raegis

What are AoS and SoA?

In the Matrix movies you can upload complex knowledge to a person in seconds. If LLMs could help with this even a little it would be useful. But alas, people like myself who are slow learners still get overwhelmed when trying to learn too much or too fast without rest breaks.

Libraries have been renting non-books for a long time. Different communities have different needs. It's not a big deal. Some libraries in the Los Angeles area lend sewing machines, bike tools, and other useful stuff. The main branch library has 3d printers and other tech stuff ordinary folks can't afford. And of course, they have various workshops on numerous topics for adults and children.

Given all the stuff I've taken advantage of, if the libraries here were only for borrowing books, they would seem kind of useless. And this is from someone who has the max 30 books checked out right now.

That narrows it down to about 50 countries :)

I used Mathematica on a NeXT computer back in 1991. It was a beautiful machine to work on. I did a student project where I simulated the flow of the boundary of a plane region over time (like how the shape of a drop of oil in water changes over time) and it was very, very easy to write in Mathematica with cool graphics.

"...the level of pattern matching you can use when defining functions, as well as the high level of functional composition..."

This sounds like your average functional programming language. The Scicloj community is the first thing to come to mind (but I assume they don't do symbolic algebra/calculus like Mathematica does), but I don't know what you're specifically missing.

Actually, I'm running the backports kernel which is at 7.0 today.

  $ uname --kernel-release 
  7.0.10+deb13-amd64

I did all of my distro hopping when I was young, 20+ years ago. I settled on Debian because life got busy and I had no time to fuss with broken software updates.

One study (sorry, can't recall the source off the top of my head) claimed 20% of calories in the average U.S. diet was replaced by processed foods over that period. I'm over 50 years old, and it agrees with my own observations. Those "big gulp" beverages became popular in the 80s, and "low fat" foods just replaced fat with added sugar.

One example: long ago I used to buy Bush's baked beans in a can. They had a vegetarian version which I assumed was healthier, and it even tasted better than the original. But one day I compared the labels and found the vegetarian version had more added sugar and more calories per serving.

We were fed a massive amount of misinformation about healthy foods in the 1980s. Hopefully things will improve from now on.

New Honda Accord hybrids do not include a spare tire. The manufacturers copied the idiocy.

Can you say a little more about what you mean by "better"? How much faster is editing?

"juniors are useless": Maybe y'all should consider updating this hyberbolic language. Nobody is born a "senior developer", so surely all of your training as a "junior" is not useless. There is always a disconnect between what younger people know and what older people expect them to know, so training is required almost universally.

The one math majors joke about is Serra’s A Course in Arithmetic, which is definitely not for young children.

The problem might end up being that the value created by LLMs will have no customers when everyone is unemployed.

I'm not a professional programmer, but I am the I.T. department for my wife's small office. I used ChatGPT recently (as a search engine) to help create a web interface for some files on our intranet. I'm sure no one in the office has the time or skills to vibe code this in a reasonable amount of time. So I'm confident that my "job" is secure :)

I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.

I immediately did a "apt install units". Very cool!

Six is the smallest perfect number. Perfection is key here.

They were talking about instability. I had an old Radeon workstation card in my desktop at home for at least a decade, but with the most recent AMD drivers, Firefox (with hardware acceleration turned on) would crash Gnome and the system when watching videos on YouTube. So I wasted money on one of those new Intel graphics cards to get the stability back (in addition to the time wasted diagnosing the problem).

I don't game, but all my computers run Debian Stable, and my oldest child wastes considerable time gaming on Steam. I had to tweak one or two things for him early on, but it all seems to work fine.

People who don't use Debian misunderstand Stable. It's released every two years, and a subset of the software is kept up to date in Backports. For anything not included in Backports, its trivial to run Debian Testing or Unstable in a chroot on your Stable machine.

I moved to Debian Stable ~20 years ago because constant updates in other distros always screwed up CUPS printing (among other things). Curiously, I was using Ubuntu earlier this year and the same thing happened. Never going back.

Maybe check out Scott Wlaschin's videos on YouTube. There is one talk for his book "Domain Modeling Made Functional" which, if I remember, was very clear and easy to follow.

I don't think so. An LLM by default is not trained to be "good"; it's trained to be accurate.

I wouldn't use the word "accurate" since it creates language based on probabilities. For example, it occasionally does basic mathematics computations incorrectly. I'm sure the AI companies would say they are training for "accuracy" but the actual code they write says otherwise.

An observation I've made about Rust is that because it eschews OOP, it tends not to "scale" to large development teams for single applications.

Linux is written in C and "scales" to large teams. If folks were willing, I think most of Linux could be written in Rust.

I just tested both on the text "Look Dick. See Jane. Jane run home. I says you go home to. They eats dinner." LanguageTool does what I would expect. Harper does not. However, both whine about two spaces after a period.

Edit: Alas, Hacker News also removes the extra space after periods.

Same here. I lived there 30 years ago, and my one speeding ticket in TN shows up first. I've had 2 or 3 "rolling stop sign" tickets in CA and can not find them.

I guess I'm naive, but given the current situation, wouldn't a smart person resign from DOGE? If I were smart and highly employable, like these guys, I would not want to be associated with all the indiscriminate firings of DOGE.

I used to do this with my wife, and it drove me crazy. Now we use a shared Google calendar, which works way better than prior solutions. Our unspoken rule: if there is an open time slot available, the first to enter it in the shared calendar wins. We're both responsible for entering all family-related appointments in the calendar as soon as they come up. There have been conflicts when either of us forgets to enter something into the calendar, but we just resolve the conflicts as usual. This was a game-changer from my point of view.

This is one of the most acronym heavy discussions I've ever seen. I searched "AIMA/PRML/ESL" to find the books, and the first result is a Reddit thread with most upvoted comment "Can we use the names of the books instead of all acronyms, not everyone knows them lol".

By the way, LaTeX and TeX existed long before PDFs were ubiquitous. A common workflow in the 1990s and prior was

TeX/LaTeX -> DVI -> PostScript -> printer

And DVI stands for "device independent", so the idea was you can take a DVI and convert it to any format. PDFs just eventually became the dominate format.

Typst is Apache licensed. I install it with "cargo install --locked typst-cli". The subscription model is for their web interface with storage. I write simple worksheets for a living, so I've been using it instead of TeX lately. (I've use LaTeX or plain TeX since around 1990.)

That hardly looks regressive.

I know you're making a good faith argument, but you're twisting the definition of regressive. For example, if a country has one citizen with an income of 1 trillion, and one hundred thousand citizens with an income of $10,000 each, the trillionaire would still pay over 99% of taxes even if taxes were proportional.

The point is that with severe income inequality, it is fair that the super rich pay a very, very high proportion of taxes. The 40.4% seems high for the "top 1%" of the population, but if you replace "top 1%" with their actual average income, the comparison is less misleading.

Did you give up a pension?