sawyna

Lately, I stopped reading what people are sending. I'm asking LLM to visualise it for me and explain it to me in simple / concise / precise terms.

Is herdr in the similar park as superset?

I have installed this and configured the API key, it's been three hours nothing is happening for some reason. The app doesn't show anything. Is it because I have a multi monitor setup?

Can you enlighten me with some advanced features that you use? I would love to start using them. I have always used iTerm, but never really used advanced stuff.

I have always wondered - what if the utf-8 space is filled up? Does it automatically promote to having a 5th byte? Is that part of the spec? Or are we then talking about utf-16?

Unpopular opinion: Let us say AI achieves general intelligence levels. We tend to think of current economy, jobs, research as a closed system, but indeed it is a very open system.

Humans want to go to space, start living on other planets, travel beyond solar system, figure out how to live longer and so on. The list is endless. Without AI, these things would take a very long time. I believe AI will accelerate all these things.

Humans are always ambitious. That ambition will push us to use AI more than it's capabilities. The AI will get better at these new things and the cycle repeats. There's so much humans know and so much more that we don't know.

I'm less worried about general intelligence. Rather in more worried about how humans are going to govern themselves. That's going to decide whether we will do great things or end humanity. Over the last 100 years, we start thinking more about "how" to do something rather than the "why". Because "how" is becoming more and more easier. Today it's much more easier and tomorrow even more. So nobody's got the time to ask "why" we are doing something, just "how" to do something. With AI I can do more. That means everyone can do more. That means governments can do so much more. Large scale things in a short period. If those things are wrong or have irreversible consequences, we are screwed.

For reducing the number of points, I had to do something similar but for an isochrone. There were 2000 points for each isochrone and we had like 1000s of map markers. I simply picked every 200th point from the isochrone polygon and works reasonably well.

Of course, mapbox provides a parameter in the API to reduce the number of points using Douglas-Peucker algorithm. But I didn't want to make API call every single time, so we stored it and used a simple distilling depending on the use case.

I wish more people could understand this. Yes, LLMs help me learn faster, brainstorm ideas and so on, but to say that it can generate code and hence you can do complex things easily does not make sense.

For me, writing code has never ever been the challenge. Deciding what to write has always been the challenge.

My personal daily experience with this! I first used vertexai APIs because that's what they suggested, that Gemini APIs are not for production use.

Then there comes the Google.generativeai. I don't remember the reason but they were pushing me to start using this library.

Now it's all flashy google.genai libraries that they are pushing!

I have figured that this is what I should use and this is the documentation that I should look for, because doing a Google search or using an LLM gives me so many confusing results. The only thing that works for sure is reading the library code. That's what I'm doing these days.

For example, the documentation in one of those above libraries say that Gemini can read a document from cloud storage if you give it the uri. That doesn't work in google.genai library. I couldn't figure out why. I imagined maybe Gemini might need access to the cloud storage bucket, but I couldn't find any documentation as to how I can do that. I finally understood that I need to use the new file API and that uri works.

Yes, I like Gemini model they are really good. But the library documentation can be significantly simpler.

That'd be amazing!

I got really excited to play a custom card game with my friends who are spread across the world. Was looking to see how I can add my own game, but when I downloaded the app to try out some sample games, I see that all the players have to be connected to the same WiFi. Does this mean the app is only for games played in person but on phone?

This isn't true at all for OWNERS files. If you try developing a small feature on google search, it will require plumbing data through at least four to five layers and there is a different set of OWNERS for each layer. You'll spend at least 3 days waiting for code reviews to go through for something as simple as adding a new field.

Humanity has come so far and I'm sure it's possible to do it. I'm not saying wealth and power are bad. The ways of getting them are what's causing this. If you can become a billionaire by focussing on starvation, that could be a good one.

Today you are incentivised to get rich by making a technological innovation like Facebook. Facebook is a great money making business idea, however is it a life saver as much as solving clean water? I guess not. Unfortunately, we prioritised and incentivised the business models of Facebook and that's where we are.

FYI, I'm not picking on Facebook, it could be any big company today.

I guess it's mostly a matter of what framework the society put in place. We incentivise economical achievements, optimisations, tech. The common theme is making wealth. As long as that's the case, you can't expect these problems to be solved. Humanity/societal frameworks have to start incentivising the right problems.

