zeroq

Reminds me of a story from Freakonomics.

A teacher would ask his students to note 50 coinflips. And based on distribution he could immediately tell which one of them actually flipped the coin.

If I would be a math/physics teacher in a high school, in a class of 30 students, I would start every class by picking random 2 or 3 students and ask them to explain the solution to me. Or do a carbon copy of one of the assignments in front of the class. Something like that.

In my high school I had a physics teacher. Every class she had a 3 rudimentary questions about the recent subjects. She would call a random name and ask first question. If you fail to answer on the spot you get an F, and another random person will get a shot at the same question. If they fail they got and F as well. Of course by the 6th or 7th person someone would manage to find the right answer. If they got the right answer they'll get the next one. If someone answered all three - they got an A. Most of the times half of the class would get an F.

I've been reading these stories and I'm completely flabbergasted.

Here in EU when there is a public office, there's a right to access the public record. Anyone can file a request, and the office has a given time frame to respond.

Sure, they can do mental gymnastics and stall as much as they want, but there's no money involved. Ever. And if they stall too much you can go to court.

A public office is founded by tax money, by us, and the idea that I would have to pay for publicly available information (public as in not confidential) is beyond me.

I'm one of those people.

I have serious ADHD and I often dive a rabbit hole for an idea for side project. Or research. Or combination of both. Most of my side projects you could categorize as spikes. There's no serious intent on delivering something of value for the world, just going from A to B and learning a thing or two on the run.

I'm like kerosene, I light up instantly, but the fire goes away very quickly. I can be researching a thing for 3 nights straight in my spare time to gather hooks and pieces of information... and then I get distracted and my focus goes somewhere else. And I'm left with 10 tabs that were suppose to kick start my idea.

To my own surprise I tend to go back to these ideas, but sometimes it takes me months, and sometimes, I keep these tabs on one of my devices, opened for months at a time. Sometimes I scrape them, adding links with notes to Obsidian.

Of course the amount of hoarded information vastly exceeds my throughput.

Trying to access the wave files directly reveals: Access to model destined/hurston-1 is restricted and you are not in the authorized list. Visit https://huggingface.co/destined/hurston-1 to ask for access.

I'm staying stainless

I think this conflates a few different points.

1. A friend of mine is an artist. She mostly does pottery. One could argue that if you need a cup you can get one at IKEA for $2. But there's a certain group that's willing to pay $200 or $2000 for a cup if that's a convenient conversation starter. They don't pay for the cup per se - they pay for the story she's providing with the cup. And we love good storytellers.

Unfortunately that's not the case when it comes to software development.

2. You can have unlimited resources but you still have limited time, so you have to know what you want. That's the human touch LLMs won't be able to automate. You have to be able to find a niche, work out the product and reach out to clients with clear message.

3. If your product is "Tinder but for horses" it doesn't matter if it was written by LLM or vegans. As long as it works.

4. If you want to gradually develop your product vibe coding will get in your way very fast. It's great for prototyping and developing well defined products but in a long run you'll want to know how your system works.

I did the same couple years ago using Google. Should CNN run a story about me?

Its not just QA and bug hunting.

You want to hire your target audience, which may be vastly different from yourself, and suddenly you discover that the language is throwing them off, the color scheme brings different meanings, and they just don't understand the flow which felt completely natural for you.

I see Jev as a major step towards commoditizing current LLM paradigm. One thing would be to further optimize this particular route to work purely on CPU. This will grant an option to embed this feature into any application, from MS Office to games. The other is integrating this into agent workflow to vastly minimize token consumption.

in an ideal world real programmers wouldn't be building their whole identities around publishing libraries like "isEven" or claiming fame for vibe porting perfectly fine libraries into whatever is the newest and hottest platform...

... but that ship has already sailed

+1

When mentioning foundational 2d driving models one simply can't omit Marco Monster (2003) [1].

Also Physics for Game Developers (2001) had a hilarious chapter dedicated to car racing simulation. Most of the chapter is dedicated building the scene in a minute detail - for instance pointing out that the center of gravity of the car will change during the course due to fuel consumption - only to simplify and cancel out most things at the end to leave the reader with just a handful of variables.

[1] https://www.asawicki.info/Mirror/Car%20Physics%20for%20Games...

If you're asking about the ASCII alone then it's quite simple.

You resize the image to fit your text area dimension, then probe each pixel for luminance, and based on how bright the pixel is, you swap it for a ascii character that takes more or less space.

If you're asking about animation it's called color cycling and was quite popular back in the days where there was no space to pack a real animations: https://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0

Hands down one of the most creative advertising campaign of all time.

Whenever I mention this on HN, Scam Altman keeps downvoting my post from all his accounts. xD

I have a screenshot from 2024 when I asked ChatGPT to write me a draft of a story about a young boy who lost his parents and got send to a wizardry school. I specifically asked for the story to be original and not based on anything that has been already published.

As you probably suspect, chat gave me a full synopsis of Harry Potter.

I kept asking if that's an original idea, and it kept swearing on it's mothers grave, that the story has never been published before.

