the epilogue is what speaks to me most. all of the work I've done with llms takes that same kind of approach. I never link them to a git repo and I only ever ask them to make specific, well-formatted changes so that I can pick up where they left off. my general feelings are that LLMs make the bullshit I hate doing a lot easier - project setup, integrate themeing, prepare/package resources for installability/portability, basic dependency preparation (vite for js/ts, ui libs for c#, stuff like that), ui layout scaffolding (main panel, menu panel, theme variables), auto-update fetch and execute loops, etc...
and while I know they can do the nitty gritty ui work fine, I feel like I can work just as fast, or faster, on UI without them than I can with them. with them it's a lot of "no, not that, you changed too much/too little/the wrong thing", but without them I just execute because it's a domain I'm familiar with.
So my general idea of them is that they are "90% machines". Great at doing all of the "heavy lifting" bullshit of initial setup or large structural refactoring (that doesn't actually change functionality, just prepares for it) that I never want to do anyway, but not necessary and often unhelpful for filling in that last 10% of the project just the way I want it.
of course, since any good PM knows that 90% of the code written only means 50% of the project finished (at best), it still feels like a hollow win. So I often consider the situation in the same way as that last paragraph. Am I letting the ease of the initial setup degrade my ability to setup projects without these tools? does it matter, since project setup and refactoring are one-and-done, project-specific, configuration-specific quagmires where the less thought about fiddly perfect text-matching, the better? can I use these things and still be able to use them well (direct them on architechture/structure) if I keep using them and lose grounded concepts of what the underlying work is? good questions, as far as I'm concerned.
A solid suggestion, but a big point of porting it to C# is the performance gains, which the CLR would mitigate. I know it'll be faster than running in a browser - where the game will also run - but if you're offering something for "performance", I don't think the time is best spent on making my job of composing the package easier. I think I'd rather try to figure out how to go whole-hog and compile as much of the game into an AOT package as possible. But, for what it's worth, the entire game engine was written in C# and ported into JS for the express purpose of being able to back-port the packaged code into C#. So I'm hoping it's not too onerous to do the native transpilation, either.
Right on. That makes sense. Thanks for spelling it out!
I do think aligning the semantics will be the easier part, honestly, because I'm only trying to transpile the supported source for the game engine. Since that's all written in typescript and I'm not guaranteeing full parity if you are trying to transpile arbitrary ts/js (only the source that can be parsed the same way the game engine is parsed), I'm expecting it to be a near 1-to-1 conversion. I started writing everything in C# and copied the structure to JS, knowing that this was the eventual plan, so the JS can actually be re-written as C# with a pretty simple regex tokenizer.
My hope, here, is that by having the code morphed into an IR, that the IR would be some kind of well-known IR that - for instance - C# could also be morphed into and - therefore - would allow automatic parsing back and forth. From what you're saying, though, it sounds like IRs don't use a common structure for describing code (I'm guessing because of the semantic misalignment you mention between a wide variety of different paradigms?), so this would only work if I made the map from IR to C# which would be just as complex (or more so) than just regexing my JS into C#. If I've got that right, that's a bummer, but understandable. If I'm wrong, though, happy to learn more!
asking as someone who is writing a game engine in javascript with the intention to 'transpile' the games' source into a C# project for a native runtime: this provides a map that allows automated translation from javascript source to C# source, right?
please engage in good faith. if you think mathematical proofs will be an issue when I tell someone to "look at the literature", you either don't know what a mathematical proof is, or are too far abstracted from reality to influence any practical action. yes, we're being lied to. no, they don't fuck up the science in order to lie to you. they just expect you not to read the science. because, truthfully, it's rare that the people who are lying to you would even know how to fuck up the science in their favor. so they bet on your ignorance, based on their ignorance, and they usually win the bet. but not if you just go look it up and engage with it. it's not about reading a single paper; it's about always reading every paper (on topics you have decided you are going to have an opinion about) with a keen and unshakeable focus on practical effect. anything else is an academic boondoggle.
