Wow. The fog example is fantastic.
...Reminds me of how I ruined my old wallet, hiking thirty miles on a foggy day in Algonquin Provincial Park.
1,023 karma · joined September 5, 2019
...Reminds me of how I ruined my old wallet, hiking thirty miles on a foggy day in Algonquin Provincial Park.
I’m working on a web app with Axum, Diesel (type-safety on my Postgres stuff), and Leptos (in “islands” mode, allows me to write my server side HTML using JSX-like syntax within Rust, and client side WASM). It’s actually incredible how much it can accomplish with a relatively simple file tree.
I originally started with Loco, which is rails-like. It spits out something like 80 files every time you make a scaffold. It felt exactly like what you describe — too much code to do something that should be simple.
The first IDE I used was Zend Studio [0], because I was writing a PHP application for the IBM i Series, and Zend pushed their IDE along with their licensed server [1]. (Note that in modern times, with IBM OSS for PASE, PHP for the IBM i can be sourced from e.g. Seiden Group for free). Zend Studio is eclipse based, and terrible - their modern landing page advertises PHP 7.1 support. About a month into using it (this would be sometime circa 2018), IIRC, the whole thing broke while I was tinkering with basic appearance preferences, and the application would no longer open. Instead of fixing it, I asked my manager if we could buy a PHPStorm license, since I kept seeing it mentioned in blogs and tutorials and it sounded nicer.
PHPStorm was an absolute game-changer. It was the first time I experienced the miracle of modern language servers. Go to definition? Holy shit! It can see errors before I test the code?! IT CAN HELP ME SPOT ERRORS IN MY JAVASCRIPT?
My PHPStorm license was probably the single highest ROI expense my company ever took on my behalf. That led to all sorts of rabbit-hole learning, like setting up gulp with babel and sass and autoprefixer back when we were supporting all the way back to IE10 on our websites.
When I went back to school for a BS CS, I downloaded CLion expecting as-good support for C++ (our curriculum's language) as PHPStorm had for PHP. I was a little disappointed, but from what I hear CLion is much better now (with the Nova engine). On another note, JetBrains threatened to suspend my account when they saw me using an educational CLion license on the same account as my corporate PHPStorm license... Explained my way out of it (as I was using the licenses correctly / following EULA) but it was a sour moment, especially considering they recommended people join all of their licenses (personal & professional) under one account [2].
Regarding CoPilot: I haven't used it and probably won't, unless they add truthiness to LLMs. I've found that actually typing my code is rarely the bottleneck, and sparing myself from typing is the "value add" most coding LLMs offer.
[0]: https://www.zend.com/products/zend-studio
[1]: https://www.zend.com/products/zend-server/ibmi
[2]: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/208460135-Can-...
When I was 21, they offered to pay for my tuition so I went back for a CoE degree (later switching to CS). The moment I touched C++ - on my very first day in their “intro to programming” class - I fell in love. The type system, debugging, and ecosystem was fantastic compared to PHP 7 that I was using at the time. With my manager's permission, I went back to some of our existing intranet apps and built a C++-based API for them that our PHP would call over a web-socket, so that I could leverage the type system (and performance). Those systems are still in daily use, company wide. Maintenance hasn't been a problem. And that’s despite running in a really weird environment (IBM Pase for i).
Now, after using Rust and Axum, I'd vastly prefer the Rust ecosystem for creating that type of API. But C++ deserves credit. It really is a great language, especially if you’re coming from web languages like (non-TS) JavaScript or PHP.
Later in the year I moved to Florida, just in time for Helene and Milton. I didn’t spend much time thinking about either of them (aside from during prep and cleanup and volunteering a few weeks after). But I had frequent dreams of catastrophic storms and floods.
Different stressors affect people (even myself) differently. Thankfully I’ve never had a major/long-term problem, but I know my reactions to major life stressors never seemed to have any rhyme or reason.
