awesome_dude

This is a distraction. Whether it's 300 million voters or 300 million iPhone users, both groups act as the ultimate arbiter of value. If a customer stops paying, the "leadership" of a company fails. If a voter stops voting for one party, or the other, the "leadership" of a state fails. The mechanical result on the "seven teams" is identical: the unsuccessful ones are defunded.

Further, this proves the detachment from reality you are bringing to the conversation - everybody in the private sector knows the golden rule - your customers ARE your employers

THEY dictate what they will pay for, and therefore what can be sold (unless you are a fan of monopolies forcing people to buy things they do not want to)

> Whatever it is you are reading in other threads has no relevance to this one.

Your dishonesty only highlights your bad faith, and as such we are done here.

The repeated movement of the goalposts here is only evidence of the no real scotsmen strategy being employed.

If a government did this (e.g., seven independent agencies competing for a moon landing), people would call it "fragmented," "uncoordinated," and "bureaucratic infighting."

This assumes that the duplicated effort arrives at a solution that is better than if it were done by a single team.

> >If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem

> The problem here is "government funded" - the trials are not rationalized by free-market economics. That is, a 5% better product in the end would not be worth seven competing developments initially.

I think you're saying that 5% is worth it when the free market does it, but 5% gain isn't when the government does it?

I'm hoping you're not because that's impossible - the end result is precisely the same

If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem, people would lose their minds over the 'waste' But when private companies do it, we call it efficient market competition. The duplication is the same - we just frame it differently.

Edit: fixed some typos caused by fat fingers on a phone keyboard

A recent example, Mitchell Hashimoto was pointing out that he wasn't "first to market" with his product(s), he was (at least) SEVENTH

That's not quite my read - the original says per branch there was a 1/3 reduction, but your comment appears to say 1/3 total redundancy.

There was, according to the original, a 40% increase in number of branches, meaning a net increase in tellers (my math might be off though)

edit:

100 branches → 140 branches = +40%

100 tellers/branch → 67 tellers/branch = -33%

140 × 67 = 9,380

100 × 100 = 10,000

net difference -620 or just over 6% (loss)

And, to be equally as fair, the only genuinely good guys are the ones that are too small to enforce their will upon others directly - small countries without arms who are forced to find other ways to engage with others in order to achieve whatever goals they have (resource acquisition)

The Americans have been extremely adept at dominating the discourse via non-government pathways (Hollywood)

I'm laughing not at you but the ludicrousness of the times - I use endash heavily, have done for a minute, but now I see endash used by LLMs with no surrounding spaces.

I think that the "identify AI by some artefact" is just another game of whack-a-mole, and the better approach is to look at the quality of what's being presented.

I have argued before, and still feel strongly, that LLM/AI generated images/audio/text is causing a stronger inspection of what's being presented as fact, which is a healthy thing (how far that will go is yet to be determined, as per when the availability of Photoshop generated content exploded)

I personally would prefer "AI" to be "AGI" but there's no point fighting the way people use language (see: every damned pedantic comment about English usage ever!! :-)

The real tell is that you've not been in the group of people that use these terms frequently enough for you to think they're normal.

It's like the emdash alarmism, AI never invented emdash, nor did it invent using it frequently. Its training was full of examples, so many that AI picked up using it frequently.

By definition, they involve variance that cannot be explained or eliminated through simple repetition. Demanding a 'deterministic' explanation for stochastic noise is a category error; it's like asking a meteorologist to explain why a specific raindrop fell an inch to the left during a storm replication.

This doesn't mean the model only works on that specific dataset - it means ML training is inherently stochastic. The question isn't 'can you get identical results' but 'can you get comparable performance on similar data distributions.

Machine Learning papers, for example, used to have a terrible reputation for being inconsistent and impossible to replicate.

That didn't make them (all) fraudulent, because that requires intent to deceive.

Thank you for missing the point.

It's not about the WHAT, it's about the WHY.

For loops are obvious. O(n) being intentional instead of 'lazy' isn't obvious without context. That's what comments preserve - the decision rationale, not the syntax explanation.

A professional developer can read code. But they can't read the mind of the author who made a non obvious tradeoff. That's what comments preserve.

> I guess where we differ is that to me, a professional software developer should be able to understand good code. If they aren't, they are a junior who needs practice. But I am for designing tools for the professionals, not for the apprentices. The goal of an apprentice is to become a professional, not to remain an apprentice forever.

If you are going to make personal attacks, you should know that I work with actual professionals, and they understand that future maintainers, myself included, cannot read their mind on why they chose the path they did.

A committee forms when there's widespread disagreement on goals or priorities - representing stakeholders who can't agree. The cost is slower decisions and compromise solutions. The benefit is avoiding tyranny of a single vision that ignores real needs.

Someone following me could look at it and go.. "well duh" and that's not going to hurt anyone, but if I didn't put that comment and someone refractometer, then we have someone redoing and then undoing, for no good reason.

There's that meme where people are told to update the number of hours wasted because people try to refactor some coffee and have to undo it because it doesn't work

https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/e...

Go ask Steve, he wrote it, oh, he left about 3 years ago... does anyone know what he was thinking?

I <3 great (edit: improve clarity) commit comments, but I am leaning more heavily to good comments at the same level as the dev is reading - right there in the code - rather than telling them to look at git blame, find the appropriate commit message (keeping in mind that there might have been changes to the line(s) of code and commits might intertwine, thus making it a mission to find the commit holding the right message(s).

edit: I forgot to add - commit messages are great, assuming the people merging the PR into main aren't squashing the commits (a lot of people do this because of a lack of understanding of our friend rebase)

I loathe this take.

I have rocked up to codebases where there were specific rules banning comments because of this attitude.

Yes comments can lie, yes there are no guards ensuring they stay in lock step with the code they document, but not having them is a thousand times worse - I can always see WHAT code is doing, that's never the problem, the problems is WHY it was done in this manner.

I put comments like "This code runs in O(n) because there are only a handful of items ever going to be searched - update it when there are enough items to justify an O(log2 n) search"

That tells future developers that the author (me) KNOWS it's not the most efficient code possible, but it IS when you take into account things unknown by the person reading it

Edit: Tribal knowledge is the worst type of knowledge, it's assumed that everyone knows it, and pass it along when new people onboard, but the reality (for me) has always been that the people doing the onboarding have had fragments, or incorrect assumptions on what was being conveyed to them, and just like the childrens game of "telephone" the passing of the knowledge always ends in a disaster

I have no idea if the reports are accurate, or an attempt to put the market into readiness for inflation.

edit: Whether real or imagined, there is panic buying of petrol happening - this could lead to supply issues by itself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1rohwzl/fuel_pan...

Nobody would care for a millisecond about the doomsayers if there wasn't some dread in their lives about what's happening.

WHY would a machine need a simulation at all?