1,951 karma · joined August 20, 2019
In general, I believe the problem of our time (sociopolitical divide, echo chambers, propaganda, people getting pulled to extreme viewpoints ...) isn't so much about the difficulty to access truthful information (most people would know how to fact check their beliefs and assumptions given enough time and motivation), but about the constant information overload that makes this process impractical. You are essentially softening your brain into accepting large volumes of information as facts, unchecked, and pretend that it's a good thing. You essentially don't know anymore the extent of what you know. Worse, you no longer know how you came to know, because the underlying principles and processes of knowledge (natural laws, models, theories, ...) were not involved in the learning (you could assert that day means light, and that night brings darkness because you have seen it repeated extensively and convincingly, but you wouldn't internalise this knowledge through the model of the earth orbiting the sun, and so you wouldn't know how to generalize from this knowledge into thinking about seasons or do any abstract reasoning on your own).
That is to say, we should be much much more cautious about what and how we read and learn about stuff.
your answer focused on maintainability, but you are overlooking what I think is the bigger problem: those components will eventually interact with one another (technically, by nature of living in the same code tree, sharing the same storage backend, framework, common libraries, …, or logically, by referencing the same entities for slightly different and complementary features). With that comes the need to centrally control what they should/can/cannot do. There is no shortcut to having to clarify (with your customer) and formally document what those layered interactions are, or, before you know it, you have multiple incompatible user access controls, row-level access policies, competing master/reference data, or different parts of the application interpreting differently the same data.
It's a pretty bad value proposition, if you ask me, to have to do so much hand-holding for a result that comes with no guarantees whatsoever (you will never know the extent of which your clean spec "made it in").
- building functionalities as components that are swappable on a whim requires a level of careful thought, abstraction and architecture that essentially is the exact opposite to ai slop
- in this day and age we still don't make software for the sake of it, and who's financing it doesn't generally require such levels of functional flexibility (the physical world commandeering the coding isn't nearly as volatile as to justify that)
- this comes loaded with the implication that "stuff needs to work": if you are developing software that manages inventory, orders, resources, ... you just can't take the chance to corrupt your customers data or disrupt their business processes. Shipping faster than you can test and with no accountability and no oversight is a solution to a problem I've personally never encountered in the wild
Also good to remember that Apple is a company of good devices and tremendous marketing, not a company of tremendous devices per se. That entails a lot of subjectivity and awkward tribalism.
Sorry if this comes across as disrespectful, but it smells like Stockholm Syndrome. You are choosing not to use the full extent of your screen estate, and that is your fine choice, but that is no excuse for making it hard. If you compound the whitespace, the thick borders and the generally oversized UI controls, not much of "productive space" remains available to get the work done. I am not interested in macOS as a content-consumption-first vehicle, though that's clearly where Apple is steering.
> For something so core to the business, I'm baffled that they let it get to the point where it was costing $300K per year.
And this, this is the core/true/insightful story the executives will never hear about.
for example, for my second criteria:
> - works on partial matches (e.g. inputting "ma in" matches ("make install", "cd main")
typing "ma in" I would expect "make install" to come before "cd main" to come before (what's currently the very first hit) "cd Binaries/Multimedia".
I'm now reading about https://docs.atuin.sh/cli/configuration/config/?h=fuzzy+daem... while not managing to really get what would seem natural. Sigh.
- case insensitive (e.g. inputting "make" matches ("make install", "vim Makefile")
- works on partial matches (e.g. inputting "ma in" matches ("make install", "cd main")
?
Seemed a credible comment till that point! (/s)
Congrats :-)
No, I'm not: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
And I still stand behind the fact that, for that price, you've got a very competent device that is better specced for light use and friendlier for mom and pop (look, it has a HDMI, you can straight up connect it to the telly! Look, it has USB A ports, so that old camera, hard drive with the family pictures, old weird ergo mouse just works out of the box !).
If you ask me, for a comparable price range, the ThinkPad still is a much better pick than the MacBook Neo: that thing has no IO and not even enough RAM for nowadays light web browsing.
Sorry, this is admittedly a harsh response, but not out of the blue…
China passed EU's cumulative emissions in 2014, if I remember correctly. It's totally fair to blame industrialised countries for their share in causing global warming, irrespective if that happened in the early days of industrialisation and was propped up by dirty energy sources. Though, it's morally much harder to give a pass to countries polluting now using the same sources.
This would essentially bring us to a cross-roads between, on one hand, a utopia with UBI and people not needing to work (because their labour is unnecessary), or a dystopia, where few technocratic "lords" own the means of work automation and rule over a submissive world.
I don't think it takes a genius to guess where this is heading in our current political climate.
Personally, I'm not scared about any of that, because I don't believe LLMs to be very potent as an AI tool. Robotic militias (remotely controlled by BI or AI) seem a much more tangible threat.