it's amazing how much asking someone to actually explain what they are trying to imply will completely shut them up. Thanks for playing! I hope your next one is so pithy that I'll rue the day I spoke against you. fingers crossed
not quite; spell it out for me. are you suggesting that the onion has never, under any circumstances, been funny and therefore are guilty of having pretentious opinions that are "not funny", which makes them bad? Or is it that you're suggesting that you are the sole arbiter of what is and isn't funny, so you're the only person who gets to determine the worth of specific types of humor? Sorry, I have a hard time distinguishing which type of childish, smug bullshit I'm dealing with, so any help you can provide would be appreciated.
In any case, I've never laughed as hard at anything Lenny fucking Bruce said as I did at The Onions "Sony Releases Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work" bit. So if you've got some favorite bruce bits, I'd love to get educated on what is hilarious about 60 year old observational standup.
you don't have to be a scientist to directly engage with the literature. from mathematical proofs to directly observed phenomena to statistical certainties - it's all out there for you to engage with and feel secure in your findings just by having an internet connection. there's a qualitative difference in that evidence from the "sides" and therefore there is a qualitative and practical difference in the "more intelligent" side. "truth" is not incidental to the situation, it's the entire point of making claims at all. So a side that is making claims that turn out to not be true - whether you personally verify that or not - is a worse side, intellectually, than another.
nailed it. I see this odd "eugenics" framing all the time, and all I can think is 'ooh la la, somebody's gonna get laid in college." you can argue the academia until you are blue in the face, but the real-world statistics show that less educated people have more children and that education quality in the US has been declining. It's not a foregone conclusion that one causes the other, but there's a cogent argument to be made that it's about the culture of poorer people vs the culture of richer people - and they even spell out that angle in the movie. They show how reticent the rich couple is to have a child, and how eager the poor couple is to do the same. It's about what their cultures value about children and legacy. It's not "dumb people make dumb kids", it's "dumb people won't educate their kids past their own knowledge who, in turn, won't educate their kids past their own knowledge." The movie even goes on to resolve with the "dumb" descendants learning (from the protagonist) when they have anyone willing to make that a point of the culture. So I can't read a clean "eugenics" take from the film; I only find that take in misreadings of the intro, personally.
Truly fantastic work! "Holy Grail" is right! Terrain generation just got an upgrade so the tooling is about to start producing some really beautiful results in real time. That's going to be a blast to work with. Thanks!
Speaking of which... when people talk about "replacing" humans with AI, it makes me wonder if there's some kind of law we can push for that says "if you are part of the chain of command that signs off on AI being able to make final determinations, and that causes legal issues, you will be legally liable in place of the AI, since computers cannot be liable." Let a jury decide who, in the chain, bears what burden, case by case, but provide for prima facie liability for all parties in the chain, when a valid suit is tried. I want to see how strong the push is for AI when it's the CEO's personal money on the line.
in case you don't understand what GP is suggesting: your website does not actually describe what you're providing. A "next generation Rust UI library powered by fine-grained reactivity." could mean a UI for native apps - something like egui or Dioxys - or it could mean a way to use rust to output HTML, CSS, and javascript. Or a bunch of other things. And, regardless, there's no way to look at your website and determine how to get that output using sycamore. I can inspect and see your HTML or your CSS, but there's no Rust code for me to compare that against without going and looking it up somewhere.
To be more succinct: you don't even have an image of your UI running on your websites landing page. Not one single image of the library which is, again, a UI library. People have an interest in knowing "does this look and feel like I want it to?" as well as "can I use this in the projects I'm working on?". Both of those questions should be answered by your landing page. For me, at least, it doesn't do that.
>the giveaway was having the karen call back to request the person stop.[emphasis added]
if you believe that a government employee called this person back - especially in a full panic, right next to the alleged machine - I've got a bridge to sell you. I mean, yikes.
