Robin_Message

Neal Stephenson - Anathem is great and not an easy reader. I enjoyed most of his other books but that one was the complexity sweet spot for me.

Umberto Eco and Ursula Le Guin I agree on.

If it's only proofreading text you've written, the changes will be minimal enough that watermarking seems impossible to me.

Right, but I don't think consumers would consider this "intelligence". It's too dumb.

> Turn the lights down low in the bedroom

Sets lights to 30% but also off

> Turn the lights low in the bedroom

Sets lights to on

This is a cool idea but I think humans assume more than 14MB of intelligence. This is like the unhelpful guard in the swamp castle of Monty Python's Holy Grail

I'd suggest writing by hand as a proof of work, for now at least!

Sounds interesting but the blog seems hijacked by some advert to me, anyone else?

If that study was of submariners, is it possible long-term high-level exposure causes the body to adapt?

I am suspicious of 0.1% having a significant effect though, given oxygen is around 20% and we naturally exhale a couple of percent CO2.

I think he's doing 15% every month, not every year. It's not an implausible growth rate for a unicorn startup; it is implausible to expect it.

I've been thinking about this, and I think software is uniquely knowledge work that has the most defined structure and least personally interaction. Hell, some of the software I write is for machine to talk to other machines. It's not surprising such a closed system is so amenable to AI, and other knowledge workers are not getting the same benefits.

> Overwhelmingly Large Narrative Unit

I miss Iain M Banks. Thanks for this lovely little nod to the Culture

I think you are (informally and correctly) doing Bayes theorem here. The prior is combined with the conditional to give the posterior estimate; the conditional is not itself the estimate.

> Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug like this to engineering.

What does that even mean? Does it mean, "our support flow is just an LLM that fobs off customers and puts their issues into the bin"? Or is there some genuine "routing" of simple bugs to engineering which accidentally drops "complex" bugs? Could you drescibe that process, it sounds fascinating?

Also, how is changing a customer's billing based on detecting a certain string in a certain place a "complex" bug? Grep the string, remove the if statement, done. I'd love a post-mortem about why this was a complex bug.

More questions than answers here Thariq.

If there is oversupply, why are retailers forced to rent and not able to purchase at the depressed market price?

(My theory, landlords are holding onto property in the hope of future returns rather than making a currently rational sale, and doing specific things like holding units empty or 364 day leases to avoid revaluations)

If I asked you for the same thing 10 times, wiping your memory each time, would you generate the same result?

And why does it matter anyway? I'd the code passes the tests and you like the look of it, it's good. It doesn't need to be existentially complicated.

It's not a drop-in replacement; rather it is an implementation of the same ideas (+ some extra ones) but open source so it can be used for things other than Apple devices.

It's because such research has no obvious initial use that the public must pay for it; no private enterprise will fund it, and often it will be useless knowledge, but occasionally someone will figure something out that unlocks a whole new understanding of the world.

It's publicly-funded venture capital for ideas.

I gotta ask, did you spend a week sucking your teeth after that, or did you hand it to them and say "hey, you're paying for expertise and we got it to you faster than we estimated"?

The weights are aware of the end goal etc. But the model does not have access to these weights in a meaningful way in the chain of thought model.

So the model thinks ahead but cannot reason about it's own thinking in a real way. It is rationalizing, not rational.

Ordering and wiring up 64 small individual PCBs, vs one PCB, is not a hard choice.

Sounds like the Phonological Loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeley%27s_model_of_working_...

Change map to forEach?

The presumption was about mechanical instruments, from a simpler time. As computers expanded from being purely mechanical, it never got revised, which is why it is being revised now (three or four decades too late, I'll grant you, but legislation is a slow process.)

Photos of ballots are a criminal offence in the UK, which obviously is imperfect in an abusive relationship, but does help set a general norm that the vote is secret.

SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Cambridge/London/Remote

I'm a software engineer with two decades of commercial experience. I've helped startups get started and big companies keep going.

