Pamar

Can you name a few? Not doubting your claim, just curious because I am maybe not following the same niches you do.

Half-dozens of them, apparently.

90% of my my experience has always been dealing with large-ish corporate systems. I am in Europe, so YMMV even when talking about corporate instead of smaller scale projects.

In my experience stuff like RAILS had negligible impact in my field because companies would always require solid backup from some big name vendor (MS, Oracle, IBM, Sun - back in the day, or even SAP).

So most if not all the smaller silver bullets did not even make a blimp on the radar... and stuff like Java or .NET, while definitely better than C or COBOL... did not really deliver in terms of productivity boost (in part because, as noted in the message I am answering to, expectations kept growing at the same pace)

Some stuff I collected so far, but not exactly what I was looking for:

https://www.zdnet.com/education/computers-tech/linguistics-a... https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2019/9/natural-langu... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3npuPXvA_g8

I had similar experiences with an unpopular but not "esoteric" language (Progress ABL) and so did some other developers in my team.

Well... the actual problem is, imho, that it looks like the LLMs seem to have reached (or are close to reaching) a plateau. You might be right about the "three months ago it could not produce a working implementation of a DBMS... but what if in 3 months (or 3 years) it stays stuck at the 20K slower threshold?

So basically like Excel since the 80s?

Not sure I understand your point about

Everybody already has local regional tickets anyway. And most people can't be in more then one place at the time anyway. And most people stay in the same region most of the time anyway.

I live in Rostock. So if I want to go to Berlin or Hamburg (you know, where stuff like actual airports are) I am crossing "regional borders" even if it is a 200-250 km trip to each city

About non-replaceable batteries: from what I understand, if a battery can be replaced by any random device owner you must design it with a robust cell to avoid risk of it being punctured, breaking, being crushed.

And therefore you have more shell, less actual battery and therefore it lasts less.

This does not mean that I believe this was done exclusively for altruistic reasons. More like: this will result in a slightly better experience for the user... and more revenue for Apple. So let's do it.

I think that what erased "programmer vs computer illiterate" dichotomy was BASIC in the 80s.

I've met lots of "digital natives" and they seem to use technology as a black box and click/touch stuff at random until it sorta works but they do not very good at creating at mental model of why something is behaving in a way which is not what was expected and verify their own hypothesis (i.e. "debugging").

I am from that era, so I might add something that perhaps is not obvious at all nowadays.

The microcomputer explosion gave birth to an large number of actual paper magazines and at least 50% of their content were... actual source listing you had to manually retype. Basic was already fragmented in a billion different flavors and dialects (especially if your program had any kind of graphics) so the more ambitious user could also try their hand at translating a listing from - say - TSR-80 to Apple Basic.

In any case you were directly exposed to the actual source code, and tweaking or experimenting with it felt very natural.

What about Cara, Vero and MeWe?

This are just the last three Social Media I subscribed in the past and range from Stagnant to Pretty Much Dead.

I suppose that the problem is that if you already have 1000+ followers on, say, Twitter or IG you try posting the same stuff in parallel on both... after 1 month of doubled effort you notice that your followers on the new platform is an order of magnitude smaller... you want to stop double posting because it is too time consuming. Guess which one you will opt out of?

What about "microservice", then?

I definitely agree with that, at least this is how I use chatGPT in 99% of the cases.

Sorry, I should have been more specific maybe: I do know about Montecarlo, and yeah, the circle stuff is a more or less canonical example - but I wanted to know more about the Markov Chains, because, again, I only know these in terms of sequence generators and I have some problems imagining how this could "solve problems" unless your problem is "generate words that sorta sound like a specific language but it is just mostly gibberish".

I am on the move so I cannot check the video (but I did skim the pdf). Is there any chance to see an example of this technique? Just a toy/trivial example would be great, TIA!

Time to trot out a recent experience with ChatGPT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44167998

TBH I haven't tried to learn anything from it, but for now I still prefer to use it as a brainstorming "partner" to discuss something I already have some robust mental model about. This is, in part, because when I try to use it to answer simple "factual" questions as in the example above, I usually end up discovering that the answer is low-quality if not completely wrong.