"Sir, please." - yeah; total defeat. this low-level government employee was in such a desperate place that they had to call the only person who could fix it and helplessly beg him to stop. the machine was simultaneously out of toner, but still trying to chug on with the print, making mechanical noises of helplessness? tl;dr - everybody clapped.
possibly! but I'd put some actual money on it. when I was doing student loan collections for incarcerated (or assumed incarcerated) people, we had to deal with a ton of city and state offices to track down whether or not we needed to pause collections. there are plenty of software vendors offering services, but you tend to hear the same four or five from most places and the places that don't use them would usually reference them like "ours is like westfax" or whatever.
I'm not so naive as to think there's no podunk, crossroads "town" out there that has some mayberry-ass fax machine just spitting out whatever you send it. But given how attractive government offices are to people for either pranking or ...ahem redressing via their fax machines since the late 70's, it's more common than you might believe for even the smallest little townships to have a contract with a company that turns faxes into emails.
lol. stopped reading after your first line because I've worked every low-wage, customer facing job you can imagine. shoe salesman, phone rep for verizon and then t mobile and then at&t, fast food, local diner waitstaff, office receptionist, contract installer, HVAC repair, cable service tech. that's a truncated list. I have the opinions I have because I've had those jobs, not in spite of them. I know how I carried myself, and it was a very low bar to reach. it's only when people don't reach that bar that I raise issue. because the bar is "know where you are, know what you can do, know what you can't do, and be as accommodating and responsive to the client/customer as you possibly can be, given your constraints." doesn't feel onerous to me. and in this specific case, I don't even have a problem with karen, per se. at least not from the content of the story. my reply was in response to other people insisting that karen needs to be coddled because all she did was answer a phone and this horrible man sent her a fax! (the horror)
I'll assume you're misrepresenting me out of genuine misunderstanding, rather than snark, so to that end: I'm not suggesting no one every take a job they don't like (for any reason whatsoever!). I'm suggesting that everyone recognize the position they are in and make peace with it. You're in a job that isn't very nice? Got it! Been there. Feel for you. Honestly!
But why, on earth, would that afford you pity when you take part in making life shitty for other people? You knew that was the job. You called the job 'not nice'. Recognize that you are being shitty to someone. Yes, on behalf of a company. That part goes both ways. You aren't responsible for the shitty things you're doing - that's the machine's responsibility. You are just doing shitty things. You don't get absolved from that just because you didn't make the call. It's still perfectly rational to resent the person that is being shitty to you.
And, overall, it seems like we mostly agree. Not a lot of people "in the right", in this story. I won't discount that it's the caller's prerogative to be a jerk (even if it's just being a jerk "back"), and that's on them. Just want to stake the claim that while I accept that, the standard must reciprocate to the actual agent on the phone as well.
the author didn't make anything harder for anyone because the "fax" wasn't ever even printed, much less caused a backup or even a slowdown at all. the giveaway was having the karen call back to request the person stop. the initial phone call undoubtedly happened, but the fax was consumed by the same systems used in medical offices all around the country, which means that it arrived as a pdf in some repository and it was attached to the client's records in the system. the whole "it has to be a fax" thing is a HIPPA compliance measure about chain of custody, rather than a technological requirement. it "could" be an email, but the data can never at any point be stored in certain ways or in certain locales, or whatever. since most email can't guarantee that, the policies are to only use fax, but then they use a service or application (that provides financial and legal guarantees of custody) to receive incoming faxes as pdfs. sometimes, even as attachments on emails.
