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devnonymouson Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

How is it that so many people who supposedly lean towards analytical thought are so bad at understanding scale?

devnonymouson Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

Can't speak for Rob Pile but my guess would be, yeah, it might seem hypocritical but it's a combination of seeing the slow decay of the open culture they once imagined culminating into this absolute shirking of responsibility while simultaneously exploiting labour, by those claiming to represent the culture, alongwith the retrospective tinge of guilt for having enabled it, that drrove this rant.

Furthermore, w.r.t the points you raised - it's a matter of scale and utility. Compared to everything that has come before, GenAI is spectacularly inefficient in terms of utility per unit of compute (however you might want to define these). There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be. The egarness and will to throw money and resources at this surpasses the crypto mania which was just as worthless.

Even if you consider Rob a hypocrite , he isn't alone in his frustration and anger at the degradation of the promise of Open Culture.

devnonymouson Notes on Bhutan

Buddhism in India grew in opposition to the Hindu caste system instead of spiritual change of thought. The current Indian government is loudly Hindu nationalist and prefers to minimise or even dismiss the diversity of Indian religious practices as well as pretend that the caste system is no longer present.

They and their supporters downplay Buddhist followers by pretending that the lived experiences of these Buddhist (on in general the non-hindu) don't exist.

devnonymouson Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

> Why not just self-host competitive-enough LLM models, and do their experiments/attacks themselves, without leaking actions and methods so much?

Why assume this hasn't already happened?

devnonymouson A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

Not the person you're asking but I had similar CS issues. I still use Wise sparingly but have also started using Revolut. Though, I wouldn't trust either with more money than I can afford to budget for ^life lessons^

devnonymouson A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

In most (all ?) countries banks are regulated and customers have recourse to some sort of banking ombudsman for this sort of thing.

devnonymouson Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

Small change to emphasize the intent:

> because companies and governments around the world were going to prioritise that in their purchases.

Governments are the largest revenue stream of pretty much every large software company starting from IBM/Xerox to OpenAI. MS is well known to indulge in all sort of legally grey practices to win such contracts.

devnonymouson Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

Also this:

> Google stated that "the ODF standard, which achieves the same goal, is only 867 pages" and that

    If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages) which achieves the same purpose and is thus a good comparison.

    Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review that comparable standards have undergone, reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information are hardly surprising.[118]

devnonymouson Is OOXML Artifically Complex?

From the same wikipedia article:

> An Ars Technica article sources Groklaw stating that at Portugal's national body TC meeting, "representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing OpenDocument format (ODF), could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs."[55]

Sure, yeah, that's not deliberate Sabotage /s

devnonymouson Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)

The last section in the article speaks about RuPay but isn't this just one of the many implementations of UPI[1] ? In any case, imo, it is the start of the end for the duopoly and it is my hope that an truly open standard and protocol (unlike UPI) emerges (and no, the blockchain is not it -- crypto would just be accidental complexity in any potential solution).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

devnonymouson PEP 762 – REPL-acing the default REPL

I replied here earlier with my own pet project to essentially say that you don't need a whole lot of complexity to solve for QOL improvements in the console but was promptly downvoted, I thought that was fair and so deleted my comment.

However, now I do feel the need to say this - you really do not need a whole lot to enhance your productivity on the python REPL by a large factor, if you take advantage of some simple built-in facilities:

A. Understand the use of the PYTHONSTARTUP environment variable. This alone is a big advantage. It'll allow you to you automatically import often needed modules and declare helpers that you always seem to need.

B. Once you've gotten used to that, Wrap the built-in module code (or I presume pyrepl) to add the little things that you need and point PYTHONSTARTUP to it

C. Enjoy

At the risk of being downvoted again (not that it matters, so won't delete this time), here again, shameless plug - https://github.com/lonetwin/pythonrc

devnonymouson Lake Michigan Stonehenge – What have researchers learned?

One aspect of this is knowledge is part of intelligence and lifespans influence shared/communal knowledge.

