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refactor_master

1,176 karma · joined August 16, 2020

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refactor_master··on Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models
> Google is your friend

But really, it's more like tolerated business partner, right?

refactor_master··on DuckDB Internals Part 1
Yes, the most of its safety comes after you compile the graph. In that sense, it's "compile-safe" strictly speaking, which puts it on par with DuckDBs validation step. But you don't need to load any data to validate the execution graph (as opposed to Pandas).
refactor_master··on DuckDB Internals Part 1
The better question is, why is DuckDB so popular when one can use Polars which has a sane, lintable, typesafe API compared to the mess that is SQL:

  WITH lagged AS (
      SELECT 
          *, 
          LAG(event_time) OVER (PARTITION BY user_id ORDER BY event_time) AS prev_time
      FROM events
  ),
  sessions AS (
      SELECT 
          *, 
          SUM(COALESCE((date_diff('minute', prev_time, event_time) > 30)::INT, 1)) 
              OVER (PARTITION BY user_id ORDER BY event_time) AS session_id
      FROM lagged
  )
  SELECT
      user_id,
      session_id,
      MIN(event_time) AS session_start,
      MAX(event_time) AS session_end,
      COUNT(*) AS event_count
  FROM sessions
  GROUP BY ALL
  ORDER BY user_id, session_start;
vs

  result = (
      df.sort(["user_id", "event_time"])
      .with_columns(
          session_id=(
              pl.when(pl.col("event_time").diff().is_null())
              .then(1)
              .when(pl.col("event_time").diff().dt.total_minutes() > 30)
              .then(1)
              .otherwise(0)
              .cum_sum()
              .over("user_id")
          )
      )
      .group_by(["user_id", "session_id"])
      .agg(
          session_start=pl.col("event_time").min(),
          session_end=pl.col("event_time").max(),
          event_count=pl.col("event_time").count(),
      )
      .sort(["user_id", "session_start"])
  )
refactor_master··on FPS.cob: A first person shooter in COBOL
The level of nested ifs is just pure insanity. Is this COBOL forcing this kind of style?
refactor_master··on When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
It's like when Bill Gates tried to guess grocery prices. "How much memory does a regular computer have? I don't know, 50 GB? Like a small EC2?"
refactor_master··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious
> So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

Could an AI one day be suffering while plowing through some nasty legacy code? Well, who cares, I'll swing my whip, as I have a family to feed and a field to plow. I'll accept it as a fact and necessity, but ultimately it's either me or them. So practically it doesn't matter.

refactor_master··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
> We don't act like this in society

Did you miss the part where the convention was ratified by 180+ countries, because clearly society can't just take a seat?

refactor_master··on macOS needs its grid back
If I log into my system it's safe. If someone reads my password off my screen post-it and logs into my system it's quite thoroughly compromised. How would you demonstrate which of the two sessions are compromised, during the act?
refactor_master··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
It's actually even simpler than that. The airplane isn't just a "private business, and you shouldn't mess with their space". They're protected and empowered by broadly ratified conventions (which includes virtually every country in the word), starting with the Tokyo Convention:

> The convention [...] recognises certain powers and immunities of the aircraft commander who on international flights may restrain any person(s) he has reasonable cause to believe is committing or is about to commit an offence liable to interfere with the safety of persons or property on board or who is jeopardising good order and discipline.

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

refactor_master··on Various LLM Smells
Before LLM you could sum up the web as the hamburger menu, bootstrap and materialize. Even Apple threw everything in a hamburger at some point.
refactor_master··on Can we have the day off?
If anything, China proves that 996 is not sustainable as it simply leads to involution and attrition. At best the populace benefits in a few hyper-focused industries such as take-out and e-commerce, but average life quality is still far behind "lazy countries".
refactor_master··on Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)
After a refreshing walk it suddenly occurred to me - I had forgotten to add "make no mistakes".
refactor_master··on Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
I've found programming books good at what the internet isn't always: a cohesive story/presentation meant for a broad audience. I've enjoyed reading some more style-oriented books, largely ignoring beyond the gist. Learning about dependency injection and decoupled architecture, but for Python, completely changed how I viewed the language.

