fzeindl

Yes. This also explains why it excels at finding new stuff (mathematical proofs, security holes), but can’t reliably produce material for humans to consume that is also widely regarded as great (like human literature).

Maybe the problem is that it’s called “Generative AI“. It might be to use it to generate critique of content as opposed to generate the content itself.

Message passing on virtual threads on the JVM allows you to run millions of threads and it has no performance downside to async.

> Async is not I/O. It can be used for I/O, but it's just a way of writing pure, deterministic state machines that keeps a logical flow together instead of scattered over a bunch of transitions.

I argue that it is exactly opposite. Blocking threads are a much more natural way of thinking about concurrency.

Quote from the erlang creator Joe Armstrong's thesis. He argues that the only way to understand multi-threaded programs is writing strictly sequential code for every thread and not muddling all the code for all the threads in one place:

"The structure of the program should exactly follow the structure of the problem. Each real world concurrent activity should be mapped onto exactly one concurrent process in our programming language. If there is a 1:1 mapping of the problem onto the program we say that the program is isomorphic to the problem. It is extremely important that the mapping is exactly 1:1. The reason for this is that it minimizes the conceptual gap between the problem and the solution. If this mapping is not 1:1 the program will quickly degenerate, and become difficult to understand. This degeneration is often observed when non-CO languages ["non concurrency-oriented", looking at you JavaScript!] are used to solve concurrent problems. Often the only way to get the program to work is to force several independent activities to be controlled by the same language thread or process. This leads to a inevitable loss of clarity, and makes the programs subject to complex and irreproducible interference errors." [0]

[0] https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

> Lastly it's the only "SOTA" model in a long time that has actively hallucinated details.

Yesterday I used Google AI-Search (so Gemini Flash 3.5?) for opinions on a traffic accident and it continously constructed law-interpretations and then referenced the wrong paragraphs. It talked about rules on road-crossings and cited paragraphs pertaining to alcohol intoxication as sources.

> We know that very local brain injuries can result in personality changes, sometimes dramatic ones.

But not damage to a single neurons. You are talking about damage to thousands of neurons.

Could still have been the same issue.

Code assumed an array of strings, instead got an array of bytes and picked the first one.

Intermediate certificates are not included.

So is the way to go forward that browser-vendors implement bruteforcing of private keys for a couple of seconds whenever the browser encounters a previously unseen certificate?

100% correct and this resembles my experiences and countless anecdotes.

You can’t reliably do more than 5 hours of heavy concentration work per day.

Agreed. So many things could be solved by smart UIs. This is pouring the baby out with the bathwater.

> I feel like everyone already knew the code was the easy part, even pre-AI.

I don’t agree with this at all. There still tons of buggy software around, and we ship multi-gigabyte electron installs that make fanspeeds go high and are way less efficient than software written 20 years ago.

Also the largest problem of AI written code is that is so hard to maintain, so no, coding is not the easy part.

I think it is the other way round. Building requirements from many sources of data and view points is the easy part. Implementing great, maintainable systems out of them needs specialists.

So it seems he’s a bad inventor, but a great storyteller. He should have written novels.

> even if there's a lot of pain in the short term

I wonder what “a lot of pain” could mean here in a world where Crowdstrike is allowed to render half of the world unbootable without repercussions.

Not that I think you are wrong, I am sometimes just confused why we hold back on fixing security because of imaginary deployment- and business-related pains, when it is so obviously unproblematic to crash half the world for a day?

This. It’s also why I started celebrating my birthday and throwing a party. I am not doing it for me, I am an introvert and it is a lot of work, but I am doing it for my guests who have a great time.

(For perfectionists: people always have a good time when there’s some food and drinks and other people. Everything else, even music, is really optional.)

Tangential, but Barcelona has superblocks which seem to work fine:

https://citychangers.org/barcelona-superblocks/

Also the blocks are octagons which improve traffic flow: https://www.reddit.com/r/CityPorn/s/iCcOGMqoNH

> My observation is that gen-z spends less time socializing in real life…

A barkeeper from a prestigious, world class cocktail bar around the corner told me that it really is more about health/alcohol.

He had a group the other day of 20 young people and 18 of them ordered non-alcoholic drinks. He is desperate about his profession.

Yes. Once you know Erlang/Elixir and BEAM you realize it is at least a local optimum in languages/VMs.

Truly something else if error handling is built into the language as a default case, not an … exception.

I combined a couple of methods:

- stop smoking in certain situations (no cigarette at the bus stop, no cigarette after lunch, …)

- allow myself to put out a cigarette halfway when I’m smoking. I lapsed and lit one, but that doesn’t mean I have to finish it.

- try to feel the downsides of the cigarette while smoking. The nicotine high mostly overrides this, but it’s possible to concentrate on the yucky feeling in your mouth, your lungs being burned etc.

- telling myself that I am sure I want to stop smoking at some point in my life so I might as well stop now.

I really don’t get this. Apple is trying to sell you 2 or 3 addons that are really beneficial and great products that make sense.

I don’t need them, I don’t buy them.

But I really appreciate there being a button at a place that logically makes sense and that gives you the opportunity to make more out of your device.

AFAIK you can click them away.

It’s not as if there are intrusive popups or as if they are trying to sell you blackmarket ware.

Broadcom has a vast amount of patents that they leverage in their business decisions.

Are you (at least partially) aligned out of existential fear of repercussions (getting fired, losing your life, going to prison), which LLMs don't have?

Is it possible to have neuroplasticity and still keep them aligned?

No disrespect but 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline sounds truly terrible.

If your build scripts are more than 100-300 LOC you are doing something very wrong.

From a great lecture on agentic SLDC:

„Checking the work is not the same as doing the work.“

It‘s different. There are people who love coding but don‘t like checking written code. Or the other way around.

Also there’s difference in mental load: checking a finished program or algorithm can be harder than working through it while producing it.

This adds to my feeling that LLMs are incredible at storing compressed information and accessing it in a versatile way.

Apart from occasional hallucinations we celebrate their ability to dissect information and to find obscure links between facts. Hence their stunning effectiveness in finding security holes or new approaches to math problems.

Interestingly the generative part - producing the answers - is what we are criticizing a lot: we think the code is verbose, texts have a weird repetitiveness to them etc.

I think a big part also was the superb, moody soundtrack.

> And you are positive that this hasn't change in almost a decade?

No, it is a guess.

> As opposed to what? This thread is about Linux on Mobile. Are you saying that Linux on Mobile is a lot more efficient than Android?

Opposed to iOS. Android is largely Linux, I think Linux is great and highly performant, just the Android SDK isn‘t.

Since they hire, command work and fire, they kinda are.

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.