fzeindl

I stopped in 2018. I realize that a lot has been done since then, but the base code wasn‘t changed, otherwise old apps wouldn‘t run anymore.

My gripe with android is that I think it wastes a lot of resources by being very inefficient in software. Just enable the debug mode to see what portion of your screen refreshes and repaints and stand back in awe while nothing changes and you still get hundreds of repaints.

> I actually really like Android as an operating system, the internals seem remarkably well thought out and ideal for the mobile use case

Just no. I developed for android for a long time and I have seldomly seen a worse and more confusing SDK and code base. I can give you many examples but the core layouting algorithm having quadratic complexity with the number of widgets and the single base-view class having 60.000 lines of code are just the tip of the iceberg.

Regarding the argument about LLMs having difficulties auditing their work:

I wonder whether we are entering the era of throwaway software. Just like cheap plastics and improved processes has enabled us to rapidly manufacture anything we want for a very low price, maybe LLMs give us the same for software. Produce it cheaply and if it breaks throws it away and reproduce it.

Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain.

But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?

> In many cases the skills are available in house to do the necessary vetting, but these people are already overwhelmed with their existing day to day.

This is an interesting topic. We treat vetting output the same as doing the work ourselves, but that is not the case.

Doing the work is not the same as reviewing work done by others.

I have heard reports of software engineering companies that have gone full agentic. Their seniors only review stuff written by LLMs and it burns them out, because they have to switch context constantly.

I find this interesting because part of being a senior developer is that you are experienced enough that you won‘t make grave mistakes anymore. This is the case in many professions: you are relied upon to not make grave mistakes.

But those same people are now swamped with stuff that they are not able to review, so they will let a grave mistake slip through at some point.

So they really can‘t trust themselves anymore?

> but I am absolutely in the camp of "there are many tasks where pattern matching is just as effective as actual understanding“

What if „being effective at something with pattern matching but not understanding it“ just means that you have identified only 90% of patterns and keep failing to learn the rest for whatever reason.

I was originally sceptical of LLMs and am far from the „agents will magically fix our future“-crowd, but sentences like these trip me up:

> „But pattern‑matching is not system understanding, and plausibility is not correctness.“

Why not? Who says that? Who proved that system understanding is not just more complex pattern matching?

> „LLMs predict tokens, not consequences“

Same here. LLMs output tokens but who says that they don’t form some internal group of token-predicting tensors that move together and constitute the internal model of a „consequence“? It is like saying humans don’t have thoughts, they just have electrical impulses moving their tongues.

I too think that LLMs seem to be a very specific form of intelligence, maybe resembling the parts of our brain that do language-processing, but it is a fact that they at least fake intelligence very convincingly. And that we actually don’t know how they do it.

You see it when looking at the location of the microphone on his shirt.

The term for this is „buffer hiring“.

It's true that there are few obvious bugs, but there are many subtle bugs now, usually outside the main interaction flows. 5 years ago, apple's software felt bugfree, essentially.

examples:

- if I change a note on my iphone and wake up my mac, I need to restart the notes-app before it syncs the change.

- if somebody leaves me a FaceTime video-message, I get an "unread"-badge that doesn't get away after I watch the video. There are multiple ways to get to that video and only one of them clears the "unread" badge.

- if I add a pronounciation field to a contact in my iphone, SIRI stops working and I need to restart my iphone to get it back.

Tested this, works for me.

I exercise 3 times a week (running, martial arts, weight lifting). I ran marathons, I exercised 5-6 times per week for the last 5 years.

I am truly fit, but … I still don’t feel like exercising.

Most of the time it’s like brushing my teeth, it is just something I do because it is right.

A similarly scoped book series is „AI game programming wisdom“, which contains a multitude of chapters that focus on diverse, individual algorithms that can be practically used in games for a variety of usecases.

In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally.

Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.

No.

With databases there exists a clear boundary, the query planner, which accepts well defined input: the SQL-grammar that separates data (fields, literals) from control (keywords).

There is no such boundary within an LLM.

There might even be, since LLMs seem to form adhoc-programs, but we have no way of proving or seeing it.

The principal security problem of LLMs is that there is no architectural boundary between data and control paths.

But this combination of data and control into a single, flexible data stream is also the defining strength of a LLM, so it can’t be taken away without also taking away the benefits.

