mdemare

Software development is a bit like chess. 1. e4 is an abstraction available to all projects, 3. Nc3 is available to 20% of projects, while 15. Nxg5 is unique to your own project.

Or, abstractions in your project form a dependency tree, and the nodes near the root are universal, e.g. C, Postgres, json, while the leaf nodes are abstractions peculiar to just your own project.

8kb to specify the order of the clips, but not a single bit is used to describe a single pixel of a single frame.

So bizarre! It really shook my belief in Philips' competence at the time.

I mean, take a 100 minute movie, sliced into 1-second clips. 8kB is not even enough to store all possible orders you could put those clips in. I would hate to think so ill of any of my friends or colleagues to think that they could believe such an obvious fraud.

Gentle reminder that the Netherlands has lots of very smart software engineers that prefer to stay there, especially if there were more interesting software companies active there.

> has the market cap of a medium-sized country

"According to investors, today's value of Nvidia's expected future profits over its lifetime equals the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within a medium-sized country in a year."

Don't compare market cap with GDP, when you spell it out it's clear how nonsensical it is.

Until the day when I can right-click on a folder and create a folder inside that folder, I'll consider the Finder inferior to the Windows 98 explorer. Come on, that's an absolute basic feature!

The right-click context menu of a folder has 15 items! Most of them I've never used! Colors, tags, quick actions, compress, make alias? But no "New Folder"?

But I moved to the mac, in 2005, because of the unix terminal. I had been using Cygwin for years, but an OS that had it included, natively? On good hardware? Yes, please.

I'm never moving back to Windows (ads in the OS??). To switch to linux it would take great hardware with 100% support. Not holding my breath, but it might happen one day.

The EU economy is $20T vs USA $30T, so 60%. Also, Britain was part of the EU 2 decades ago. The EU economy has almost doubled in that time, with large regional differences (Ireland, Poland on fire, southern Europe flat), but the USA has done better than the eu average.

Not sure if this is generally known, but historically, going back as far as the second world war, the European far-right has been quite anti-American.

Whatever the economic merits and demerits of this deal, politically it's a disaster, as this article indicates. There wasn't even an attempt to sell this to the public. But as there are no elections until 2028, I expect major changes in strategy in a year or so, otherwise the center-right parties in charge now will be wiped out in favor of the anti-American factions of the far right and far left.

My suspicion is that there's a quid-pro-quo regarding Ukraine. Economically, the EU is in a strong position, but militarily, a mercurial US has the EU over the barrel due to the Ukraine war.

I predict that Europe's notoriously hard-nosed negotiators (Brexit) will ramp up the pressure as the midterms get closer and if the situation in Ukraine improves.

Yes. It is astonishing that LLMs can solve problems that only a handful of very smart teenagers can solve, but LLMs do it by consuming a million times as much content as those teenagers. Running out of data is not a reason for despair.

Also consider that during training LLMs spend much less time on processing, say, TAOCP (Knuth), or SICP (Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman), or Probability Theory (Jaynes) than on the entirety that is r/Frugal.

20 thick books turn a smart teenager into a graduate with a MSc. That's what, 10 million tokens?

When we read difficult, important texts, we reflect on them, make exercises, discuss them, etc. We don't know how to make an LLM do that in a way that improves it. Yet.

Just using common sense, if we had a genius, who had tremendous reasoning ability, total recall of memories, and an unlimited lifespan and patience, and he'd read what the current LLMs have read, we'd expect quite a bit more from him than what we're getting now from LLMs.

There are teenagers that win gold medals on the math olympiad - they've trained on < 1M tokens of math texts, never mind the 70T tokens that GPT5 appears to be trained on. A difference of eight orders of magnitude.

In other words, data scarcity is not a fundamental problem, just a problem for the current paradigm.

- "they were more small than large" (what?)

- "even in the thirties little had been done to them" (done to them?)

- "Welgelegen Buitenrust Nooitgedacht Rustenburg" (Untranslated!)

- "his father had first called it Eleutheria" (his father'd rather called it)

- "just as extraordinary does not refer to the ordinary nature of the outside" (complete non-sequitur)

Exactly. Books are still being translated by human translators.

