dpark

> I am no mathematician, but the math needs to start with that fundamental principle.

This is a weird sort of hubris. “I’m not qualified to do this job but I can certainly tell you how it needs to be done.”

> And if everything is a wave there are no discrete quantities beyond our definition of what constitutes the end, or borders, of the wave.

This is not true in multiple ways. First, it’s known that these particles exhibit quantum behavior. This is measured and confirmed over and over. Many measures are in fact quantized.

Second, existing as a wave does not mean no discrete quantities. Even in everyday materials we observe situations like standing waves that are effectively quantized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_wave

Where are you getting 37? The standard model has 17 fields.

If you pick and choose which properties to select as unique fields, maybe you can get the number 37, but at that point why not 118 fields?

> failed catastrophically rather than degrading gracefully

You mean like returning 529s and operating with reduced QoS?

I would imagine 360 patches removed way more than 360 uses of strncpy. But yeah, it’s not a given that each of these patches addressed a bug. (Also not a given that there were only 360 bugs fixed.)

You are making it weirder still by trying to defend your bias by saying it’s a problem with society. You are the one who called soccer a male sport. And now for some reason you are trotting out tropes about female soccer players being lesbians. Why?

“I’m so enlightened I forgot women play soccer” is definitely a weird take.

How are people still defending type erasure? Sure, it was “defensible” in the sense that there were reasons the choice was made. But it was clearly a bad choice (to many people at least) when it was made and the effects are still rippling through the ecosystem. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s even more clear that the naysayers were correct and the harm to the Java ecosystem from type erasure is worse than the harm from creating parallel libraries would have been.

If sane generics had been introduced, the non-generic collection types would be a historical oddity by now and we wouldn’t be talking about how a future enhancement is going to undo the erasure decision.

> The most basic killer use case ironically is 2D screen replacement

How is this a killer use case?

I feel like the screen replacement thing is one of those features that would be really cool for a demo (“oh wow”), and then the user would rapidly realize that for 99% of the time a screen not hanging from their head would be more comfortable and accomplish the same thing.

This story probably involves a cassette that someone copied at home and then didn’t break off that little tab.

Yeah, but electrical tape looks like garbage. Trade off is aesthetics vs ability to remove easily.

Agreeing. There is a ton of blatant misinformation being shared in this thread by people who seem utterly confident despite their apparently complete ignorance.

So much weirdly confident misinformation here. When LLMs do this we can it hallucination.

This is all untrue so far as I understand.

A research group can file for a new drug application (or abbreviated new drug application) for an existing drug. There is no mandate that an NDA sponsor be a manufacturer or the existing manufacturer.

Only the entity holding an approved NDA can file a supplemental NDA but that’s not the only path.

The real reason no one files for off label use is that there’s high cost and little to no practical benefit to doing so.

I get the impression that your takeaway is not to use LLMs, but I think your takeaway should be to give them more oversight. The way you describe this, it sounds like you went pure vibe coding.

> I asked the LLM to refactor for redundancy, quality, and size.

What did you expect when you asked it to make it smaller?

I’ve had good success with LLM refactoring. But the refactoring has never been “go make this better and smaller”. It’s “go do this specific thing to reduce redundancy” or maybe “give me a list of ways to improve the code redundancy” and then iterate with the LLM to improve the ideas and execute on the right ones.

I don’t think you can just vibe code your way out of a vibe coded mess.

The title is misleading. “Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin” sounds like results from a broader study, not an anecdotal report.

There’s a reason the article includes “a case report” in the title.

> File systems support deleting entire directories instantly.

What file system supports this? I’ve never experienced the joy of deleting an entire large directory and seeing it disappear instantly.

I’m not sure how this would work with any modern file system that supports basic notions like hard links.

Flash certainly became broadly hated. It had a pretty long stretch of being loved, and enabling content that was loved, though. Up until about 2005 or so, flash was critical tech for the young web. By 2010 it was clearly heading toward an end.

What’s “back then” to you? Flash grew up in the time of dial up when you could still get AOL install discs with 100 free hours in your typical grocery store PC magazine. I don’t recall people hating Flash a lot until later when it wasn’t a technical necessity anymore.

I remember the time of browser plug-ins (not “extensions”). Everyone happily installed Flash, and the Crescendo midi plugin, and multiple other in-retrospect-ill-advised plugins to enable fun stuff to work in their browser.

The “everyone hates Flash” stuff came later. It served a purpose for quite a while and people loved it. Newgrounds was a place of magic.

It was a fun and experimental time for sure. Way more stuff was weird in a good way. Standards hadn’t settled. All kinds of fun stuff was created in Flash that could not have been built with the standardized web tech of the day. I don’t really miss Flash but I do miss the early internet sometimes and Flash was part of that. (Remember when it was FutureSplash?)

I would be remiss if I didn’t post the most early-Internet-type thing I’ve encountered in a long time. Dungeon Soup.

https://m.youtube.com/@DungeonSoup

Once upon a time this would have been my favorite Flash cartoon series.

“Season one” playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSq76P-lbX8Ws6vgAAC2WhwSu...

Oncologists are actually way more specific than even that. Because there are many forms of breast cancer and different treatments depending on the type.

But yeah, oncologists aren’t telling people “you have cancer” the way they might say “you have MRSA”.

I agree with you about the media. Cancer is often presented as a monolithic thing by the media. I don’t agree at all about experts. Doctors and scientists who research cancers do not lack nuance.

It seems relevant here because the question was “How will this potentially help me if I get cancer?” and the answer is “Not at all unless you get a particular form of cancer that this applies to”.

> Bacteria are also all different, but still they are "one thing", and despite their diversity, antibiotics exist that can deal with many species of them at once.

Except people don’t ask “what if I get bacteria” the way they ask about cancer. If the story was about a new antibiotic that only affected 20% of common infectious bacteria strains and someone asked “in laypersons terms, how will this help me if I get a bacterial infection”, it would be appropriate to clarify that it only applies to some bacteria.

> By the end of the project, we wrote nearly four times as many lines of test code as we wrote for the Swift interpreter itself.

This is the most interesting bit to me. Engineers consistently underestimate the amount of effort that testing demands for projects that need truly high quality, it’s nice to see this shared.

If you start with a fire hose of literal sewage and install a series of filters culminating in a reverse osmosis step that pours clean drinking water out, the product is not shit even if the original input was.

I don’t believe that you can’t understand the distinction between “at one point this was garbage” and “at the present time this is still garbage”. You’re clearly smarter than that.

A human child is born with no ability to speak intelligibly. All they can do is babble. Through years of training they gain the ability to speak intelligibly and communicate in advanced ways.

The act of successful training means it’s not garbage anymore.

> So it is garbage.

This statement is ultimately meaningless and I continue to find it weird that someone who works in this space would support this view. If you fundamentally change the nature of a thing, it’s no longer that original thing. Is tan HDD still random garbage after you fill it with family photos just because that’s how it starts?

> but neither would I have kept him in my team

Let’s be honest, though. That’s firing from your team.

> trained over time

So not random.

> acceptable outcome to humans

And not garbage.

It’s real weird to see people argue that LLM output is no different than random gibberish and then handwave over the fact that it’s clearly not with terms like “training”, as if a steam of random garbage is trainable.

> The point is that it's the same process

Except it’s not at all the same process. The fact that LLM are non deterministic is not the same as churning out random garbage.

I disagree with you in principle. I think a town that accepts a donation of land for a specific purpose should be as bound as anyone else to the terms of the deed.

In practical terms, it’s not clear that an entity with the power of imminent domain can meaningfully be constrained by deeds.