indigoabstract

Ah, I see. Ever the optimist, I was imagining the low IQ folks had maybe found some unexpected ways to compensate.

Thanks.

> Low IQ is more predictive of success than High IQ.

I'm curious what you meant by that. Could you please explain?

> “In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.”

Well, maybe someone could imagine it, otherwise, all that complexity would have led to a gargantuan number of bugs and the universe would have crashed..

Bananas, apples and watermelons. I have pretty mainstream (or predictable) tastes it seems. Nice!

Quora seems pure clickbait at this point. Unfortunately, because it didn't start that way, now anything still relevant on that site is burried under the weight of the nonsense.

You can't really compare machines with people when it comes to scale.

You can scale the volume of work for a machine in a way that would be impossible with people. No amount of Mechanical Turks could make content at the rate that Generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Dall-E, etc. can.

Treating content scraped from an original source without consent as fair use for training a machine somehow seems wrong. Especially since this AI system is then used to make money and that content is essential to its ability to do so, though without giving anything back to the original content creators.

Seems natural that any law regarding AI copyright should take these matters into account.

Proof for everyone that these programs do work. You have a good memory!

:)

> Conversely, when you look at the dynamics of large groups, organizations, and corporate entities (institutions as well as business, up to whole nations), it's hard not to see them as organisms in their own right that have a sort of meta-consciousness independent of their component humans.

That's actually a thing, or at least there's a name for it:

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

Yes, when ChatGPT came out, I instantly thought its makers must have read Lem, since it's essentially the same thing as Trurl's Electronic Bard from The Cyberiad.

I've noticed that too. It's like some form of synesthesia, where one sense (audio in this case) influences perception in another seemingly unrelated sense (visuals).

And, perhaps related, in addition to their regular meaning, a lot of things seem to also have an inherent symbolic value. Like going up/going down, on top/at the bottom, sharp/blunt, clear/foggy, etc.

I think that most people, when asked, would prefer going up to going down, even though they have to push against gravity.

On the one hand most of the points make sense and I find myself agreeing with them, on the other hand, while some have been close for certain things, nobody has been able to reliably predict the future.

Though it looks very likely, I wonder how much of this will come to pass in the next 10 years or so.

That's a great way to make a comment 50% mean and 50% hilarious.

In the same way, I think a lot of people are going to roast Elon Musk if he dies before he manages to get to Mars.

I liked the quote mentioned about the Beatles being "proof of the existence of God":

"It transcends everything. It’s much bigger than four kids from Liverpool. For me the Beatles are proof of the existence of God. It’s so good and so far beyond everyone else that it’s not them."

I hadn't heard that one before.

I think what the Beatles did can be called "riding the wave of fortune" or "being on a roll", but they somehow did it year after year instead of just a few times, like most people manage to.

I think I'm the other way around. I love coding new stuff, but sometimes I dread fixing bugs, especially if I don't have an immediate hunch about the issue and end up investigating for hours or days for a fix.

But I feel fortunate that I still enjoy programming for the most part (though not as much as 20 years ago) and haven't had too many situations where I had to force myself to do something that I would rather not.

I've used it very little so far compared to Objective-C, but I definitely like it much better, since I've never enjoyed programming in Objective-C.

Up until this release, any cross platform C++ app had to use Objective-C as a bridge on macOS and iOS, but it looks like this will change from now on as Swift can now communicate with C++ also.

Maybe another way of putting it would be "the thrill is gone".

Most us started out with a lot of enthusiasm for programming, but for some it slowly eroded along the way or the novelty wore off. To me, it's a mystery why some people can maintain their passion in the long run, for some it's on and off while for others it completely dies at some point.

I also find it funny that Australians felt the need to turn the "can't be bothered" expression into something slightly stronger, if the author is right about this.

OpenGL is definitely easier to learn and use than Vulkan, but it's reached the end of life so it won't be updated anymore.

I'm not sure Vulkan can ever replace OpenGL since it's much more complex and low level.

I think a better option for a beginner would be to use a rendering library like bgfx, sokol_gfx or even facebook's igl, since you can learn the basic concepts of rendering triangles and not bother too much with all the minute rendering details.

