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coldtea

93,674 karma · joined February 7, 2013

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coldtea··on Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?
More of "I see what you did there" champ
coldtea··on Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?
This is not just (...) It's an...

Hmmm

coldtea··on Python's experimental JIT to be removed
Different guys. The CPython guys are not those behind Pypy. And they also don't want to see Pypy replace their project.
coldtea··on Python's experimental JIT to be removed
3.12 vs 3.15 would be fine, it's not like most depend on cutting edge features.

But the libraries limitations, and that it's not the "real" Python project, do get you.

coldtea··on Ghostty 1.4
And the real load-bearing part? It's not that, it's this. And honestly? That's great!
coldtea··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
While the US had a unique post-war economic advantage, this is not the cause of this.

The same things were enjoyed by workers in most of Western Europe and even Japan post-war.

coldtea··on Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office
>Um, all of the companies mentioned in this comment thread (with the exception of the original company mentioned, NeXT) received VC investment.

Yes, but in a much less frenzier and more kept in its place VC capital mindset.

coldtea··on Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office
>I also worked at modern-ish Amazon and it sucked. Horrible office environment, tedious tasks and overall sense of oppression is what I felt. It is such a huge company, maybe there were pockets of joy.

Amazon is and always have been bean counters and toxic work culture, and any level, from warehouses to their devs. The rot starts with Bezos.

coldtea··on Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office
>At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses

You really don't. The world has gotten a lot worse in lots of ways when those days are compared to today, and the industry and job market for IT even more so.

coldtea··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
The result of unioninzing includes pulling those levels.
coldtea··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
Why an "aberration" and not a good and normal thing to happen, we should continue to strive for?
coldtea··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
Since most of us weren't still working 19th century style 14 hour shifts in factories, or toiling with mostly manual labor at the farm, but had like 9 to 5s / 8 hour work weeks it was.
coldtea··on Python's experimental JIT to be removed
>There are already many way of addressing Python performance (leaving aside whether Python is a good choice if performance matters) such as Cython, Numba, Pypy and C extensions.

And all of them are lacking in different ways, we ALSO, want faster pure Python.

coldtea··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
>I was taken aback at how casually that idea was thrown around. They didn’t even have a specific idea, just the casual thought that they could just start another company.

That's how a lot of companies are made, even huge ones. Not everything comes from a specific focus, it's just "let's see what works to build a business that can make us money".

coldtea··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
>A lot of the fired then make a Discord and casually replicate the company's product.

And they find out replicating the product means little, it's the customer base, industry reputations, connections, support, ecosystem, and stuff, that matter.

coldtea··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
>On the plus side for us worker bees, this is why I never really bought in to the narrative that our jobs were inevitably doomed. A question I've posed a few times: Consider two reasonably similar competitors with 100 engineers two years ago. Suppose AI really does accelerate development 10x times. It doesn't (at least not yet) but the larger number helps bring the question into focus. One company fires 90 engineers and does the same work with the remaining 10. The other company keeps all its engineers and does 10 times the work. Who wins in the market?

The one who understands that "10 times the work" is not necessarily absorbable by the market, and adjust to whatever lesser value still works, and still fires a lot of the 100.

coldtea··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
>It's very normal to think that the extra revenue growth you bring in should mean you have either 1) a larger share of the pie for every efficiency increase that grows revenue or 2) less expectation from you, as a worker, to labor as intensively since you are continue to bring in surplus value that is being actively skimmed from.

It's also very normal to force businesses by law to either or both. But it's not happening these days.

coldtea··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
>What kind of illusion must one be under to believe that employers would ever pay you the same amount of money to do less work?

There's the historical experience with early/mid 20th century unions, the establishment of the 8 hour workweek and worker rights, even Henry Ford's wage increases.

Not necessarily that they'd do it out of their own good heart, of course.

coldtea··on The new iPad mini
Did it? Most devices are still at 60
coldtea··on Europe's summer heat wave killed more han 50k people in urban areas
>Is that how you'd like someone to respond if one of yours passed away from preventable situations?

Yes. I'd like for them to identify what the actual problem is, and suggest people paid to help with it do their job.

>Most nursing homes are barely staffed to handle basic hygiene. They don't have the resources to manage days of an entire building crossing a healthy temperature range.

Is that how you'd like someone to respond if one of yours passed away from preventable situations?

I'm repeating your comment, because you basically add to the same argument the parent made, even though you scolded them for it.

coldtea··on US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect
>a) SpaceX should not have been started in the first place

Wouldn't be bad.

coldtea··on US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect
Not having any to begin with and instead hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses doing small business things with those would be a good start.
coldtea··on US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect
We would be much better off if a single person didn't dictate what productive means those would be applied to.
coldtea··on US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect
The ceiling should totally be limited.

Unlimited wealth means political power and means to further it.

The floor should also be comfortably high but not to the detriment of the environment for example.

coldtea··on No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector
>But most white collar workers I know spend most their time either talking to each other, or thinking real hard about what to say the next time they get together to talk.

Maybe that's just something which made sense when they were necessary to do the not yet automatable informattion processing work, but that only took like 20% of their time, so they added meetings, and useless work to keep them busy.

coldtea··on OBS Studio 33
A lot of negativity about OSS is deserved, and doesn't necessarily come from supporters of proprietary software, but for long-time OSS users and programmers, who want it to be better.

But many OSS programs are awesome, and OBS is one of them.

coldtea··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
They're cope, as if Anthropic or OpenAI have some magic moat, and not just basically a headstart and more money.
coldtea··on Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
>Yes, and they'd have to deal with the same problem that we do: how do we know what is true?

So? We also have the exact same problem, and no solution that covers all facts, not even the most basic ones.

So them having this problem would be either neutral or supportive of the idea they're intelligent, not refuting it.

coldtea··on The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)
>They were talking about a system that compiles natural language into machine code. They weren’t talking about a system that autonomously gathers requirements, decides what frameworks to use, searches the web to look up error messages, iterates on ideas, etc… these things are so different from “natural language maps to machine code” that I don’t think we’re going to have a useful discussion if you think “I tell the computer what I want” is the only aspect of this worth looking at.

This confuses two things still:

People wanting to have natural language to machine code via AI, just AI that was implemented the way they thought was achievable then (symbolic AI).

People wanting to have natural language style programming language, similar to later AppleScript or some 4GL languages.

Natural language programming, or natural language processing, as it was called, was tied to the first, and the AI research of the time, from the beginning:

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

So, yeah, they didn't have LLMs, but they pretty much understood such a program or "compiler" would need to understand world facts and natural language to even work.

coldtea··on The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)
>Yep and then you'll have some war stories how things break in production because they weren't initially included in the nonfunctional requirements.

I have plenty of those in decades of human programming too, so...

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