I can imagine many people might’ve been through a few things that made them confident they’d be alright with the job, only to find out dealing with that stuff 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week is a whole different ball game.
Reminds me of the time my research director pulled me aside for defining CPU as "core processing unit" instead of "central processing unit" in a paper!
> Because in product development, there can be short-sighted industry decisions based on quarterly returns. I've also seen a constant need to justify outcomes based on KPIs etc, and constantly justifying your work, etc.
I have seen this as well. It's extremely common (especially among publicly-owned companies) and frustrating. But it's not ubiquitous. Consider LM's Skunkworks or Apple's quiet development of the iPhone, and compare it to companies that finish a product and then focus on cutting costs / nickel-and-diming their customers.
If the logical qubit can have double the lifetime of any physical qubit, that's massive. Recall IBM's chips, with t-times of ~400microseconds. Doubling that would change the order of magnitude.
It still won't be enough to do much in the near term - like other commenters say, this seems to be a proof of concept - but the concept is very promising.
The first company to get there and make their systems easy to use could see a similar run up in value to NVIDIA after ChatGPT3. IBM seems to be the strongest in the space overall, for now.
Around 50% of our time was spent working in Overleaf making small improvements to old projects so that we could submit to some new journal or call-for-papers. We were always doing peer review or getting peer reviewed. We were working with a lot of 3rd-party tools (e.g. FPGAs, IBM Q, etc). And our team was constantly churning due to people getting their degrees and leaving, people getting too busy with coursework, and people deciding they just weren't interested anymore.
Compare that to the corporate labs: They have a fully proprietary ecosystem. The people who developed that ecosystem are often the ones doing research on/with it. They aren't taking time off of their ideas to handle peer-review processes. They aren't taking time off to handle unrelated coursework. Their researchers don't graduate and start looking for professor positions at other universities.
It's not surprising in the slightest that the corporate labs do better. They're more focused and better suited for long-term research.
Google's willow chip has t-times of about 60-100mu.s. That's not an impressive figure -- in 2022, IBM announced their Eagle chip with t-times of around 400mu.s [2]. Google's angle here would be the error correction (EC).
The following portion from Google's announcement seems most important:
> With 105 qubits, Willow now has best-in-class performance across the two system benchmarks discussed above: quantum error correction and random circuit sampling. Such algorithmic benchmarks are the best way to measure overall chip performance. Other more specific performance metrics are also important; for example, our T1 times, which measure how long qubits can retain an excitation — the key quantum computational resource — are now approaching 100 µs (microseconds). This is an impressive ~5x improvement over our previous generation of chips.
Again, as they lead with, their focus here is on error correction. I'm not sure how their results compare to competitors, but it sounds like they consider that to be the biggest win of the project. The RCS metric is interesting, but RCS has no (known) practical applications (though it is a common benchmark). Their T-times are an improvement over older Google chips, but not industry-leading.
I'm curious if EC can mitigate the sub-par decoherence times.
[0]: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.270.5242.163...
[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/3511065.3511068
[2]: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/eagle-quantum-processor-per...
In my senior year, AP Physics C: E&M would become one of my favorite courses of my entire scholastic career (largely thanks to my teacher). While Calc 3 wasn't required for the AP test, he introduced the concepts so that he could properly walk us through the history of the field from the perspective of its founders, up to and concluding with Maxwell's equations. We read a lot of the original papers that introduced certain operators and equations, including works from Newton, Leibniz, Heaviside, Maxwell, Einstein, and Dirac. Ironically, I failed the AP exam (2/5) but had a very easy time with Calc III, linear algebra, and diff eq in college thanks to that course.
I really miss the feeling of wonder and astonishment I had when I was first exposed to these concepts -- it's been long enough that my memory of them is fuzzy now, but I don't get the same satisfaction from re-reading them.
