_tom_

I don't see a date the article. The web has taught me to never waste time with an undated article. Odds are very good it's obsolete.

The midlist has moved into self publishing. Many more books are published on amazon than by trad publishers. Many of them don't sell, but the numbers (guess) aren't probably that different from fad publishing in terms of success.

Many authors that succeed at self publishing move to traditional publishers. (Hugh Howe, E L James) Others (Tamara Taylor) like to control and much higher royalties and stay self published.

I'm interested but skeptical. I have not dived as deeply as you. Mostly I'm using ChatGPT. There is just no way it could generate 90% of my code. It is great at generating boilerplate for simple cases. I find it most useful for getting started on this I know nothing about. Like I was working with SVG recently, something I know nothing about. But is have to say chatgpt was helpful, but not, in the long run useful. Too many errors and its ability to refine answers is terrible. Too many attempts correction are met with cheerful fixes which have the same bugs.

Is anyone else actually getting good results for code generation using LLMs?

Old school guys at my first job could send the contents of the program counter to the speaker, and diagnose problems by the sound of it.

Definitely Old School Cool

Oh, cool. I'll have to look for that.

Just went and looked. Thanks. That will help me.

I'm still going to call that a UI disaster. Facebook puts "interested" and "going" in the same drop down. Can't miss it. If they did it the Facebook way, I believe a lot of the RSVP problem would go away. Now, people will still flake, of course. But we won't have the "save"ers.

Meetup uses an unlabeled, non-standard icon.

I strongly suspect that the vast majority of meetup users don't know it's there.

Just FYI: for running tech events in Silicon Valley, I expect about 50% flake rate. That's a few years ago, so there may be more bots now.

The market is dominated by ebooks. Trad publishing gets a few home runs, but overall can't compete with the sheer volume of new independent books that come out each year.

But, boy are they fast to write!

Wow, what a clueless article. Or maybe a deliberately biased article.

The majority of sales and debut authors are ebooks, and traditional publishers aren't involved. This has been true for years. Read publishing is pretty much pointless if you aren't a celebrity. Yes, there are a few that make it, but a handful, compared to the numbers that make something significant self publishing. And the trad publishing process is so slow. You can write and market several books in the time is takes to get one book to reads the old way.

If you aren't a celebrity, self publishing is the way to go.

Not that publishing an ebook is easy, but the process of much more controllable by you. And the payback is much higher.

This maybe driven by your platform. The only way to "bookmark" an event you are interested in on meetup.com is to click "going", so people do that.

If there was an "interested" option, the flake rate would go way down.

Outside of the title, they use the word "tunable" which is more accurate.

i feel like this would be more useful with a title like 'A note about Coercions in Haskell', it would allow people to determine interest more quickly.

> wait, are building codes currently not copyrighted?

My understanding is that this is what is currently being argued about. Traditionally, the codes have been copyrighted, but more recently, people have argued that the law must be public (reasonable) and therefore if the law says "follow standard X", then standard X must therefor be public. It's still being argued, and this proposed law is an attempt to clarify this, supporting the pro-copyright side.

Not a lawyer.

I suspect the only reason they don't use drones is range. Once they have a match, it'll be drones all the way.

And (c) in the long term influence the risk. Insurance companies have long worked to improve auto safety. This benefits everyone. This needs to be applied to more significant risks, like fire flood and storm.

I think we have to get much more serious about prevention. People are doing this:

Fire safety:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/24/1195331310/red-roof-house-fir...

Storm safety:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/mexico-beach-home-survives-hurrica...

We need to mandate this kind of building in new construction and modified construction.

It may be worthwhile to subsidize this, to help with turning existing high risks into low risks.

We need to be more severe on forbidding building in danger zones, and more accepting of insurers pricing these based on risk, so they don't have to leave the state, and others can be priced to more common levels of risk.

We also need to not allow rebuilding in areas that will have these problems again, without some way of mitigating. We should not have to pay for someone's third house in a flood zone. But if you can make it flood proof after the first one, great.

Votes are the sort term answer. People are losing their houses in Florida. Mortgages require insurance, and if you insurance goes up thousand a year, and hundreds a month, some people can't afford it, and lose their houses.

Longer term, this is bad for a society in general, and politicians do know this.

There are all sorts of potential societal consequences to people losing homes that cost the society (us!) money (homelessness, vandalism, entire neighborhoods going the way of Detroit suburbs, and much, much more). Society doesn't want this to happen.

Should always be on first use, of course.

This is a related to my number one problem with technical writing or text books: forward references.

"Let's talk all about a topic we will define three chapters from now"

Learning about things with undefined terms, concepts and acronyms is much harder and may require multiple passes over the material.

It's a hard part of writing a linear book about a topic that's probably a graph, but good writers manage it. Bad writers just leave their readers confused.

I'd love to see what books people come up with.

Another component is practice. Talk to lots of people. Get a job at Starbucks if you are really committed. Or go to toastmasters. Join any club that has lots of conversation.

Observation is also good. Watch people around you, and see how they speak.

Do not look to fiction, as someone else suggested. Almost all fiction these days is conflict oriented. The examples in fiction are almost always "what not to do", you'll learn to be an insufferable stalker.

There are also dozens of books on communication. Read a few.

or 2000 https://www.fastcompany.com/90209550/general-magics-forgotte...

Useful article. I just tried to update an app to a paid version, and it popped up this dialog.

Of course, I refused to enter it, for the reasons herein.

Frustrating, as I did want to support the developer.

Do we have a current workaround?

If google provides a credit limited to $300 for new accounts, then it has the ability to limit spend.

It should make this available.

To be fair: I'm sure they don't provide this limit to make money, because this is a rare case, but to avoid the far more common case of established business going offline because someone forgot to update a limit.

This used to be the case. Always a bent wheel or something. I was just reflecting recently that this was no longer the case, and has not been for years.

People learned what broke (front wheel that were slammed into things) and redesigned/reinforced appropriately.

Why should we "create" categories. There should be an algorithm for determining level. Input 1000 miles an hour, you get a category.

Earthquakes don't have an upper limit. It's just a function of energy.

> nerds usually suck at communicating with normal people

Wow, way to buy in to inaccurate, hostile stereotypes. The smart people I know write novels, teach dance, play instruments - and communicate with people.

I bought an expensive, name brand, toaster.

It's crap.

I do either, depending on the situation. For me, verbalizing things, internally, is like writing things down - it allows for more organization and review. (Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)

It's clear to me that the main ideas come non-verbally first, and then I translate into words.

It's fairly common to do traffic analysis, and look for behavior that is not typical. Things like a sudden jump in the data being downloaded, access from other countries, changes in IP addresses, log ins from new sites.

There are many security tools that use AI to identify patterns of access and alert on changes.

So, yes, something like this could be detectable.

It's way less than $2M, since they don't bribe people to be evil, they just buy the tool and make their own alterations.

The interesting thing here is you can feasibly measure them all.

Not ahead of time, but as you build.

You are correct.

But are you sure you are anything more?