What do you mean? You could always answer questions without any barriers, and partial answers were acceptable. Unless you're talking about protected questions (very rare), or you had such a fundamental misunderstanding of the site that you got answer-banned.
I feel like the "repository of knowledge" identity was pretty clear for around a decade (at least for main Q&A, not Chat or Discussions). It was inconsistently enforced because the volume of low-quality questions exceeded the ability of the "moderators" to enforce it. At its peak, the backlog of questions in the process of being closed was about a full month's worth of question volume (this doesn't include questions that did get closed or questions that didn't yet start the process of being closed).
The golden age of SO was when all the important questions that have accumulated over decades were getting asked and answered. SO stabilized once that backlog got finished, and then started dying once people moved to github issues for project-specific questions. Chatgpt just replaced the last remaining type of questions ("plz do my work for me"), which arguably shouldn't have been getting asked in the first place.
SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.
But that's only assuming that your original data structure already has space for the algorithm to store metadata. If there's space that can be manipulated freely to store metadata, can't you just remove that space to save memory, and then use the extra space for a stack?
What's the utility of this? It's arguably still using a stack, just encoded in the original data structure itself. If your original data structure somehow uses colors but is also fine with the algorithm overwriting with its own colors, I guess it works? But those are very unusual preconditions. For any real world scenario I can imagine, I feel like there's a better solution.
If the colors in your original data are important, then you can't really just overwrite them and/or assume that the algorithm can use its own colors. You're going to have to add a stack.
If your original data doesn't have colors, adding a stack is better than integrating metadata into the original data structure.
If for some reason your original data has colors but they aren't considered important, then just remove the colors and add a stack.
If your concern is about dynamic memory, preallocate static memory equal to the size of the original data structure.
I'm a little surprised by this. Due to the prevalence of spam, I favor private third-party messaging applications (slack, discord). Text messaging is about 50% garbage for me, and the majority I leave unread. Though contrary to the experience of a lot of others, I almost never get spam phone calls (probably <10 in the last two years), so that remains my highest signal channel.
I'm on a non-touchscreen mac, on firefox with smooth scrolling turned off, and have LinearMouse installed. I tried both trackpad scrolling and mousewheel scrolling. The weird "smooth" scrolling of this website is very jarring to me, and makes it take significantly longer to scroll to where I want to, since the responsiveness went from ~instant to ~.5s and I keep on overshooting.
I feel like normal security issues don't get much publicity. The PHP and eMudhra issues seemed severe, and worth publicity. But then with things like this, I'm not sure. Is this a severe issue? Or is it just a run of the mill issue that's only newsworthy because web security is on people's minds right now?
This article is chock full of interesting links. The link about Kenyan English/LLMs [0] describes something that feels like it should have been obvious to me.
I see several comments critical of this video. As someone whose only exposure to gyroscopes was the classic string-driven all-metal toy[0] when I was a kid, is this video helpful for getting a better understanding of how modern ones work, or should I just stick to the wikipedia page on gyrometers?
I don't think this article communicates any new ideas; to me the style is the unique aspect of it that makes it worth reading. If you personally don't like the style, there are many other articles portraying the same sentiment in a more agreeable style.
Yeah, BERT was cool, but IMO things like StyleGAN were equally cool. I think DALL-E was the first time that there was practical, nonphilosophical, discussion about AI replacing human industries. Maybe there was discussion within the data labeling industry about text classification models replacing humans prior to that? But also, data labeling is one of the industries that probably got a lot bigger due to AI, so...
Diffusion models were the first gen AI tech to plausibly be able to replace humans, no? I feel like image generation was ahead of text generation 2015-2022, and prior to 2015 the best "gen AI" was markov chains which I don't think is within the scope of what we're talking about.
I kinda get it. To massively simplify: Without AI, your choice is 8 days implementing, or 5 days planning/designing/refactoring and 5 days implementing. With AI, your choice is 5 days wrestling with the AI to implement, or 4 days planning/designing/refactoring and 1 day with the AI to implement. I made up those numbers but the general idea is that good practices have a lot more leverage with AI, since the make the implementation "free".
It's kind of funny how it took inventing AI for people to start caring about good software engineering practices (debuggability, iteration speed, reliability, etc.)
As the field of "computing" develops more and more high level abstractions, that necessarily reduces the amount of time that can be spend on lower-level stuff. These days I think it's typical to have one or two courses that cover OS/embedded/assembly/compiler type of topics, but that's the bare minimum for awareness, not near enough for actual learning. On the spectrum from low-level to high-level, CS sits just below SE. Computer engineering is the field/degree that gives people actual skills in OS-level programming.
That makes sense, thanks. I think that matches my prior understanding, but recently people seem to talk a lot about "acquiring" ADHD, often from doomscrolling tiktok or something like that, and I wasn't sure about how much of that is true. Based on what you're saying, it sounds like the ADHD a lot of people claim they have is about as real as the OCD they also claim to have (i.e. minor symptoms that vaguely match), and the real thing is much more life-altering and deserves to not be diluted.
I can see vague parallels between The Witness and AI prompting/engineering, but I'm not sure I'd describe it as training beyond the simple concept of teaching vs learning. Maybe I'm just in the category of people that think that makes no sense at all? (I completed the primary game and got about halfway through the secondary game)
There are enough EVs on the market these days that people can afford to include more frivolous factors into their decision making. I was in the market for an EV a few years ago. Solely because I dislike Elon and don't wish to support his business, I took teslas off the table after 5 minutes of research to make sure they weren't drastically superior.
The most common vote in any presidential is an (implicit) abstention.
It's very important to try to persuade centrists that you're a better candidate than the opposition, but it's also very important to persuade your voters that you're worth going to the polls for. The latter requires making your loyal voters comfortable at the expense of the swing voters.
> we were keeping many millions of dollars of daily transactions afloat and it was not unusual to receive death threats from business folks when they couldn't do their jobs
That's crazy. My team works on a part of a system handling several million $/day, and if something goes wrong then everyone's chill about it. Lost $100k revenue? Happens. We'll have the comms team send out something about it. The most heated things got was a time that a manager said something along the lines of "yeah it'll be bad if we can't roll out this thing in the next 2 hours." If I got a death threat that's an instant email to HR.