danparsonson

That just sounds like a tower of abstraction to me; the 'primitives' are whatever you're building the current layer on top of. The filesystem becomes the primitive when you want to fopen something. Perhaps I'm over simplifying? I still don't see a division into two classes of abstraction.

> Modularity abstraction aspires to hide the interleavings and present operations as if they were atomic. Its goal is to make the module easy to use, but in doing so it forgoes exposing concurrency or efficiency opportunities.

> In stark contrast, the modeling abstraction is about identifying what should leak and leveraging it! It exposes the fine-grained actions and orderings, and proves that invariants hold despite the interleavings. The payoff for this work is to harvest the maximum safe concurrency from the system.

I guess I don't understand the argument here because those just sound like two different flavours of the same custard to me; the difference is just the balance of work you're doing on each side of the interface, and that decision depends on use cases specific to the project.

This feels more like it's making a point about system design? Abstraction is abstraction - you can apply it at different levels within a project, and a big part of building skills in software development is in learning to zoom in and out and nail the abstraction at each stage, but ultimately you're doing the same thing over and over. I don't personally think we need categories of it.

That's a great comment! Tying ones shoelaces without the aid of modern technology is not just old-fashioned (em dash) it's a key differentiator that highlights the growing divide between the generations in the age of generative AI!

etc.

What a time to be alive

> adults' addictions to devices leading them to neglect kids

I suspected also that kids in such situations are learning by example, so it's a double whammy of neglect and bad habits

> As an American, I found the deference to authority very strange.

Are schoolchildren in the US still required to recite the pledge of allegiance...?

It is possible, but sadly the alternative is easier.

Ah apologies, didn't mean to pathologise you; for some, having a suitable label helps in understanding oneself and finding helpful accomodations.

Sorry for your struggles. Not to speak to your specific experience but in evolutionary terms there are other ways to look at neurodivergence besides the challenges: https://complementarycognition.co.uk/

Hyperfocus for example can be highly beneficial if you manage to point it in the right direction, and in general neurodivergence tends to specialise either into explorers or exploiters, that is, those who are good at exploring the space of possible solutions, and those who are good at applying a specific solution to solve the problem at hand. Such skills can be problematic in isolation (as you've described), but in combination can be very powerful and could've therefore been instrumental to our past success as a species.

I understand this is not much comfort for an individual who is struggling, but I second the GP in saying that many modern societies are not setup to provide the best environment for the neurodivergent among us to thrive, to the detriment of everyone.

Well the original is more than 20 years old; hopefully they are feeling a bit happier now.

Have you looked into ADHD?

You just said the same thing that I did - "enough of us" includes your government.

Not exactly a representative example you picked there though

They did rather bring that on themselves though

Value is entirely in the eye of the beholder - money itself only has value because enough of us agree that it does.

Hehe some are, in fact, English :-)

Love the retro-futuristic graphics, that's really nice

"Non-exhaust emissions (NEE) are particles released into the air from brake wear, tyre wear, road surface wear and resuspension of road dust during on-road vehicle usage."

I guess they mean total non-exhaust particulates.

Wow thank you for that - I can almost hear the 40MB HDD purring quietly in the background

Code that accidentally ships every 100th order out for free... exploits releasing customer PID and causing regulatory nightmares... self-driving cars that reboot at 70mph... The only limit is your imagination!

If you want to do that, there is a wide variety of pre-existing recording devices available already...

I feel you - I've always had a blackspot in my brain for names; I once was showing a new hire around, and about halfway through introducing my colleagues, my brain gave up and I couldn't remember anyone any more. Just awful.

Finally started writing that Game Boy emulator I've always wanted to make - C# on Linux, planning to use SDL for the display and maybe NAudio for the sound.

Is it just possible that your dating problems come from somewhere else? I personally haven't experienced the negative social consequences you're describing, but I'm also not dating in SF.

OK, I see, thanks. That applies to some skeptics, though - I'm in the AI skeptic camp but only in the sense that I believe we should make sober assessments of what these things are actually capable of.

Take your point, although

> "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon".

those are not goalposts - that's an incredible vague 'goal'. What are we moving here exactly?

You got me - I've been rumbled.

Actually, I'm really an LLM and this whole thing was a clever bluff.

It's almost like I disagree with your use of the phrase in this context, rather than that I don't know the meaning of it.

If it seems like I don't understand the meaning of that very well-known phrase, then clearly I have failed to make my point. I'll try again. And please note that I will use some generalizations to make my point more clearly, rather than because I don't understand nuance; kindly grant me a charitable reading.

In recent years, I have commonly seen the phrase "you're moving the goalposts" deployed by the "it might be sentient" crowd to shoot down the "it's a stochastic parrot" crowd when the latter respond to a new development with "OK but...". In a well-understood field of inquiry, that would be a clear case of goalpost-moving, in the commonly-understood meaning of the phrase where requirements are retroactively changed in response to them having been met. Thank you OP. 'Artificial Intelligence', and indeed intelligence in general, is very much not a well-understood field of inquiry - in fact we don't even have a common agreement about what 'intelligence' is. We are therefore learning as we go (even after all this time!) but making rapid progress in recent years. When rapid progress is made in a poorly-understood field, then how can our definitions and requirements for success not change? This is arguably one of the most pathological development projects ever - what are the requirements? 'It thinks like a human'? What does that mean? And the answer is we don't know what that means, and we're working it out as we go - moving the goalposts. If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.

Side note that, in case it's not obvious, none of this detracts from how impressive LLMs are. They're a marvel of the modern age, all the problems notwithstanding. However I reserve the right to stay sceptical about their capabilities.

Never understood all this talk about moving goalposts - you understand that's how science works, right? We improve, we learn, we recalibrate our expectations based on what we've learned. If we never "moved the goalposts", we'd be stuck scoring the same goals over and over.

> Viewing the continuance of our race as only the responsibility of parents is pathological.

That's not what I said.