stcg

Yet another case of mistaking price for value.

When evaluating whether public money is well spent on education it must be more important how valuable it is to the public, not what the price for the work is to the individuals.

I like the "what if these workers stopped today" test:

Pick a profession. For example pick from 'trader', 'dentist', 'cleaner', 'sales person' or 'nurse'. Then imagine that all people in that profession stop working today.

How bad would it be for society? Is it better or worse than some other profession? Compare this to how well-payed the profession is.

I think this is a much better test for value to society than looking at what people get payed.

For example, I think it would be much worse if all nurses stop working than if all bankers stop working. Yet bankers tend to get paid more.

I like the word "botspeak".

Another example of typical botspeak is "smoke test". Why not just say "test"? It feels like a way of downplaying the ability to detect problems.

What makes you think it is slop? The emdash?

A letter from me addressed to the agent, describing me and the goals of the project. Not AI-generated, no code or commands.

Nothing specific to the technology, because that gets out of sync fast, or might steer the agent in the wrong direction.

Smart models can figure these things out themselves.

If for example the agent repeatedly wrongly guesses the command to run tests, I prefer to change the code so the wrong guess will actually work the next time. Or I will find what in the project lead to the wrong assumption and fix that.

This is like saying "A slow leak is cheaper than a burst pipe"

Yes, okay. But with both you will have a bad time cleaning up.

There is a third option: good abstractions.

I did see this pattern described in the blog in practice a lot (and fell victim to it myself) and I think that in general this comes down to inexperienced programmers. Object oriented programming makes it worse.

Teaching these programmers that they should not abstract is not the solution. It is blocking their growth.

Teach them how to make better interfaces instead.

That sure looks like software to me!

But, at the same time, the user experiences it as a graphic. An animated GIF, for example, contains a small amount of code-like data to say how long each frame should last for and when to stop running. Is a GIF software? Is the basic circle above software? How much code do you need before something becomes software?

To me, from an ontological perspective, it's software if you wrote it like software: starting from the text form in a text editor. But it's an image if you made it in a graphical editor like Inkscape, just like how you could make an image in GIMP. The format just happens to be SVG.

I think this might also make sense from a legal perspective, as copyright law seems more focussed on the creation (how it is made / who made it / what was the purpose), and less on how it is used.

In the referenced benchmark GLM-5.2 (max) got 25% of all questions correct. GPT-5.5 (xhigh) got 57% correct.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience

I'd much rather have some answer that I can verify than no answer to verify.

I don't want a model that says "I don't know", because I will verify the answer anyway.

Anyone know why there is a high frequency signal on top of the long term trend in that graph?

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

I wonder what is the difficulty in rewriting strncpy uses that makes it take six years? Was it widespread? Or was it more of a long going effort, where it was only changed if there were some changes in the same file? Or is there some other thing that makes it difficult?

Beter wording: your brain is made for detecting dangers and attention grabbers are taking advantage of that

Other advantages to generating content: (1) fewer copyright issues. (2) No creators to pay, just GPU bills scaling with the use of the platform. (3) a much smaller critical mass.

Given these advantages I expect the current "social media" to be replaced with a new one, rather than them pivoting. The next big thing after tiktok might be something that only has generated content, where a last final bit of "social" is taken out of "social media".

I don't see consistent and correct as separate. Consistent is correct, and correct is consistent.

This sounds like how I think.

But for me, it often results in situations where I think much harder and longer than others but fail to act.

I learned to sometimes act instead of thinking more, because by acting I gain information I could not have learned by thinking.

Perhaps this human insight can be applied to working with LLMs. Perhaps not :)

"Let it crash" is a sentence that gets attention. It makes a person want to know more about it, as it sounds controversial and different. "Let it heal" doesn't have that.

One of the biggest usability problems with Python dependencies is that the name you import might be different from the name that you use to install the package.

So if you find some script on the web that has an `import foo` at the top, you cannot just `pip install foo`. Instead, you'll have to do some research into which package was originally used. Maybe it's named `pyfoo` or `foolib`.

Compare that to for example Java, which does not have that problem, thanks to Reverse Domain Name Notation. That is a much better system.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

    What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.

"XOR" as encryption probably refers to one-time-pad encryption, which is a very secure encryption strategy if done well, albeit often impractical.

(Note: I'm not saying anything about this specific code, which I have not looked at)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad

Is bluetooth not usable anymore?

I don't think becoming vegetarian helps. From the article:

The study found evidence that food processing is a likely source of microplastic contamination, as highly processed protein products (like fish sticks, chicken nuggets, tofu, and plant-based burgers, among others) contained significantly more microplastics per gram than minimally processed products (items like packaged wild Alaska pollock, raw chicken breast, and others).

Note the tofu and plant-based burgers.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (Goodhart's law)

"Wishful thinking is the weakest form of hope."

It's wrong if they share it. But then they did not 'steal' the information. They shared it (wrongfully).

If you disagree I'd appreciate if you could tell us your credit card information.

I'm not talking about being obliged to share. Of course people should have the right to not share their credit details. My point is that if you receive information from someone, then choosing to share it with a third party is not stealing.

Actually, an obligation to share information is a restriction on freedom just like copyright, which can prohibit sharing information.

Let's say Alice took a photograph and sends a copy of it to Bob.

Are you then saying that when Bob sends another copy to Charlie, Bob is taking something? What is Bob taking?

Also in these transitive definitions, stealing is about taking. And in the case of piracy (communicating information to others without permission of the original source), nothing is taken.

The person that came up with the idea still has it. The photographer still has the picture. The programmer still has the program.

It's just about what another person may do with it, the one receiving the picture. May they also send it to someone else? We could have different ideas about that, but calling it "stealing" is inaccurate.

It's not stealing. It's communication. You can't "steal" ideas, information or facts. To steal means to physically take someone's property without their consent.

The `x := 10` example is actually somewhat ambiguous. If the language fixes the type of `10` then `x := 10` is legal. If it's an unspecified type (as is typically the case), you'd have to write the type down.

For that case I like a type signifier as part of the number literal expression, like this: `x := 10f32` or `x := 10i32`.

The language might be "objectively" simple, but it's not at all a simple language.

You could say that it's simple but not easy

Maybe Clojure. In 2022 it took the top spot for "Top paying technologies" in the annual StackOverflow survey [0], and in 2023 it tied with other lispy languages [1].

That said, I don't think it matters much. A developer familiar with some lispy language (and perhaps functional programming) should be able to quickly pickup any other lispy language. And the developers that make the most money have probably used a lot of programming languages, with different paradigms.

[0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#top-paying-technologie...

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-top-paying-tec...

A similar saying, which I like more: "code as if your (hypothetical) children will have to maintain it"