I also once read a book on MS SQL Sever 200x, which I don't remember much of, and I don't think it was terribly useful anyway. If I wanted to know the size of a datatype I'd Google it.

refactor_master··on -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code
In the realm of statistics, not so. If you're right on the limit of detectability, robust experimental design is necessary to avoid assigning meaning to noise.
refactor_master··on Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)
Especially with a bug. Why think about it when you can just feed a stack trace to AI and wait 2 more minutes?
refactor_master··on Using AI to write better code more slowly
We're already having coffee breaks when AWS and CloudFlare are down. What's another break in the mix? If anything, we might be lucky that they're down at the same time, so we can consolidate the breaks.
refactor_master··on -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code
> Don't forget that very very detailed spec is actually the code

The tests, sure. But certainly not the code itself, as that sits far too close to the implementation (i.e. it is the implementation). An almost infinite number of implantations can fulfill “does foo when bar”, so how can we prove that ours is the spec itself?

It’s kind of like a scientist coming up with a hypothesis post-hoc to fit the results of the experiment.

refactor_master··on The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think
Maybe humanity will have more babies when AI takes over, capitalism implodes and we’re all farming and crafting things from scratch, since we’re forced out of the “economy”.

The house always… wins?

refactor_master··on Illusions of understanding in the sciences
Some of the figures are downright atrocious quality and are found in better quality on Wikipedia. It’s almost an insult to paying subscribers and contributors of Springer.
refactor_master··on Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app
Surely you mean grab a coffee and sit back down at your desk in your corporate office, because working remotely while your agent also does so is just preposterous.
refactor_master··on MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
Still baffles the mind that Apple solved this issue some 20+ years ago, and others _still_ haven't. I remember being basically surrounded by jet engines running Word in school.

A few years ago in an old job I got a monster-specced Dell laptop, and it would still roar if I opened anything. I had to pull all the nerf tricks through the BIOS to at least keep it somewhat tolerable in low-load scenarios (i.e. most of the workday).

refactor_master··on Show HN: OpenGravity – A zero-install, BYOK vanilla JS clone of Antigravity
Is there any other editor that comes close to JetBrain's Git integration? All I see is forks of forks of VSCode, and I'm wondering what the incremental gain of yet another does-the-basic-text-editing editors we need. This is in no way directed at OP, but it seems like a lot of wheels spinning around the world and surprisingly little progress at the Pareto limit.
refactor_master··on I benchmarked Claude Code's caveman plugin against "be brief."
Can someone give me a sound argument for why, when these things supposedly hold:

- LLMs scale with amount of data on the subject

- Even frontier labs themselves have a hard time gauging exactly how well-performing models are, across a quite rigorous set of tests in all aspects

then, how can this be true:

Using a low-data "niche language" (what is the volume of literature written in Caveman?) is supposedly of equal performance, when this anecdotally doesn't hold for e.g. niche code languages, proven by a handful of completely arbitrarily designed tests.

We've barely convinced ourselves that LLMs actually increase measurable industry productivity, instead of us just spending time to send slop to each other.

refactor_master··on Is my blue your blue? (2024)
I only know chartreuse from the liquor.

I thought it was green though.

refactor_master··on The first 40 months of the AI era
If you’re an employee who can finish their work 25% faster but you’re not getting a 4-day work week, what are the incentives for not introducing creep?
refactor_master··on Chest Fridge (2009)
Most people in dense urban areas would actually pay less. By going vertical you’re freezing a whole m2 that was otherwise necessarily occupied by the fridge. In most places, 300 kWh is much cheaper than an extra irrevocable m2 for your fridge.

Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge.

refactor_master··on Why I'm Not Worried About Running Out of Work in the Age of AI
> The real move for the autoworker was sideways, not upward: industrial maintenance, tool and die work, welding, industrial electrical work, construction trades, trucking, or logistics.

But in an AI post-work future, all the sideways moves have also been taken over by AI and robots. After all, “knowledge work” as a discipline will not be there, right? Whether I can write code, manage teams or copywrite. All of them automated.

When the complexity vs cost of automation tips in the favor of humans, that’s where I’ll have to skill to. You said it, trucking, welding, … That I have a PhD in knowledge work is just worthless paper now.

refactor_master··on A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)
To add to this, voicing is also a way for Japanese words to become more “coherent”, the same way you write “dislike-chopsticks” as one combined noun, and not “dislike chopsticks”.
refactor_master··on A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)
Well that certainly depends on the establishment. I’ve picked out plenty of splinters here in Japan.
refactor_master··on Comparing Python Type Checkers: Typing Spec Conformance
How does Zuban manage to be developed by what appears to be a single person without megacorp backing, yet be mere inches behind pyright at this stage?
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