I don't think anyone claims that early humans were not as intelligent as we are now but the weakest link in the knowledge of how to effectively use levers or roll logs, or not (metaphorically) 'reinvent the wheel', would have been the eldest members in the community.

devnonymouson The First HTML LSP That Reports Syntax Errors

Chai tea!

devnonymouson Litecli: CLI for SQLite Databases with auto-completion and syntax highlighting

Yep ! ...and if you want the same ux with Postgresal, MySQL or Mariadb you have pgcli and mycli.

There also a tmux and vim clone that uses prompt_toolkit iirc.

devnonymouson Can a product with "0g sugar" contain lactose?

Guess a few didn't get it. For those who didn't, congrats you're one of today's 10000

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_Western

devnonymouson ps aux written in bash without forking

But that's hardly the most optimal approach in this scenario :-)

devnonymouson Every company should be owned by its employees

Yep! ..and when workers are owners, optimizing either ways works !

devnonymouson A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout (2023)

This google talk https://youtu.be/bmSAYlu0NcY?si=yHREamFoRG_fZopl is a condensed version of the (already small - 150 pags IIRC) book. I highly recommend both.

To the point made by the GP (and others here) about how useful the book is, I must add that I got a whole lot more from this small book than some other well known and oft suggested titles (like Clean Code, POSA etc).

My most recent peeve about the matter is that Kent Beck"s "Tidy, Fisrt?" was apparently motivated partly in response to this book and yet it falls way too short to matching up. Half of thst book is way too simplistic and almost patronizing and the other is handwavy abstract notions too scared to touch reality lest it spoil the narrative.

devnonymouson Withdraw most of my ownership in favor of Mark

That would have been his 12 July, 2018 announcement.

devnonymouson Withdraw most of my ownership in favor of Mark

He stepped away from being the 'BDFL' back in 2018[1] so yeah, this isn't really news worthy.

[1] https://www.mail-archive.com/python-committers@python.org/ms...

devnonymouson DuckDuckGo was down

Huh, of all those, ddg seems the odd one. I thought it used its own search service, didn't realise it was bing underneath. Even if that's not entirely true the fact that the home page is down due to the same reason that bing is down doesn't look good.

devnonymouson Computer scientists invent an efficient new way to count

> Also, he actually writes and runs code, overnight if need be...He's not in an ivory tower. He's very much hands on, and when he's behind the wheel, you're in for a ride.

That's such an admirable thing. Something to aspire to, given his age. I wonder if one can say the same thing of all the 'thought leaders' of the industry who go around pontificating about code hygiene and tidiness.

devnonymouson But Why a Penguin?

You're right, besides the reference to the logo competition there isn't much info on why Tux is a penguin. Wikipedia is better at recording the lore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux_(mascot)#Origins

devnonymouson But Why a Penguin?

https://web.archive.org/web/20040209111609/http://www.linux....

Tbh, I thought the original article would be another tech journalist rediscoveting the history of Tux.

More ; https://web.archive.org/web/20040401161253/http://www.linux....

devnonymouson Computer scientists invent an efficient new way to count

Not sure which Knuth paper you're referring to but skimming through the article my understanding is this algorithm works /only/ if the values are hashable. IOW how else does one define unique/distinct values ?

devnonymouson US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

The excess of often conflicting information, is the same as no information.

devnonymouson Alice's adventures in a differentiable wonderland

No, I think the inspiration is more direct https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lewis+carroll+alice+in+wonderland+...

devnonymouson Best engineering interview question I've gotten

This comment is about some of the replies here. On the one hand everyone seems to agree that software engineering interview process is broken because it doesn't make sense to ask comp science implementation questions for an engineering job. On the other hand some people balk at having to do a 3 hour engineering interview...or take home tests or full day meet-the-team style interviews. Payment for interviews is a can of worms w.r.t legality, either that of you restrict your candidate pool to people not currently employed.

To those who refuse engineering intervies that take time - what is your solution?

devnonymouson India's TikTok Ban Is a Cautionary Tale for the U.S.

I'm amused by your incredulity at how Trump could become president while simultaneously rationoalizing Modi being PM. The gullibility you so freely ascribed to the US Midwest and South... Is that not the same as those of the bhakts ? Like Trump, isn't Modi too not a self-aggradizIng, opportunistic felon ?

I mean for all its faults the US did not give Donald Trump a second term and that's all that I have to say about this matter.