These so called billionaires have become billionaires because the society and economy are set up that way and they got good at this economical game.

Why don't you have access? I'm curious

My pixel 4a 5g works like a charm. 3.5 years and still going fine. I used my pixel 2 for three years so badly. I used it as a hotspot every single day and the number of battery cycles were as if the phone was used for 6 years.

My pixel 4a5g takes photos that are on reasonable standards, obviously they won't match match, but it doesn't make a serious difference either to me. I need three things from my phone - battery, camera and lag free user experience. I don't need thinner bezels for gods sake, I can't understand the craze and demand for thinner bezels over a two day battery life.

I suppose it's an over-arching policy created that makes it easier to mandate. If not, Google would have to say - you can enter some stuff into chatbots, but not sensitive stuff. Then it would have to classify sensitive and non-sensitive, keep track of this, have this up to date etc and etc - you get the idea. By sensitive stuff, I'd say entering youtube's content moderation algorithm package for instance.

Unfortunately that's true. I think he companies can ask interesting questions that are not in leetcode, but it's basically a game where the companies make up new questions and they get added to leetcode. I don't think any company wants to spend their employees fighting a battle that's not worth it.

I hear you and share the sentiment (for the most part). I don't understand what's with leetcode. Granted it's not the best for way to judge the capabilities of a programmer, but then what is? A design round can be gamed as much as an algorithmic round can be. At least with leetcode, people become aware of different ways of thinking. By different ways, I don't mean different algorithms. I mean, given a base set of capabilities (algos), how to use them effectively to solve a much more diverse set of problems. This kind of pattern almost always exists in my day to day job. The constraints are limited, and I need to figure out an effective way forward.

That's all not programming. I absolutely hate the corporate working style.

The programming part in itself is always interesting to me, because regardless of who sets the constraints (me in a hobby project or the leadership in a company), they are what make the problem challenging and exciting.

I don't think anyone has ever explored an alternative here. Transistors came out of exploratory research that Bell Labs funded and as the other comments say, this indeed happened very recently! I suppose the silicon industry and the digital age built up so fast that we didn't really have the incentive to explore the alternative?

An excellent overview! I always dreaded learning this and your post seems to be a nice way to digest the content! This is probably going to get me to dive deep into some hardcore c/c++ work :)

One small copy correction: In the linker (4/5), you mentioned "Let's compile hello.c and peek inside hello.o.". But you are actually peeking the a.out.

The is-odd package depends on is-number!

I don't know the mechanism behind this. Coconut is accentuating the sinus infection in my case? My situation (deviated septum) makes me allergic to coconut water?

I used to have pretty bad sinus. I used to take antibiotics for 10 days a month and would be good for 20 days and this goes on each month. After 6 months, my immunity has gone to shit. The doctor recommended clearing out my sinus by a surgery but apparently that doesn't solve the root cause. It can happen again and again.

I tried multiple doctors, treatments, tips etc and etc nothing worked. I finally visited a homeo doctor who diagnosed it right. It's deviated septum which is causing sinus infections because of regular coconut water intake. I just stopped drinking coconut water and it's been 10+ years and not another recurrence of sinus so far.

Proper diagnosis is hard and requires skill. The OP figured it by himself and in my case, someone did.

Funny enough I have been dealing with this situation at work exactly right now. It is insanely annoying to be in such an environment.

Obviously, I'm the odd man out for saying a project can be done by 1-2 engs in a month. This said project is being currently done by 10 engs who are all writing boilerplate code since two months.

The management is not taking responsibility and I can't believe everything that is said in the post is fairly accurate.

Another googler here.

I don't enjoy the work at Google as much due to bureaucracy, pace of work and politics. I previously worked at a startup and there is a stark difference in the work culture and environment. I'm working with the exact same team as that at the startup (we got acquired by Google). The same people i enjoyed working with, I absolutely hate it now.

Nothing ever gets done, even when it is possible to do so. Folks around here call it perf-farming.

Now someone is surely getting fired.

What if this quadrant of people are managers? That's the situation I'm in - my sister team's leadership is nice but don't want to work. They lack the skills but want the projects, and do get them because they are nice. It's a recipe for disaster.

I'd be the same. There are so many things to do, so many new experiences to feel. If I ever get retired, I'd just go back to university and start from scratch in a completely complementary field that I worked all my life so far.