tsm

I'm far from an LLM power user, but I've found ChatGPT to be quite good at debugging my init.el and also writing little extensions I wish I had.

I'm a semi-professional violinist who got to borrow a Strad for a couple months and whose long-term teacher has the lifetime loan of a del Gesu (and has had access to a Strad but prefers the del Gesu!)

I don't have Studies to back this up, but anecdotally:

* Playing fine violins takes a lot of practice with the specific instrument to begin to unlock its potential. I was scratching the surface after a couple months; people with longer-term loans say it takes years.

* Strads in particular are surprisingly hard to make sound good at first. I'd say there was a good two weeks where I sounded better on my $2500 Chinese-made violin than I did on the multi-million dollar Strad. (del Gesus sound great out of the box. This is widely agreed upon but I don't know why it is)

* In terms of pure craftsmanship there are many contemporary makers who are working as well as Strad and del Gesu, and I don't place much stock in them having access to uniquely good wood or magic varnish or anything like that.

* However, for poorly-understood reasons the act of playing a violin "opens up" the sound and also gives you access to more and more tone colors. A 300-year-old violin that's been played a lot will therefore have a much bigger tonal palette than a contemporary violin, even if any individual tone color isn't strictly better than the tone of a contemporary violin.

* The corollary is that in the year 2300 I believe top-end contemporary instruments will be as good as Strads are now.

* If you just thought "what if we simulate the vibrations of playing on new instruments to expedite their aging", you're not the first! Some luthiers hook new instruments up to a specialized amplifier and effectively play music through the violin for a couple weeks before selling it. A lot of people claim this helps a lot, but I don't have first-hand experience of it.

I own a handful of TI calculators (TI-{80, 83, 83+, 86, 89T, NSpire CAS}, possibly a few others) but actually use a TI-89 Titanium emulator on my Android phone. I no longer do anything remotely interesting with it, but I prefer it to the stock calculator since I know how it does order of operations, it shows fractions, it's easy to get old return values, etc. Don't tell me if the stock calculator now does all that; the TI-89 ergonomics are burned into my brain. (I was in an advanced math class which got me using a TI-80 at the age of 9)

I'd guess that the majority of people who've made a bug like this got started on Ruby via Rails, where many hashes are HashWithIndifferentAccesses.

HWIAs are convenient, but they do confuse the issue.

Previously (2024-07-07; 136 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40898654

How do you think the LLMs train?

If I release a new library tomorrow, do I not need to write docs for it?

Europe is worse than the US on this front

Would you please expand on this?

Theft does not exist. Only deficient windows intentionally designed to be breakable exist. if you want your "personal possessions" to not be taken, dont make them vulnerable. <etc>

Yes, the companies involved should take some responsibility for terrible security practice (though I'm sure they wish this had never happened!) but victim-blaming doesn't justify crime.

Don is especially susceptible to huge regional differences. It's as GP described in Honduras and I think as you described in Spain.

I've found the Metabase test suite[0] to be very good considering it's real-world software written by a for-profit company. Coverage is good, the correct tests usually break when doing a refactor (stuff like "Oh, I thought this change was harmless but actually it breaks the permissions model"), etcetera. But the most important thing is that there's a strong team culture of a) demanding good tests on each PR b) hunting down flaky tests and other sources of friction.

Another neat thing was that there used to be a full-time SDET who spent a lot of time writing Cypress reproductions for known bugs. When you picked up the bug, you could un-skip the test that was right there waiting for you.

All that said, of course it's far from perfect!

0: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/ Backend unit tests are in test/, Frontend unit tests are in frontend/test, end-to-end tests (Cypress) are in e2e.

In these cases it's all Scottish Gaelic, which has a complex but very consistent phonics system. Complaining about it would be like complaining that Russian vodka brands are hard to pronounce because you can't read Cyrillic

Seems like a very backwards-looking article. Would've been interesting to hear more about his ideas for the future, such as what this should involve:

if the new Scottish Languages Bill is to succeed in securing the Gaelic and Scots languages in the face of immense pressures, then the needs of the communities speaking those languages must be at the heart of it

Gaelic advances in the modern era include:

* the foundation of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, a Gaelic-medium university

* the rise of Gaelic-medium education as an option for primary and secondary school

* Gaelic-language radio and TV stations

* The launch, a few years ago, of SpeakGaelic (https://speakgaelic.scot/) with loads of learning materials (mentioned in the OP).