One can get an idea of the complexity build-up of the current graphics APIs by measuring how much code it takes make a triangle show up on screen.

Compared to the OpenGL fixed function days, the required Vulkan setup code is massive.

Somewhat off-topic, but I can't help wonder if ChatGPT and Whisper can do all this amazing stuff, why would anyone join the waiting list to use his app ChartMyLife and not use ChatGPT directly?

I don't want to sound pessimistic and I may be missing something, but this seems a bit like trying fork the Edge source code to build a better browser or to come up with your own version of MS Office for Windows..

Edit: This popped into my mind after recently seeing some people having made their own mp3 players and photo browsers with AI code generators and then going on to say how awesome it is to have those programs made just for them and their unique preferences.

Unit tests are complementary to assertions, they don't supersede them.

I feel that assertions are the first line of defense against programming judgement errors/omissions and are much easier to write in the given context than unit tests.

I see. Seems pretty similar conceptually to C++ coroutines.

Fast switching between fibers is mainly what got me interested, of course. Thank you for the explanations.

Yes, in my (limited) use case with coroutines for a recursive descent generator I got it working by following this tutorial:

https://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/blog/c++-coroutines.html

but I was unpleasantly surprised by much extra code it required to make it run.

The Tiny Fiber library in the article looks pretty hacky right now and the amount of x64/arm specific code might cause trouble with portability, but the concept itself is intriguing. Thank you for the details.

Since coroutines have been in the standard since C++20, I wish he would have explained better what are the advantages of using a Fiber over a Coroutine.

Well said. Following a set of rules is no substitute for experience, despite any pressure to do so.

Since every situation is unique, even if similar to others, I think it's always best that programmers rely on their judgement and experience when writing code instead of a set of axioms.

And besides, blindly embracing a set of rules is acting more like a robot, instead of a human being.

That sounds more like the movie industry approach.

In the games industry, that would probably only happen in you developed the entire game yourself and only needed a publisher. If you need to take payment in advance for development, you would also most likely lose the IP.

Both Takahashi and Iwatani were Namco employees, so they wouldn't get to keep any IP they developed within the company. But that doesn't stop the said company from giving them bonuses and promotions. Doesn't seem to have happened in their case.

That sounds like a far from ideal situation. Credits should be mandatory IMO, since everyone appreciates them and they cost the company nothing. I'm fortunate to have had a better experience with that during my time in the games industry.

However, let's say that you come up with a game idea, design the game all they way until it ships and then it does gangbusters well, making the company millions and millions. Getting some serious appreciation doesn't seem far fetched in that case, like CliffyB and such got, to give an example. But if not that, at least some generous bonuses and promotions would be expected in an Euro-American company.

Apparently not for these 2 guys. That's what I was referring to.

How the Japanese companies operate can be pretty strange from a non-Japanese perspective. I've read that Toru Iwatani, also from Namco, who designed Pac-Man, was not compensated in any way financially for the success of the game. He seems to have integrated better in the company's structure than Takahashi, but that may have been thanks to other skills besides game design.

Yes, there were already phones with touchscreens before the iPhone, but they were all using a stylus, which seemed a better choice than a finger at the time, since they were more precise. But after the iPhone came out, it quickly became obvious how much better it was to use a screen with a finger with multi-touch than with a stylus. Steve or whoever made the decisions about the iPhone obviously knew very well what they were going for and 100% deserve the success.

Well, when you engage in speculation about the future, you're bound to be wrong most of the time. We can have fun now at his lack of insight, but, it's been almost 17 years, so maybe he can be forgiven. We all make mistakes, but if we do it on the internet, it's going to be there forever, thanks to archive.org. So kids, let that be a lesson!

Whew, I'm so happy I've always been right in my predictions, unlike this poor fellow, who has probably been unemployed since this inexcusable prediction failure.

Yes, it's quite baffling to be repeatedly bombarded with the same ad and no way to make it stop. It feels just like spam did in the old days.

It's good that you managed to get the advertiser to stop in your case.

Google Ads also has a way to tell it to stop showing a certain ad, but it doesn't work here, either because it's broken or the advertiser found a way to get around it.

I thought other people might have ran into this exact problem with YouTube, but it seems, not that many.