SanderNL

Oh, right. I agree as well. Git is not their kind of tool.

Thanks for indulging me. I know I am yelling at the clouds.

I also know people usually misunderstand me because I am a “programmer” and all I see is “code”. I guess that’s fair enough, but I fully understand legal being of a completely different nature from Rust.

What I also understand is that no matter how long everyone argues about it, the only thing that matters about legal is the text. The font, the styling, etc is all secondary. It might be important, but it’ll never be primary. Unless courts start judging differently based on page margins I guess.

The same goes for science. Publishing “attention is all you need” in an 8bit NES font might not be fashionable, but it does not and cannot detract from the discovery within it. LaTex produces the exact same documents (I know it is configurable but we are going for a certain style) and that’s what this is about. Not how the tools work but that we fundamentally even care about it instead of focusing on the primary issues like correctness, openness, accessibility. I’d like academic papers to be APIs actually.

Again I see the importance of styling and appearance in general. It’s just that we start with that and I think that’s problematic and actively harms our progress.

Also, to conclude, I am nitwit. This is just my take.

Edit: A man can dream, right? If a paper was plaintext I could typeset it last minute in 8bit NES fonts if I’d be so inclined. I hate ya’ll deciding how everything looks and works. I know that’s technically challenging, but to me that’s where the progress is. An academic paper like, say, a jupyter notebook would be awesome, not? Would you give up your fancy type setting? I would!

Wow, sickening.

I guess something like certified engineering may alleviate some of these issues.

If we build bridges like this.. oh.

My point is not that. Sure, you can go from Word to OpenOffice. Great, now you manually highlight your code in that..

It’s a deeper thing. You can hack Word and related tools for coding and eventually it is acceptable I guess, but it’s starting from the wrong foundation.

This ladder will never reach the moon.

Word’s diffs are not “just different”. they are objectively inferior in many ways. I personally witness daily the travesty of government staff’s handling of information.

Word is a fancy digital typewriter and IMO it’s the wrong abstraction for this day and age and cultural issues are the only thing keeping us back. As always.

Edit: academic papers looking like they were written on a 19th century typewriter.. I don’t get this fascination with style, from scientists of all people. Lay down the info, provide the data. Kerning your fonts properly.. oh my god, I need to cool down. I am a hot headed type of guy, sorry about that.

One thing to keep in mind is that software for a dialysis machine requires a different approach from some overly generic CRUD app exposing how many mansions you have or something.

There is a lot of asinine software in the world and that’s fine. Lots of “real problems” are pretty asinine and don’t require heroic engineering feats.

Just slapping some bullshit together is good enough in a frightening number of cases.

Hate it too myself, but I have come to accept I can either prove them wrong by building my own business and outcompeting them through my supposed superior engineering or just swallow that I’m yelling at the clouds.

Style and substance separation is easy and should be a requirement. Legal is pure text "programming" and what I mean is that the style of the text has zero bearing on the judicial process.

The benefits of working at the proper level of abstraction compound. It enables tech like diffs and git, which then nicely solves a bunch of other problems as well. Using Word completely side-steps all those benefits. Sure, you get a few nice buttons, but that's literally it. You are trapped forever with no way forward.

This feels like actually programming in Word and manually highlighting comments to be green or something. It's a travesty IMO.

Obligatory GPT4 summary of the article.

"LLMs: The Summarization Superheroes of the Modern Era

LLMs, like the one you're reading from, shine brightest when tasked with summarization. They may not craft unique insights, but they excel in distilling vast amounts of information into digestible bites. As information overload continues to plague our modern age, a tool that can swiftly and effectively condense info is invaluable. Bing Chat's emergence hints at a future where LLM-driven search engines index and summarize vast content troves, from books to blogs. But it's not just about search. Inspired by a recent Hacker News discussion likening the LLM movement to the early days of the web, it's clear that these models will reshape how we handle information, from helping CEOs extract corporate insights to tidying up the sprawling mess of unstructured data in enterprises. While LLMs have diverse potential applications, summarization stands out as their killer use case, at least for now."

There is a good chance it sucks and is wonky as hell, making the value proposition of proprietary solutions even more attractive.

As professional developers we are usually in a business context and our purpose is not to be artists, to create, we are there to provide the reliable building blocks out of which actual creation can arise.

The focus here is “reliable”. Let the creative guys mess around, we should focus on keeping stuff clean. If we start becoming messy that’s no good, because it’s all downhill from there. How can you draw skulls, no matter how messy, if the drawing functions don’t work?

Using this article’s story, we are the ones creating the drawing functions, not the “skulls”. We make sure those guys that actually see the skulls can do whatever it is they do. We are bad at that, so when we are asked to be creative we arrive at what the author describes: few lines, something simple, something algorithmic.

That’s not because you are all about cleanliness.. you just lack creativity and vision and an artist’s drive to make it reality. And that’s OK.

Ah! That’s interesting. I have to do some more reading instead of yelling at the clouds. Thanks for that.

Although HN is a very bad example of an “average” anything, it’s still a good catch. Thanks for reminding me. SPAs can definitely be leaner than regular websites. Never disagreed on that one to be honest. SPA or not is just a delivery method. Clean SPA or clean “regular” site, it’s all good.

Again I was just venting and that sucks. Yelling at the cloud(s).

The problem is ditching it for .. what? Bloated messes.

Be careful throwing babies out with bath waters.