Problems include the continued dilution of Gaelic-speaking communities (native speakers either die or move somewhere with better job prospects; non-speakers buy up holiday homes or Airbnb investment vehicles in the area) and the perception that career prospects are much better for people educated in English (perhaps with a bit of French or similar on the side) than those educated in Gaelic.

My wife and I realized we were only really using Netflix to watch Seinfeld. I got a complete set of DVDs for less money than a month of Netflix and canceled my subscription

The etymology is from 'enCYClopedia'.

I worked for an IBM acquiree 13 years ago and as part of the "Blue-washing" process to get our software up to IBM spec we had to use their proprietary tools for verifying our dependencies were okay.

American elevators are 1-indexed!

Time was you could check in online and get the ticket counter agent to print your boarding pass for you

A magnifying glass on its own could mean:

1. Search (across the application)

2. Find on page

3. Adjust zoom

My surname is Macdonald—some ancestor generations ago decided to use the lowercase d. When I lived in the US it took considerable coaching to get humans not to write McDonald, and some just couldn't get it.

I then moved to Scotland, where exactly zero people have defaulted to Mc instead of Mac. However, the computer systems of both the NHS and the University of Edinburgh apparently don't store the case of strings and reconstruct the capitalization after the fact. Both systems list me as MacDonald and there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm relatively okay with this—before computers McDonald, MacDonald, Macdonald, and M'Donald were all functionally equivalent. But now I do worry about the implications of having official documents with variant spellings

Usually, thus the common construction "and/or" to unambiguously mean inclusive-or.

It's Mary -> Molly-> Polly, which makes slightly more sense

Tangential: I'm looking for a handheld Linux computer that's the approximate size and shape of a GameBoy Advance SP, but with a QWERTY keyboard and wifi. The old Zipit Z-2 would've been perfect. All it needs to run is git and Emacs/org-mode.

It's a surprisingly hard form factor to shop for—anyone have any recommendations?

If you find this remotely intriguing, I highly recommend Ross Duffin's book How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care)

https://search.worldcat.org/title/How-equal-temperament-ruin...

I really like the idea of getting my day's worth of emails in the morning and responding to them throughout the day while offline (using one of the great folding keyboards!). Hard to emulate that these days though. It feels artificial to put my phone in airplane mode or whatever.

SF is SourceForge, which at the time effectively had a monopoly (and also sucked)

Location: Edinburgh, Scotland. I require a UK Skilled Worker Visa

Remote: Currently working remote; flexible

Willing to relocate: Potentially within Scotland. Could make visits to a UK headquarters as needed.

Technologies: Expertise in Clojure and Ruby on Rails. Some experience in Javascript, Typescript, Python, and Java.

Résumé/CV: https://www.mact.im/s/XNef5PtpdfsDtEj

Email: "tim@" + username + "acdonald.com"

I'm a software engineer with 10+ years of experience, mostly in full-stack web development. I'm currently happily employed on a 4-day week writing an open source business intelligence tool in Clojure, but due to visa snafus I need to look for a British job. I'm especially excited about mentoring others, Lispy languages, and writing maintainable code.

I have the same setup via GSuite.

It's absolutely useful to tell 4th-graders that x(t) = vt + x₀ (assuming no acceleration) since they're probably not on top of exponents yet.

It's also absolutely useful to tell 8th-graders that x(t) = at² + v₀t + x₀ since now they can handle exponents.

And it's useful to tell 12th-graders how to do the calculus to get x(t) for variable acceleration.

But that's also inaccurate for very large values of v (or a) due to relativistic effects. However, it's a very convenient simplification ("lie") for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of cases. It's probably possible to explain the relativity math to most 4th-graders, but for most of them it's a terrible use of teaching time and the old "rate times time equals distance" that was drilled into my head at a young age is much more practical.

See also: the Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic, which preyed on Haitians' inability to pronounce the word "perejil" as a native Spanish speaker would:

The Haitian languages, French and Haitian Creole, pronounce the r as a uvular approximant or a voiced velar fricative, respectively so their speakers can have difficulty pronouncing the alveolar tap or the alveolar trill of Spanish, the language of the Dominican Republic. Also, only Spanish but not French or Haitian Creole pronounces the j as the voiceless velar fricative. If they could pronounce it the Spanish way the soldiers considered them Dominican and let them live, but if they pronounced it the French or Creole way they considered them Haitian and murdered them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsley_massacre

The logic in the `catch` block could be complex enough that they got an if/else backwards or something like that. E.g., they could catch an exception and then have the body of the `catch` return six different error messages based on details about the exception, system status, etc.