I think that's a big part of the issue with tests like Hackerrank - LLMs have been trained on a lot of the DSAs that those questions try to hit. Whereas, if you ask an LLM for a truly novel solution, it's much more likely to spit out a garbled mess. For example, earlier today, Google's search AI gave me this nonsense example of how to fix a dangling participle:
> To correct a dangling participle, you can revise the sentence to give the dangling modifier a noun to modify. For example, you can change the sentence "Walking through the kitchen, the smoke alarm was going off" to "Speeding down the hallway, he saw the door come into view".
LLMs have effectively made it impossible to test candidates for crystalline intelligence (e.g. remembering how to write specific DSAs quickly) remotely. Maybe the best solution would be to measure fluid intelligence instead, or front-load on personality/culture assessments and only rigorously assess coding ability in-person towards the end of the interview cycle.
Keeping the regular pace also allowed me to do a lot more extracurriculars. I started helping with quantum computing research in my freshman year of college and joined a bunch of clubs.
I'm not entirely happy with where I am at 26. I wonder if I'd be further ahead - or behind - if I had skipped forward.
I think that's part of why everyone went to flat design - Windows Vista and glass effects looked great, but they were expensive to compute! Flat designs are aesthetically controversial, and can be more difficult to use than skeuomorphic ones, especially for older users [0][1].
Considering that realism can aid in usability, I think it's totally valid to use effects like this on the web.
[0]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144929X.2020.18...
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01419...
I didn’t know what they were, so I clicked. I was bewildered that I had never run into them before, used them in my own code, or seen them used by others. Come to find out they’ve only been around for about a day!
Reminds me of some of the lovely expressibility and syntactic sugar that’s pulled me to other languages lately. Glad to see it make its way into PHP.
I pushed hard and was able to get us to the point where stuff runs in PASE with modern languages (like PHP).
It’s not any specific licensing issue, just organizational distrust of anything that isn’t paid for.
Mine has a table spec that can translate into a SQL definition or spit out a nicely formatted HTML form. There’s a separate controller that handles all DB connections / CRUD operations, with before- and after-hooks that can easily cross reference with other tables and constraints if needed.
It all works pretty nicely, although I would still switch to Laravel in an instant if I could.
In my hardest semester at college, I wound up spending a somewhat unreasonable amount of time in nature. I would walk 3-5 miles a day and up to 20 miles on the weekend. I had a wetlands preserve across the street (well, highway) from my apartment, and a great state park about 10 minutes away. My workouts got more intense as I was more stressed as well.
It all seemed to balance out and I've been trying to get back to that sort of balance of activities since I graduated.
My base assumption is that moving people around is good. Freedom of movement and time-efficient movement. The car reigns supreme over trains, planes, and buses in those terms.
> the net impact was a slight time savings for suburban commuters for about six months, after which traffic was worse than before because more people were driving.
By the sound of it, more people were able to get where they were going because of the the Big Dig.
> Getting those people onto trains would be far more effective and cheaper
A breakdown of the numbers here would be great, but I'm not sure how much more time either of us want to spend lol. I like trains, but I'm cautious about them because they generally can't take people directly to an end destination the way an independent vehicle can. The US has also generally failed to use rail in a way that could replace cars in a meaningful way, despite rail having a decades-long head-start over the automobile.
> Similarly, delivery and garbage trucks aren’t affected at all by calming measures
I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that you wanted to remove or replace roads in cities to make way for alternative transportation. That's based on the statement in your original comment:
> Outside of freeways, we shouldn’t dedicate millions of dollars in public space to private car drivers,
I was not referring to traffic calming measures when I said that would be a logistical nightmare. I more meant that private cars share common infrastructure with a number of critical services; reducing their share of public space would harm those other services.
We absolutely should consider the entirety of drivers and their existing behaviors when we design roads, instead of wishing they would behave differently.
Moreover, reducing accommodation for motor vehicles in cities leaves the non-urban population behind - and neglects that private vehicles aren't the only users of the roadway. Truck deliveries, garbage collection, and mail become a lot more difficult if roadways are reduced.