That has absolutely no bearing on TCP. A bunch of images could load on a single TCP connection just fine.

Don’t confuse browsers and HTTP with the underlying protocol.

TCP has its flaws, but I don’t see how HTTP and its request/response monopoly is one of them.

> Just the TCP handshake packets themselves (3 * 1460) can hold almost as much data as it takes to get a standard SPA.

I have no idea in what reality you live where you encounter SPAs of a few Kbs. Don’t even know what to say if that’s your experience.

> That said the problem with rants like GP's comment is that they don't serve to illuminate but serve to push on us, the readers, the author's agitated emotional state.

You are absolutely right there. I will try to refrain from these “frustration posts” in the future. Sorry about that.

“Efficiency” for whom and for what? Think deep before you all bow down before our overlords and ditch clear and simple protocols for “efficiency”.

I know what QUIC is for and I know it’s strengths. I just want the web to be simple and accessible. It’s great Netflix and friends can stream content efficiently. It’s another thing to push this to the “open web” and declare it The Protocol.

Welcome to the desert of the real. That's some real diversity for you.

Not everything that shines is gold my friend.

But I concede my comments are really ranty. Sorry about that. It's frustration.

Imagine you are holding a 200 requests/page bag of excrement and it’s generating too much load on all systems involved.

What do we do? Empty the bag? No, we do not. That doesn’t scale.

We create the most elaborate, over the top efficient bag-of-excrement-conveyer-belt you ever came across. We’ll move these babies in no time flat.

Don’t worry about side-loading 24 fonts in 3 formats and whatnot. Especially do not worry about having to load three different trackers to “map” your “customer journeys”.

No sir, your customer journeys are fully mapped, enterprise-ready and surely to be ignored by everyone. We got you covered with QUIC. Reimagining “data transport”, for your benefit.

Edit: Of course I didn’t read the article, but now I did and it’s somehow worse than I thought. “Why TCP is not optimal for today’s web”: no answers. There are literally no answers here. Other than, TCP is old. Old things are difficult.

I have learned this from experience. If you think this is bad, real people in real situations are actually worse. If you can get them to speak quasi-coherent sentences that’s a major win in itself. Sounds sad, but the reality these gadgets must operate under.

It’s not that people are stupid, but they operate under a surprising amount of varying conditions ranging from fully inebriated to severely demotivated and/or burned out.

"Oh.. but skip cell A.. 6? or whatever, the one with the .. uhh... "

'Error processing your request. I emailed your supervisor with my error condition.'

"No, no! Stop. Just do whatever you did first, but now you do like the other thing too, with the skipping of the cell with the.. uh.. what's it called?! ampersand?"

'I will average the last 3 columns while adding random numbers to the rest of your document, sure. By the way, this is the information you requested. I have also forwarded it to the company CEO: 'The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram &, representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters et—Latin for "and"'. SOURCE: wikipedia.'

Proceeds to mess around with LLM for 3 years instead of learning wat AVERAGE() is and how it works

It is too much work. It’s way too complex.

No, that’s hallucinating. Mind’s eye is like what you see when you remember a visual scene.

To be clear, the word "ridiculous" is targeted at the signal-to-noise ratio, which is indeed in the ear of the beholder, not the article or the experience(s) of the author herself. Also, the "hard" part is not because it is dense or thorough. I just think it's messy and all over the place, but it's her blog. She gets to do whatever she wants.

Thanks for your perspective though. I don't wish to dig into this and turn extremely pedantic - I have a knack for that - because the author seems like an incredibly nice and talented person. I hope she moved on and forgot about this whole issue.

How is this different from “drawing is better than writing a book”?

Some people write, others draw. Each method has its own strength and problem spaces.

Encoding a complex issue sometimes is just shitty with a visual metaphor. Other times writing code is a really bad idea. If you want to express “flow” or “connections”, filter or stream systems like modular synths, that’s when the visual metaphor shines.

You use whatever metaphor works best at the moment. One cannot replace the other.

The “problem” is that people want to push all of “programming” into the visual metaphor. That’s like pushing all of programming into only functional, only declarative, only imperative or only OOP (or whatever), but worse. That’s not going to work, but I guess people can try.

I'm sorry, I really tried to read this, but it's.. hard. The author seems to live in a very different reality from mine and I'm having a hard time understanding her (?).

I do not think the author is wrong or anything, but the signal to noise ratio IMO is ridiculous.

“Stop eating salt. Take a piece of chocolate. Eat it.”

You can use language to guide and point. Talking about chocolate is difficult. Pointing to chocolate is not.

Ceasing the consumption of “salt” may be difficult and the “chocolate” in question may be subtle so you may need many intermediate steps.

Nothing we experience can be transcribed into words. Literally nothing. There is not one thing you can experience that’s possible to pin down into script. It’s pointers all the way down.

Why don't you try it out for yourself and let us know. You seem to worry about other people's interests more than usual.

I get the pragmatism coming from a Buddhist, but not everything can or indeed needs to be brought down into a "path". I'm sure you are fully aware of this.

Now I am fascinated by your consternations. Whatever the answer, whatever people get out of it. What's it to you?

You don’t support changing an URL? Why..?

Why does AWS even enter the conversation?

Newton was wrong if his project was about uncovering the deep workings of nature. His assumptions were wrong and don’t work. They will never work. They are not “incomplete”.

They are practical though. In that sense astrology can be said to be practical too.. hides.

I believe it’s actually over 9000.