exactly this. I didn't put you in a bad job; you - and to a large extent, your society - did. you are the face of the machine that I am trying to deal with. if you don't want to be that face, go be the face of some other machine. but if you pick up a phone to talk to a client or customer, you are a representation of an organization, and you will be treated as such. fix you mind to understand that people are trying to find the right things to say to you to get what they need at that moment. no different from someone putting in quarters to get a soda from a vending machine. I do X, I get Y. if there is a breakdown in getting Y, I will try other things beyond X. so, in this example, I tried to be reasonable; I tried to make this simple for me while simultaneously making it simple for both you and the machine you are representing. if it is the machine that prevents you from accepting that simplicity, then explain as much as they let you, apologize like a human being for the failings of the machine you represent, and ignore literally all of the rest of it. you can only do what you can do. they can only get what they can get. no amount of hostility will change the policy, but hostility will surely get different (sometimes better; not often) results than acquiescence. recognize that it's not hostility towards you and - god forbid - enjoy the fact that someone else notices how fucking shitty the machine you work for is. if you're a real superstar, take note of the specific situation and place it somewhere you can provide a collection of specific situations for review.
ah, cool! great to have such a loyal ally that snark and cynicism wilts their enthusiasm to such an extent. how would we ever get rid of age verification laws without your "dropped at the first sign of someone not being nice to me" supportive commentary and shrugs?
ah, yeah; I guess organization looks like complete capitulation and then commenting on the effect elsewhere with a sturdy shrug "whatcha gonna do? we're all just so powerless". fighting the good fight.
nevermind the apologist. his paycheck is paid by people that have capitulated to the same bullshit. and you know what they say about people learning lessons whom have a financial incentive not to.
Sounds interesting, but I guess I'm a little unsure of how to connect the dots? Are you suggesting that websites would be hosted on a blockchain and browsed by human-signed browsers? Or more like there would be a blockchain authority, which server hosts could query to determine if a signature, provided by their browser, is human? Would you mind painting the picture in a little more detail?
I'm seeing a lot of comments about how we maintain the status quo, but I'm very interested in hearing from anyone who has conceded that there is no way to stop AI scrapers at this point and what that means for how we maintain public information on the internet in the future.
I don't necessarily believe that we won't find some half-successful solution that will allow server hosting to be done as it currently is, but I'm not very sure that I'll want to participate in whatever schemes come about from it, so I'm thinking more about how I can avoid those schemes rather than insisting that they won't exist/work.
The prevailing thought is that if it's not possible now, it won't be long before a human browser will be indistinguishable from an LLM agent. They can start a GUI session, open a browser, navigate to your page, snapshot from the OS level and backwork your content from the snapshot, or use the browser dev tools or whatever to scrape your page that way. And yes, that would be much slower and more inefficient than what they currently do, but they would only need to do that for those that keep on the bleeding edge of security from AI. For everyone else, you're in a security race against highly-paid interests. So the idea of having something on the public internet that you can stop people from archiving (for whatever purpose they want) seems like it's soon to be an old-fashioned one.
So, taking it as a given that you can't stop what these people are currently trying to stop (without a legislative solution and an enforcement mechanism): how can we make scraping less of a burden on individual hosts? Is this thing going to coalesce into centralizing "archiving" authorities that people trust to archive things, and serve as a much more structured and friendly way for LLMs to scrape? Or is it more likely someone will come up with a way to punish LLMs or their hosts for "bad" behavior? Or am I completely off base? Is anyone actually discussing this? And, if so, what's on the table?
I wouldn't call it a bug. This is a first step, not a final step. Maintaining the refraction might be more realistic, but it's not necessarily what the creator wants.
lol! no surer sign of a junior/naive/ignorant developer or manager than the sentiment "okay, well, let's start from scratch and do it right this time."
big projects generate cruft. there are ways to minimize it, but as you go along there will always be some stuff that doesn't quite mesh with whatever else you've got going on. if you insist on ironing out every single wrinkle (admirable!) you'll never actually deliver a result.
I'm not saying this will fail. green field projects can certainly be a godsend when they produce something better than what they attempt to replace. but they are always a sign of failure. of not being able to work your way out of the mess you made with the first attempt. so that just begs the question: what are you going to do when this attempt gets hard to work with? going to give up and start over again - do it right that time? or...?