d-us-vb

This. Muscles can be optimized for volume/endurance or power, or some balance between them. Taking legs as an example: Powerlifters obviously go for pure power, whereas runners need a bit of power but mostly endurance, whereas cyclists need more power than runners but more endurance than powerlifters.

All of these benefit from weight training, but depending on the sport, the programming will be very different.

This comment is quite strange to me. e is the base of the natural logarithm. so ln 2 is actually log_e (2). If we take the natural log of 2, we are literally using its value as the base of a logarithm.

Does a number not matter "in practice" even if it's used to compute a more commonly use constant? Very odd framing.

That is not my read on the post, and your point doesn't really make sense. The objective of all these activities is measurable improvement. The practical discipline in each practice session for each activity is the bare minimum to improve and every activity has it. The point of the post is that some activities tend to see consistent, linear improvement over the long term where others tend to see droughts/plateaus.

Running is a great example because a dedicated runner, even a hobbyist, can expect to see 3-5% improvement in speed/endurance or whatever every season. But no runner expects to see improvement during a single run. But the same isn't true for activities like golf or language acquisition (my own example).

Completely agree. NaNoWriMo solves a problem that the author doesn't even mention. And I like your point that writing is part of the thinking process. Indeed, Richard Feynman claimed that his notes were his thoughts. He saw no distinction between them, and that useful fiction was important to him making progress.

For the kinds of things you’d need to reach for an LLM, there’s no way to trust that it actually generated what you actually asked for. You could ask it to write a bunch of tests, but you still need to read the tests.

It isn’t fair to say “since I don’t read the source of the libraries I install that are written by humans, I don’t need to read the output of an llm; it’s a higher level of abstraction” for two reasons:

1. Most Libraries worth using have already been proven by being used in actual projects. If you can see that a project has lots of bug fixes, you know it’s better than raw code. Most bugs don’t show up unless code gets put through its paces.

2. Actual humans have actual problems that they’re willing to solve to a high degree of fidelity. This is essentially saying that humans have both a massive context window and an even more massive ability to prioritize important things that are implicit. LLMs can’t prioritize like humans because they don’t have experiences.

I like this post. It reminds me of contemporary programming language research. There are precious few people actually doing interesting stuff in PL research these days that are actually trying to uncover new paradigms that aren't just the same old "we discovered how to do X in Y type system" or "novel technique to generate objects with blah blah constraints".

People doing actually interesting stuff can't get funding, so they have to lone-wolf their entire research or just give up and work on stuff that gets paid, people like

- Jonathan Edwards

- Allen Webster

- Brett Victor

All with seriously intriguing ideas that probably have potential, but nobody seems to want to actually dig in to the stuff. Fortunately, there are guys like Stephen Kell who are kind of doing it even in academia, but I think he's limited too towards working on the boring problems that get funding as well.

No, rendering to a vector display (hardware whose primitive operations are points and lines) is almost free for the kind of drawings he was rendering. Zoom is just one linear transformation on each point in the model, no different from panning the view.

*2swap

It's just the popular wisdom these days. Companies tend to deprioritize hiring engineers in their 40s, especially if their overspecialized. At face value, Companies want high-energy 20-somethings that they can mold into their specialty. More likely, they know that 20-somethings expect a far smaller salary.

Watterson explicitly stated that the names have no relation to the characters' personalities or philosophical views. As someone familiar with John Calvin's views and writings, I can say safely that Calvin is not much in any way similar in personality or spirit to anything John Calvin ever taught or expressed. At best, Watterson is projecting the typical libertine caricature of John Calvin as a cantankerous and disagreeable curmudgeon onto the character. John Calvin was in reality quite progressive for his time, and by all impressions did all that he did out of love for those around them in line with a plain reading of scripture. But to see him that way requires nuance that seems to be lost on the anti-religious.

Well, I'm definitely anti-pseudo-intellectual. Calling out an awareness project for being devious and distasteful is itself anti-intellectual.

The nuance here is that LLMs seem to exacerbate depression. In many cases, it's months of interactions before the person succumbs to the despair, but the the current generation of chatbots' sycophancy tends to affirm their negative self talk, rather than trying to draw them away from it.

If a new technology is directly or indirectly involved in people's deaths, we can't just ignore the problems. Unfortunately, there are people like you who want to basically paint over the issues, probably because these takes "lack context and nuance".

If they were developed to actually tell people the truth, rather than simply be a sycophant, things might be different. But as Pilate said all those years ago "what is truth".

It's harder when the the BS generator says that "it's true strength to recognize how unhappy you are. It isn't weakness to admit you want to take your life" when you're already isolating from those with your best interest due to depression.

The mind is much more sensitive to writing it didn’t produce itself. If it produced the writing, then it is at least somewhat aware of the emotional state of the writer and can contextualize. If it is reading it from an outside “observer” it assumes far more objectivity, especially when the motive for seeking the observer perspective was for some therapeutic reason, even if they know that at best they’ll be getting pseudo-therapy.

Perhaps not a true counterpoint, but there are systems like the GA144, an array of 144 Forth processors.

I think you're missing the point, and I don't think OP is "being critical of companies making practical designs."