I tried this with early ChatGPT. Asked it to answer telegram style with as few tokens as possible. It is also interesting to ask it for jokes in this mode.

> But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical.

You forget the larger problem less wealthy individuals face: They typically already own a ICE-car and can‘t afford to purchase a new car multiple times in their lives.

Since sand is a non-renewable resource that is needed for construction, there’s a lot of illegal activity going on.

In India, illegal sand mining is the country's largest organized criminal activity.

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

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

Would the single sentence „Imagine you are a regular computer player and accustomed to the usual elements of games“ count as a harness?

I disable it only for the DIR variable which I might not use.

My header on top of every script

            #!/usr/bin/env bash
            set -eEuo pipefail
            # shellcheck disable=SC2034
            DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"
            #######################################################

Certificate/key renewal was a mess in every enterprise environment I worked in.

My suspicion is that corporations in general don‘t handle tasks well that need to follow an exact timeline and can‘t be postponed by a week or two.

> a lot of real world performance comes down to how efficiently you are calling external services (including the database)

Apart from that my experience over the last 20 years was that a lot of performance is lost because of memory allocation (in GCed languages like Java or JavaScript). Removing allocation in hot loops really goes a long way and leads to 10 or 100 fold runtime improvements.

I agree JFR is amazing.

Also that you can start it on a running JVM and it that is has minimal ~1% performance overhead.

That and also the JVM is a marvel of engineering with millions of hours that were poured in by smart people over the last 30 years.

It can be as fast a C, supports a multitude of languages, introspection, surveillance etc.

My guess is that some cell in an excel sheet says that some customers bought certain models in the past and no manager at Dell has enough weight or enough courage to question that and rule to NOT release a certain model.

I have been alone for quite some time in my life, for various reasons.

Here is my advice

1. Don’t listen to people telling you that there‘s something wrong with you if you aren’t happy alone and that you need therapy. You probably don‘t.

If you aren’t able to survive a single day on your own, then you have an issue, but in general people are social animals and need talking to and touching other people on a regular basis to regulate themselves emotionally. Some don’t, but you don‘t seem to be one of them. (In my experience people who honestly enjoy being alone for weeks at end often got used to this in their childhood, for example by being single children. If you had a noisy, lively house when growing up you will always miss that.)

2. That being said it is still nourishing and useful to follow the tips for spending time on your own (cooking for yourself, going into the cinema) now and then. But don‘t expect it to magically fix your yearning for social connections.

3. Doing sports and going to the gym often is great advice, because sports generally gives you a more positive mood and a better outlook and it quiets down negative thoughts. But also keep in mind here that it will not replace social interactions and touch.

4. So the question remains where you get your social interaction from, and I suggest that you replace the single person you had with a lot of tiny social interactions.

None of those is going to fix your solitude on it’s own, but the mixture will enrich your life. If you do all of those things once per week, your mood will improve:

- Online dating and chatting with friends (but don’t expect anything to come out of it)

- Dancing classes (this is especially great because you get the physical touch component)

- Regular coffee/dinner dates (1-2 per week) with a friend, coworker or relative.

- Going for a walk and talking to a random stranger

- Singing in a choir or similar hobbies

- Going to pubquizzes or free to join community walks

- Commuting to the office instead of doing home office.

5. I won‘t argue against your psychiatrist, but I find that medication is only useful in a minority of cases. Both anti depressants and anti anxiety meds can actually reduce your motivation to go out, by mellowing you into a not-great-not-terrible dreamy state.

6. Don‘t start rummaging and contemplating your thoughts when you are lonely. Being lonely makes you weird: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/lonely-people-see-th...

I once digged into this database out of curiosity and found incredibly detailed research on many edge cases. Like time zones in Germany being temporarily aligned to Moscow during soviet occupancy after World War Two.

One particular commenter stood out to me, so I looked him up because I was interested which kind of people spend so much time correcting timezone information.

Turns out he was an astrologer and wanted his astrology-program to work perfectly correct.

I find it funny that we have to thank astrology for the correct calculations in our banking software :).

> Almost no one is shopping multiple supermarkets, buying cheaper alternatives, buying in-season veggies and fruit when it’s cheap, waiting for sales to stock up, buying in bulk and freezing, using coupons, meal planning based on the latest supermarket Sunday circular, etc. only a tiny minority of people have been doing so.

I don‘t know where this observation comes from, but here in Austria a majority of people in lower income sectors than IT do all of this?