The difference between contributing to OS and AI, is that the first is a hobby alternative to woodworking or hiking, while the other can easily bootstrap you a company you can get millions in investment, at least for time being.

I don't quite get the problem this tries to solve.

I'm not quite sure that the bug list is the integral part of the source code. And there are dedicated systems that work just fine.

And if I really feel like tagging bug tracker along with my code, I could use any of those systems as long as they support file based databases, like sqlite, or simply static text files for that matter.

How to write Jev in 25 lines of Python:

  1. draw a circle
  2. import the rest of the owl

>> This site has been online since 2004, previously entirely static (generated by a Perl script). It outgrew that some years ago and I've finally got around to rewriting it in bleeding-edge Rails. Source available on GitLab.

It's an useful resource, I had similar, albeit just a tiny fraction, collection of colors I can pull out of my sleeve when asked for advice, but... why does this page has to be served from "bleeding edge server application" instead of being served as static html files?

I have to make a confession. I've been using different version control system for the last 25 years, but everytime I'm doing anything more complicated than basic commit/push I feel absolutely overwhelmed and terrified that I'm about to break something.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like a huge waste of time (or to be on a more positive note - potential).

Just the first example "Device type in JS".

"A coarse pointer does not mean “mobile”, and a fine pointer does not guarantee “desktop”. Ask the browser about input capabilities instead of guessing the device from its user agent."

  const input = {
  finePointer: matchMedia('(any-pointer: fine)').matches,
  coarsePointer: matchMedia('(any-pointer: coarse)').matches,
  canHover: matchMedia('(any-hover: hover)').matches,
  }; 

So it doesn't tell me how to identify device type. It doesn't even run the code so I could quickly compare results between my mobile and desktop devices to establish a baseline.

> Did you know that we name around 2,000-3,000 new products every year?

It's more likely that the whole product catalog contains 2-3k products. [1][2][3] So no, you don't.

[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/products-products [2] https://lar5.com/ikea (~ 2200) [3] https://namingschemes.com/Ikea_Product_Names (~ 1300)

I has never been so bad as in the couple last years. And it's getting worse.

I never had to wonder if Steam is going to be working today, so I could play my game after work, but it's been an issue with GitHub since covid. At least for me.

Fortunately, due the nature of the service, I can sit out most downtimes. Most of the time at least.

It's been a downward spiral since covid.

Enterprise works ok-ish, but the standard version has daily issue ever since.

disclaimer: I haven't seen the code

TS/JS is not the problem.

You can, and you should eject your dependencies and package them with your releases. And I don't understand why it's not a common practice.

You can even bundle your releases with a runtime, but that's not always the best solution. For something like this I'd actually prefer interpreted code I can inspect line by line rather than having a blob of unknown origin.

I've been saying this for years - the best way to wrap your head around AI and LLMs are to think about them as "a whole internet wrapped into a single zip archive, with immensely clever solution to query the data".

That's it.

Once you accept this mental model the implications are staggering.

AI is not "thinking", and it doesn't know the answer to your question because it's smart, but because it has been asked thousand of times over the internet, and it simply provides you with an already existing answer. That code it made for you? It already lived somewhere on GitHub.

But then you have to ask yourself - if we surrender to the AI, who will produce new content 10-15 years from now? If we all pivot from programming to prompt engineering, who will come up with novel solutions?

tangent

Once I've tried one SCM to track every single change to my files, and the other for bulk commits. The result was quite satisfying.

It was some 15 years ago, we just switched from CVS to SVN and everyone thought it was the end of the history, at least for SCMs. Main branch was called master, and we were locking files by simply telling our teammates not to touch them.

At one time I decided I really missed the Eclipse feature which was tracking all local changes to the files, even without an active SCM. Making tiny commits was not an option, because I want it to track every file save, and we haven't yet figured out working with branches.

So I decided to install mercurial and made a hook which made a dummy commit every time I saved a file. Everything mercurial related was ignored by SVN.

Suddenly I was able to teleport myself to a version from before the lunch while SVN history was crystal clear.

Somehow I still miss integrated, per file, timeline in IDE.

A good moment to remind everyone that if we took the promise for granted, that AI will in fact prevail and prompting is the one skill that will rule them all... we'll lose all domain experts in one generation.

It's less of "signaling expertise" and more about actually having said "expertise".

In my experience with LLMs it's not uncommon to be having a deep conversation about making pasta, only to be told, after asking for a sample recipe, to get a bucket of paint and a bag of concrete. Of course these hallucinations are way more subtle and easy to miss for someone who doesn't have deep domain knowledge.

This.

It's easy to make a good call, but it's really hard to stick with it.

The main financial advice I'm giving to all relatives is to write down their decisions before buying anything. Or, if you're looking for a long term investment - asking someone close to change the password on your account without letting you know.

The major problem with investing is that most people will commit to 2-5y strategy, and panic on the first dip.

If you did your due diligence and you believe that this particular asset will grow within 5 years - when it starts dipping after few months, and nothing major has changed in your predictions - you should buy more instead of selling.