumptions that their respective authors had about each others' code. This is the kind of thing that you need integration tests to catch. Integration tests need some kind of common environment (even if it is ephemeral) in which to run. And now you have a development environment.

    The only reason Circle isn't bothering with this market is seemingly that they didn't want to deal directly with retail

But I'm willing to bet that they won't, because dealing with retail investors is a hassle. You have to have customer service. You have to deal with additional regulation. You have to deal with random social media firestorms. It's a mess. I don't blame Citadel for leaving it to Robinhood to deal with these issues and I wouldn't blame Circle for leaving it to Coinbase to deal with the retail issues surrounding crypto.

The problem is that the countries that are good for crypto, e.g. Venezuela, Nicaragua, Lebanon, etc, aren't really all that good for anything else.

It would be unavailable in the sense that US entities would be legally prohibited from transacting with it, in the same way that US entities are prohibited from transacting with Binance (and, to the extent that they're flouting this prohibition, they're getting in trouble for it).

    But that relegates the centralized exchange into the position of being nothing more than a "fiat on-ramp"

    That might seem the case from afar, but once you start writing Haskell and
    start experimenting these space leaks, you will notice that:

    1. 90% of the space leaks you write end up adding a tiny amount of memory
    usage to your functions, mostly unnoticeable. Think thunks like (1 + 2) that
    are subjected to demand analysis under optimization.

    2. 1-2% of them are serious enough to require profiling your code with
    cost-centres.

Memory leaks are a matter of correctness and reliability. Our computers are not ideal Turing machines. Their "tapes" are finite. Running out of memory causes the program to crash and produce incorrect results. Arguing that this only happens in a small fraction of cases, and can be handled with testing and profiling isn't persuasive, because one might say the same thing for a dynamically typed language, like Python.

I've never seen a civil engineer say they hate how we built bridges.

You must not have spoken with any of the civil engineers I've spoken with. They all describe an absolute wasteland of arbitrary and capricious regulations, competing stakeholders, and last minute requirement changes that require extensive redesign and often very expensive rework.

Software engineering really isn't all that different from all engineering, for better and for worse.

it’s plausible that learning a healthy way to integrate with your local community is an important life skill that gets disrupted by these online connections and makes the big picture of one’s life worse

Yes, let's go back and tell all the kids that were being bullied in high school merely for being different that their bullies are teaching them important life skills and that they shouldn't retreat into online spaces because that will make the "big picture" of their life worse.

The 1990’s weren’t some dreary hellscape.

You can totally still live a '90s lifestyle today. Cancel your high-speed Internet and tether to your phone for everything. Give up watching YouTube. Give up looking things up on Wikipedia. Film cameras are a dime-a-dozen on eBay, with even high-end SLRs from the '90s selling for less than a hundred dollars. Disable Google Maps and Google Search. Stop posting on Hacker News.

If you think the '90s were better than they were today, by all means, go back.

EDIT: For what it's worth, you can find people in the 1930s saying the same things about electricity and indoor plumbing. Every current generation's necessity is the previous generation's excess frivolity.

The weird thing is that I never needed computer assisted navigation until it existed. In my local area I simply remembered where streets were, and when traveling I used a map book.

You are extremely fortunate. It may not be apparent to you, but the advent of GPS, smartphones and Google Maps has been a game changer for so many people. My sense of direction is all right. I'm not a homing pigeon, but given a map, I can generally find my way around. But for other people such as my mom, every trip, outside of some well-traveled routes (like going to work, or going to the store) had to have detailed written directions, and be rehearsed ahead of time, because otherwise she'd get lost. For her, Google Maps has resulted in a substantial improvement in the quality of her life, simply by enabling her to get around in the world without the constant background terror of not knowing how to get home.

I do think those things are great but I would say that culture is substantially worse.

Only if you aren't a misfit. If you had some "weird" hobby or interest, like anime, or science fiction, or heck, even computers, you'd have maybe one, two other people in your life who were interested in that. If you openly talked about your "weird" hobby, you'd be as likely as not socially ostracized and made fun of.

Today, thanks to the internet and social media, one can find forums and discussion groups for any hobby, no matter how weird or esoteric, and have fun conversations with people that have nothing to do with weather, politics, or sportsball.

You don't think your life has been substantially improved by Google? Or the Internet more generally? You'd rather go back to the '90s, when you had to carefully watch how much Internet you consumed, so as to keep from running out of AOL hours? You want to go back to an era when you couldn't instantly pull up navigation direction in a foreign city? You like to to take photos on film, paying ridiculous prices for every photo you took, and then paying again to have some stranger paw through your family photos while developing them? You want to go back to an era when batteries were heavy, polluting NiCd bricks, which required special chargers that would completely discharge and recharge them in order to avoid things like the memory effect? You want to go back to a time when you had to call a person on a phone in order to book a flight. You want to go back to a time when, if you moved to a different country, you got to talk to your relatives in the homeland once a month, for five to ten minutes on a noisy analog phone line, because that's all the international long distance you could afford?

Don't get me wrong, I dislike social media just as much as anyone. But do I dislike tech? Would I give up the all innumerable ways that my life has gotten better thanks to Moore's Law, ubiquitous Internet, and the proliferation of tools and services that take advantage of the above two? Absolutely not.

    For non-mainstream languages 95% of what Emacs enables can be done using
    multi-cursors and a macro language built in to the editor, and we're in
    2023. Those kinds of editors are a dime a dozen :-)

But other than emacs and vim, which other editors allow me to interactively automate portions of my editing workflow? All the other IDEs and editors that you've cited, like IntelliJ or VSCode require you to either find or write a package. That's a much bigger step than just interactively evaluating some lisp to do a one-off thing.

    requires barely any ram

But I can create an AI bot to answer questions about products and store policy.

Why wouldn't someone be able to game your bot's responses about refunds and store policy in exactly the same way? Then, when the customer really does come in with a return or refund request, you're forced into a dilemma where either you grant the refund (and accept that your store policy isn't the written policy, but rather whatever your bot can be manipulated into saying is your written policy) or you refuse the refund, and the customer walks away angry, because your own bot told them something that you're now contradicting.

    It's easy to interpret that as "stackoverflow should change to be
    like this", but I think it was meant to be more like "If I had to
    guess how stackoverflow works, this is what I think it would look
    like".