Am I the only one that remembers how Microsoft tried to convince everyone to adopt .Net because this way you could have teams where one member could use J#, another use Fortran.Net (or whatever the name was) and old chaps could still contribute by writing Cobol# and everything would just magically work together and you would quadruple productivity just by leveraging the untapped pool of #Intercal talent out there?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language) - it was mandated for some projects both by NATO and US DoD.

Awesome transcript! Thanks a lot!

Condensed version will be more than adequate, thanks!

I would like to read a complete example if you want to share (I am not disputing yourbpoint, I'd just to understand better because this is not my field so I cannot immediately map your comment to my own experience)

I am Italian, and I have some interest in Japanese history/culture.

So when I saw a completely unknown city I googled it up because I was wondering what it actually had in common with Venice (I mean, a Japanese version of Venice would be a cool place to visit next time I go to Japan, no?).

If I wanted to know, I dunno, "What is the Chinese Twin City for Buenos Aires" (to mention two countries I do not really know much about, and do not plan to visit in the future) should I trust the answer? Or should I go looking it up somewhere else? Or maybe ask someone from Argentina?

My point is that even as a "digital equivalent of the Library of Alexandria" LLM seem to be extremely unreliable. Therefore - at least for now - I am wary about using them for work, or for any other area where I really care for the quality of the result.

I asked "What version/model are you running, atm" (I have a for-free account on OpenAI, what I have seen so far will not justify a 20$ monthly fee - IN MY CASE).

Answer: "gpt-4-turbo".

HTH.

Partially OT:

Yesterday I asked Chat GPT which was the Japanese Twin City for Venice (Italy). This was just a quick offhand question because I needed the answer for a post on IG, so not exactly a death or life situation.

Answer: Kagoshima. It also added that the "twin status" was officially set in 1965, and that Kagoshima was the starting point for the Jesuit Missionary Alessandro Valignano in his attempt to proselitize Japanese people (to Catholicism, and also about European Culture).

I never heard of Kagoshima, so I googled for it. And discovered it is the twin city of Neaples :/

So I then googled for "Venice Japanese Twin City" and got: Hiroshima. I doublechecked this then I went back to ChatGPT and wrote:

"Kagoshima is the Twin City for Neaples.".

This triggered a websearch and finally it wrote back:

"You are right, Kagoshima is Twin City of Neaples since 1960."

Then it added "Regarding Venice instead, the twin city is Hiroshima, since 2023".

So yeah, a Library of Alexandria that you can count on as long as you have another couple of libraries to doublechek whatever you get from it. Note also that this was very straightforward question, there is nothing to "analyze" or "interpret" or "reason about". And yet the answer was completely wrong, the first date was incorrect even for Neaples (actually the ceremony was in May 1960) and the extra bits about Alessandro Valignano are not reported anywhere else: Valignano was indeed a Jesuit and he visited Japan multiple times, but Kagoshima is never mentioned when you google for him or if you check his wikipedia page.

You may understand how I remain quite skeptical for any application which I consider "more important than an IG title".

Well, if a party has enough votes to pass such a law, it means that the majority of the society has no problems with that.

Conversely, if this hypothetical party had a secret agenda to pass the law when they get elected, but they kept this a secret until then... first of all they will probably lose of voters in the next election. Also, they might find out that former immigrants do not automatically reward this behaviour in terms of votes.

I do not find this scenario particularly realistic.

Maybe I misunderstand your point but... if these people are not citizens (i.e. they need a VISA) how could they actually vote for whatever party proposing this?

Same first name? For twins?

I find it very difficult to believe this is not prevented by some law.

Personally I am trying to see if we can leverage AI to help write design documents instead of code, based on a fairly large library of human (poorly) written design documents and bug reports.

Maybe your point is valid for other situations, but believe me, letting someone getting on a plane after their names has been removed from the Flight Manifest (passengers list) will have very bad consequences for everyone involved.

Starting from the Captain deciding the plane will not depart until the police has taken care of the situation (assuming they find out before taking off, which is quite probable if the seat had been reassigned to someone else).