Also, I think OP was imagining some kind of tree based topology, not connected graph since he said:

> ...but it would take talking through up to 15 intermediaries to communicate between any two arbitrary cores.

You won't be bringing your own graphics card to RadiantOS. According to one of the pages, they want to design their own hardware and the graphics will be provided by a memory-mapped FPGA.

If your question is about the general intricacies in graphics that usually have bugs, then I'd say they have a much better chance at solving those issues than other projects that try to support 3rd party graphics hardware.

There are lots of systems that have tried to do something like the first quote. They're usually referred to as "semantic OSes", since the OS itself manages the capturing of semantic links.

I don't think anyone denies the current utility of AI. A big problem of the current OSes is that AI features are clumsily bolted on without proper context. If the entire system is designed from the ground up for AI and the model runs locally, perhaps many of the current issues will be diminished.

Based on its /log page, it doesn't look like it has one yet. They're just now implementing the implementation language, R'.

Yeah, this is concerning. Although, if the system is architected well, accessibility features ought to be something that can be added as an extension.

What is a screen reader but something that can read the screen? It needs metadata from the GUI, which ought to be available if the system is correctly architected. It needs navigation order, which ought to be something that can be added later with a separate metadata channel (since navigation order should be completely decoupled from the implementation of the GUI).

The other topic of accessibility a la Steve Yegge: the entire system should be approachable to non-experts. That's already in their mission statement.

I think that the systems of the past have trained us to expect a lack of dynamism and configurability. There is some value to supporting existing screen-readers, like ORCA, since power users have scripts and whatnot. But my take is that if you provide a good mechanism that supports the primitive functionality and support generalized extensibility, then new and better systems can emerge organically. I don't use accessibility software, but I can't imagine it's perfect. It's probably ripe for its own reformation as well.

Seems like this is one way of visualizing the solutions to many closely related equations simultaneously. I wonder what the graph looks like if instead coloring based on error, one composited all the solutions within a range of values of of the coefficients.

It was a deliberate word choice by the author. "Illegible" conveys that it's difficult to track from the outside. It's a clever analogy: illegible hand writing can be read by those who are familiar with the scribe.

It's not invisible though: those who work with these kinds of engineers easily see how valuable they are.

I'm not sure that AI will always be "convenient". We're currently in the rose-colored glasses phase, a lot like object-orientation was back in the '90s. It'll probably never go away, but in a few years everyone will realize that it creates its own friction, just like poorly designed OO codebases have. Inevitably, there will be an entire supporting industry designed to circumvent the inherent problems like a tradeoff.

Is Object Orientation bad? Is AI driven development bad? Not intrinsically, but anytime people are drawn to convenience, there are hidden tradeoffs they're making.

As far as programming goes, I tend to think that the friction created by bad OO practices haven't really led to anything other than "creative" coping mechanisms in those codebases, so perhaps for this analogy, that doesn't really bode well. But anyway...

This is an interesting take. It maps decently to the "first to market" mentality of a lot of programming these days. For sure, we'd get better programmers if they were judged by the quantity of code they produced in their personal projects, but if "quantity learners" are simply forced to churn out bad code without any reflection or the time to experiment, then I would agree that it seems pretty naive to think they'll ever improve... except at a handful of patterns that make bad code sort of work.

the silent argument is that the store should have more open registers.

I disagree. For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a word even if they’ve never heard it spoken before. And even if they use an intuitive pronunciation that isn’t identical to standard pronunciation, they’ll still be understood.

Spelling bee is the opposite direction, going from pronunciation to spelling; not a fair comparison.

he said "somewhat work the same way". For a person who doesn't care about whether they have to get a new code when they move, the systems are equivalent in their value proposition. Thus is the case for most things that "somewhat work the same way".

Then just donate to the projects that you use maybe? Certainly there are some OSS projects that don't need our help (Chromium, for example), but there are lots that do:

- Emacs packages like Consult, Denote, Helm, Magit, and many others

- Anki

- Recoll

- FSF

- Virtually all community driven linux distros

If you want to make the argument that "I don't know if I can trust the maintainer to actually put my hard earn money to good use in improving the project", then I would say "just be ethical; the laborer deserves his wages".

Not so hot take: FOSS should be treated as shareware was in the 80s and 90s.

that's only if you're viewing "people" as a whole. If you instead view each commentor as an individual, it only makes sense that you would promote what improves the health of your service and punish those who stir up strife.

In general, anyone can find some reason to criticize even the best things, and if there's one lesson humanity can take from social media it's that negativity and cyber-bullying is contagious. I am completely in favor of YouTube for creating a comment section that I actually enjoy reading; one that enhances the video-watching experience. Not even a single flavenoid of bad taste in my mouth about this.

This post presents why object oriented programming is harder than it looks.

“I’m gonna return a pizza because I want a pizza”

When of course, what one really wants is a pizza in a box. And the oven objection is also kind of funny. It leads to a “but computers are so fast, why can’t they build me a new oven for each pizza?”

People think they want real-world analogies, which they hope will make code easier to reuse and maintain when what they really want are deep modules with clean interfaces, for which object orientation is not necessary in the least.