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stevedonovan

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Software developer in Johannesburg, South Africa

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But are they writing? In that specific sense of high prestige communication? Sounds like stolen aura.

Now, code by Gen AI is straightforward in comparison. Coding is not writing poetry, even if the lines also don't reach the right margin

Gild Just One Lily 7 months ago

"This post could have been a tweet", and so on.

It's a lovely metaphor for the soulful business of doing something really well, even if there is no 'market' for that kind of quality

Replacement.ai 9 months ago

Heh,I read SF as San Francisco; point remains true. Except the Valley wants to force a future, not describe it

But this is one thing that Gen AI is genuinely good at, constructing computer programs under close human supervision. It's also the most profitable (but not enough to justify valuations) Also, it may be a big thing here but its pretty niche in the larger scheme of things

The article is about it encroaching in the domain of human communications. Mass adoption is the only way to justify the incredible financial promises.

Is this not more a Cargo thing? Cargo is obsessed with correct builds and eventually the file system fills up with old artifacts.

(I know, I have to declare Cargo bankruptcy every few weeks and do a full clean & rebuild)

Yes, same feeling I had, but with dual mode; can be compiled as a 'standalone' service over HTTP/REST (or whatever) and _also_ compiled as a classic module with a strictly defined interface.

One cool thing about standalone services which needs to be factored in is that they can be spun up and debugged very easily. But for deployment, we pay for all the network latency/marshaling overhead, and coordination complexity.

So, best of both worlds? As for polyglot, there does have to be a shared platform (C ABI, JVM, etc). (Go doesn't play so nicely with other languages due to goroutine stack allocation.)

Exactly. We learn to speak our mother tongue without instruction, but need to learn to write. And what is actually happening is training in putting thoughts out in a linear fashion, and debugging them. That's been the core of the curriculum for about 2500 years.

I suppose async web servers is the poster child of async, and drove a lot of the development. However, then _everything_ went async, adding the cognitive overhead of dealing with Rust async throughout the ecosystem, whether needed or not.

In short, it still feels like a leaky abstraction: marvelous to look at working code, but errors (both compile and run-time) expose the underlying machinery underneath the syntactical sugar.

This is probably heresy, but as a former Rust dev I'm enjoying web-services in Go more these days.

XFCE 4.18 4 years ago

I've honestly never noticed the problem, so I never saw the problem with X in the first place.

(It is possible that I have never experienced a truly beautiful desktop, but my eyes are no longer particularly precise enough to operate at modern pixel densities)

Yes, the newtype pattern in Rust works very well, say to wrap a string. The somewhat annoying thing is that it is born without any properties so you have to teach it to be comparable, etc from scratch.

The newtype pattern in Go is easier to use, but isn't strict enough - your wrapped string can still appear directly in a string concatenation without a cast. Any wrapped integer can still be used to index a slice! Considering how careful the language is with mixed arithmetic (can't add uint8 to uint16 without casting) this feels like an oversight.

Bash 5.1 6 years ago

I would find such a lag very irritating, but it's fine on Linux. Using Bash for years and I realized that I could never remember all its corner cases - fish is much easier to fit in the head. And _personally_ I don't need to be POSIX. (The function loading system is pretty simple and makes so much damn sense after years of .profile etc)