I've organised a couple of jobs through HN now; it's been a good way to find interesting projects, and my clients have been pleased with the work. One said: "Thank you! I've played with it a bit and it looks very impressive! Way better than what I imagined this project could be."

I've worked on a very wide variety of web-based projects, as well as React Native, Windows, and other platforms, so I will be able to hit the ground running on most projects. If you're doing something a bit esoteric, that could still suit me – I've done image analysis of microscope images, processing big data for satellite imagery, devised novel algorithms, written network protocols, hacked on FPGAs, basically a bit of everything.

I did a PhD in programming languages so I'm pretty good at picking them up. In the last 5 years I've done commercial projects in (at least):

Typescript/Javascript (React Native, browser, and Node.js), C#, Python, Java, Swift, Ruby and Golang.

As well as building things, I am also good at talking to people to help figure out what we should be building. I enjoy working with other developers and helping the team learn, but I am also happy to get my head down and build what you need. I'm happiest on fixed-term projects that I can complete on a schedule that suits both of us, and my clients have been very happy with this process too.

For more details my website is https://www.lambdacambridge.com

Email: robin [at] the website above

This is a good writeup and a surprising bug!

For the average web app, it feels like JWT introduces some complexity (and footguns like this) for no real benefit. I mean, you can avoid a session lookup from redis or something, but that's hardly an expensive part of a request. You can always optimise hot, non-session requests (e.g. private image serving can use signed URLs)

Also, you can't revoke sessions ns unless you have a revocation list, in which case, why not just have a session list?!

Genuinely interested in real use cases for JWTs.

The visitor pattern is a way of getting multiple dispatch in a language with single dispatch.

It can also be seen as a way of encoding a functional solution to the expression problem in an OO language, which is useful when you have a set of objects and want to make it easy to add new operations to them, not create new types of objects.

SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Cambridge/London/Remote

I'm a software engineer with two decades of commercial experience. I've helped startups get started and big companies keep going.

I've organised a couple of jobs through HN now; it's been a good way to find interesting projects, and my clients have been pleased with the work. One said: "Thank you! I've played with it a bit and it looks very impressive! Way better than what I imagined this project could be."

I've worked on a very wide variety of web-based projects, as well as React Native, Windows, and other platforms, so I will be able to hit the ground running on most projects. If you're doing something a bit esoteric, that could still suit me – I've done image analysis of microscope images, processing big data for satellite imagery, devised novel algorithms, written network protocols, hacked on FPGAs, basically a bit of everything.

I did a PhD in programming languages so I'm pretty good at picking them up. In the last 5 years I've done commercial projects in (at least):

Typescript/Javascript (React Native, browser, and Node.js), C#, Python, Java, Swift, Ruby and Golang. I'm trying to find someone to pay me to do some Rust (I completed an Advent of Code in it.)

As well as building things, I am also good at talking to people to help figure out what we should be building. I enjoy working with other developers and helping the team learn, but I am also happy to get my head down and build what you need. I'm happiest on fixed-term projects that I can complete on a schedule that suits both of us, and my clients have been very happy with this process too.

For more details my website is https://www.lambdacambridge.com

Email: robin [at] the website above

Hypothecated taxes are an anti-pattern, for precisely this reason. Setting the budget and setting the taxes should be somewhat separated (but not too separated!)

To be fair, that's one of the reasons why libraries like jQuery and React exist: to smooth over the difference between browsers.

Even today, big chunk of React is masking the subtle differences in event handling and other things. And whilst it forces you into a paradigm, I've never had a bug caused by the internals of React that I've had to dig into. But maybe I'm lucky or only do simple stuff?

As to it hurting, I guess I'd say, use the protective equipment! Sure, it can be bulky and awkward occasionally, but it works and it's often better than the alternatives.

This sounds exciting but the enormous and confusing breadth of what your bio says you are working on, and the odd unit errors (lowering "a megawatt" to "2 to 3 terawatt), is really harming you credibility here. Do you have a link to a well-explained example of what you've achieved so far?