apothegm

Typically that kind of thing is entirely student-run. Campus IT might provide them with hosting, I suppose.

Pretty sure that’s their campus newspaper, actually.

I think there’s a disconnect here between someone talking about what Americans call “white bread” (the highly Wonderbread that reportedly can only be sold as cake in some European states) and someone talking about what Europeans call “white bread”, which is more traditional bread — baguettes are an example, and just one of the many shapes it comes in.

They sift all the dirt they remove from the site. They also typically sample it for pollen and such, which they can learn a lot from as well.

Nowadays they don’t in fact brush off artifacts immediately upon extraction, just clear them of large clumps of dirt. Precisely because the fragile remains of paint and whatever else might have been stuck to them can often teach us more than the artifact itself.

There are also a lot of issues currently with AI being used for fraud, impersonation, and more in remote hiring.

It’s probably dead because it’s clearly the C&Ped result of feeding this question to an agent. If OP wanted an LLM’s answer, they’d probably have asked the agent themselves.

I mean… the origin of that analogy is selling shovels to gold miners in the 1849 gold rush. Most of those miners found absolutely nothing.

Clarity and coherence.

Next question?

Not the ones we had at my school and home in the 80s. Nor the outdated DOS machine I inherited to write school essays on when my dad got a new Dell with Windows 95. Just a power button or switch, depending on the model.

What are they protesting?

Yes, we used to do that, back in the dinosaur (286-486, DOS and Win3.1) days.

“Have you tried turning it off and then on again” became such a common response to Windows 95+ being kind of crap that they started to include the option for convenience.

Not surprising it died out, and probably quickly. Birds trained to sing Fur Elise would probably be at a disadvantage in attracting a mate imprinted on a more typical song.

You’ll get a kick out of the concept of nominative determinism, then!

There are also traditional small business loans.

> the best place for DDD is a big ball of mud that works but an absolute pain to deal with

So a vibe-coded codebase?

Nor would most of us.

You seem supremely confident that that will be the outcome, though. A lot of us see a lot of other possible ways this could end up, and that seem more likely considering the way the people who have the most influence have been behaving.

You don’t, _can’t_ pick up that sort of knowledge in college. You pick it up on the job.

If anything, critical thinking is _more_ important in the LLM age. So you can question what the machine is telling you. So you can determine when it’s bullshitting, hallucinating, or plain wrong — even about topics you don’t already know intimately. So you can evaluate the queries it picks for and the sources it picks from a web search. And whether the sources it picks actually support the conclusions it draws (hint: too often not).

Translating GPT’s word salad to English at the end of an agent interaction.

As an average that includes those who don’t use it at all?

Damn right. Year round DST would be winter hell. Year round standard time, on the other hand…

For decades, surgery was performed on infants without anesthesia because they were believed not to be conscious.

Probably something to do with the way we tend not to retain memories from before about 2 y/o.

And yes, obviously absurd, one would think. Yet something that it’s important for modern medicine to have evidence of.

The ceiling fan in my bedroom was installed no later than 1981 (possibly a few decades earlier) and is utterly silent. On high you can hear the rush of air and thats it.

Of course they won’t tell us which ones didn’t…

What natural selection favors depends on the environment. That’s why dinoasaurs thrived and then went extinct, and why fish are different from dogs.

Yes.

If for no other reason than that our code can have major impacts on people’s real lives. We’re not developing games or something.

Ah.

I feel free to curse at it precisely because I’m confident it doesn’t have feelings, and it’s like swearing out loud at an inanimate object like when a shoddy screwdriver breaks, or strips a screw, or whatever.

Most people who write novels do so because there’s something (a story, an idea) that they want to communicate to other humans. Sure, you can write a novel for purely commercial purposes, but most people who write do so for the love of storytelling. Which is an inherently social and interpersonal activity.

Yes!

Declarative code has low cyclomatic complexity per unit of business logic. It also tends to have low state management demands (which the functional devotees will tell you is the root of all evil).

You can use a DSL or other abstraction so that you can declare what will happen in what circumstances, in a way that’s succinct and easily comprehensible. And all the repeatable loops and conditionals that make the declared thing happen in the appropriate circumstances are under the hood and needn’t be concern or be loaded into mental context by the person designing or updating the requirements.

It’s not the right solution to every problem, but when you can apply it effectively it’s a huge win.

However, agents and most SWEs are trained on imperative (wrapped in procedural/functional/OOP paradigms), and most will default to imperative because it’s familiar.

As I get deeper in my career I find myself gravitating toward a style that’s declarative where possible, falling back on functional, and then only when necessary imperative/procedural/OOP. It’s nice that many modern languages allow you to mix and match features of all those paradigms.

TL;DR: Mental load is the bane of programmers everywhere, and declarative programming minimizes mental load.

Fuck yes, I do. Not the most effective way to get things done, but a bit cathartic. And no, the stochastic parrot does not have emotions. And yes, it sometimes does worse after being cursed at, but you’re generally better off forking/rolling back the convo to a point before it screwed up anyway. And other times strong language manages to provide the emphasis you need to get it to actually pay attention.

Anyway, why are you ashamed of it?