I have a text on my computer, the first couple of paragraphs from the Dutch novel "De aanslag", and every few years I feed it to the leading machine translation sites, and invariably, the results are atrocious. Don't get me wrong, the translation is quite understandable, but the text is wooden, and the translation contains 3 or 4 translation blunders.

GPT-5 output for example:

Far, far away in the Second World War, a certain Anton Steenwijk lived with his parents and his brother on the edge of Haarlem. Along a quay, which ran for a hundred meters beside the water and then, with a gentle curve, turned back into an ordinary street, stood four houses not far apart. Each surrounded by a garden, with their small balconies, bay windows, and steep roofs, they had the appearance of villas, although they were more small than large; in the upstairs rooms, all the walls slanted. They stood there with peeling paint and somewhat dilapidated, for even in the thirties little had been done to them. Each bore a respectable, bourgeois name from more carefree days: Welgelegen Buitenrust Nooitgedacht Rustenburg Anton lived in the second house from the left: the one with the thatched roof. It already had that name when his parents rented it shortly before the war; his father had first called it Eleutheria or something like that, but then written in Greek letters. Even before the catastrophe occurred, Anton had not understood the name Buitenrust as the calm of being outside, but rather as something that was outside rest—just as extraordinary does not refer to the ordinary nature of the outside (and still less to living outside in general), but to something that is precisely not ordinary.

One of the things I dislike about function notation is that in f(g(h())) execution order is right-to-left. I like OO partly because execution order is writing order ( h().g().f() )

In Clojure I love the threading macro which accomplishes the same: (-> (h) (g) (f))

I once thought of creating a cryptocoin where 1 initial coin would be handed out to whoever would be the first to claim each ip4 address. I think IP is too easy to spoof for that to work, but I still like the idea.

More AGI Final Frontiers:

"Reimplement Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri", but with modern graphics, smart AIs that role-play their personalities, all bugs fixed, a much better endgame, AI-generated unexpected events, and a dev console where you can mod the game via natural language instructions."

"Reimplement all linux command line utilities in Rust, make their names, arguments and options consistent, and fork all software and scripts on the internet to use the new versions."

Tylenol.

If a library has a flaw that big, it is a bug to use that library.

Claude, "Find the hacker news discussion about github repo github.com/maciek-roboblog and implement the suggestion by bilekas. Patch format."

It produced a patch. Unfortunately it was for removing the emojis from the readme.

Claude Code denies that it has a plan mode...

No, symbols are immutable strings, strings are mutable strings. Having both mutable and immutable strings is pretty useful.

"Any questions before you start coding?"

The Marathon Crater might be a crater from a novel. LLMs have read plenty of fiction. Maybe all fiction. Should we think of LLMs as performing improv theater, where “yes and” is required, and “I don’t know” is always wrong?

If you want less consumption, and pay off debt, maybe ... raise taxes?

The US has levied a 25% tax on imported light trucks since 1964, and 2.5% on passenger cars. The EU levies a 10% import tax on all cars from the US.

> that the democrats are on the right leaning side of “centre right”

This is repeated frequently, but, no, just no.

Name one position by the Democrats that is to the right of typical center to center-right parties such as CDU/CSU, La République En Marche, PP, CDA, ÖVP.

Immigration, abortion, environmental regulations?

Wow, they're absolutely awful at it. They don't even realize who is still alive. I hadn't expected that. Too little training data? Look at this game for instance...

https://mafia.opennumbers.xyz/game/76e9e829-0a9a-4972-bec2-e...

Half the population, and the same GDP.

No, I meant the Norman conquest (conquête) in 1066, in which the English aristocracy (aristocratie) was replaced (remplacé) by French warlords, who kept speaking French until well in the 14th century, and changed the English language (langue) beyond recognition (reconnaissance), to the extent that Dutch or Scandinavian speakers find it easier to understand Old English than English ones do.

You might view the Hundred Year War as quarrels (querelles) of different (différent) branches (branches) of the French aristocracy.

Therefore, the current (courant) Anglo-Saxon hegemony (hégémonie) has its roots in France.

There is one war France won so comprehensively that everyone in this forum is still using words with a French origin in almost every sentence.