fzeindl

This. It’s also why I started celebrating my birthday and throwing a party. I am not doing it for me, I am an introvert and it is a lot of work, but I am doing it for my guests who have a great time.

(For perfectionists: people always have a good time when there’s some food and drinks and other people. Everything else, even music, is really optional.)

Tangential, but Barcelona has superblocks which seem to work fine:

https://citychangers.org/barcelona-superblocks/

Also the blocks are octagons which improve traffic flow: https://www.reddit.com/r/CityPorn/s/iCcOGMqoNH

> My observation is that gen-z spends less time socializing in real life…

A barkeeper from a prestigious, world class cocktail bar around the corner told me that it really is more about health/alcohol.

He had a group the other day of 20 young people and 18 of them ordered non-alcoholic drinks. He is desperate about his profession.

Yes. Once you know Erlang/Elixir and BEAM you realize it is at least a local optimum in languages/VMs.

Truly something else if error handling is built into the language as a default case, not an … exception.

I combined a couple of methods:

- stop smoking in certain situations (no cigarette at the bus stop, no cigarette after lunch, …)

- allow myself to put out a cigarette halfway when I’m smoking. I lapsed and lit one, but that doesn’t mean I have to finish it.

- try to feel the downsides of the cigarette while smoking. The nicotine high mostly overrides this, but it’s possible to concentrate on the yucky feeling in your mouth, your lungs being burned etc.

- telling myself that I am sure I want to stop smoking at some point in my life so I might as well stop now.

I really don’t get this. Apple is trying to sell you 2 or 3 addons that are really beneficial and great products that make sense.

I don’t need them, I don’t buy them.

But I really appreciate there being a button at a place that logically makes sense and that gives you the opportunity to make more out of your device.

AFAIK you can click them away.

It’s not as if there are intrusive popups or as if they are trying to sell you blackmarket ware.

Broadcom has a vast amount of patents that they leverage in their business decisions.

Are you (at least partially) aligned out of existential fear of repercussions (getting fired, losing your life, going to prison), which LLMs don't have?

Is it possible to have neuroplasticity and still keep them aligned?

No disrespect but 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline sounds truly terrible.

If your build scripts are more than 100-300 LOC you are doing something very wrong.

From a great lecture on agentic SLDC:

„Checking the work is not the same as doing the work.“

It‘s different. There are people who love coding but don‘t like checking written code. Or the other way around.

Also there’s difference in mental load: checking a finished program or algorithm can be harder than working through it while producing it.

This adds to my feeling that LLMs are incredible at storing compressed information and accessing it in a versatile way.

Apart from occasional hallucinations we celebrate their ability to dissect information and to find obscure links between facts. Hence their stunning effectiveness in finding security holes or new approaches to math problems.

Interestingly the generative part - producing the answers - is what we are criticizing a lot: we think the code is verbose, texts have a weird repetitiveness to them etc.

I think a big part also was the superb, moody soundtrack.

> And you are positive that this hasn't change in almost a decade?

No, it is a guess.

> As opposed to what? This thread is about Linux on Mobile. Are you saying that Linux on Mobile is a lot more efficient than Android?

Opposed to iOS. Android is largely Linux, I think Linux is great and highly performant, just the Android SDK isn‘t.

Since they hire, command work and fire, they kinda are.

I stopped in 2018. I realize that a lot has been done since then, but the base code wasn‘t changed, otherwise old apps wouldn‘t run anymore.

My gripe with android is that I think it wastes a lot of resources by being very inefficient in software. Just enable the debug mode to see what portion of your screen refreshes and repaints and stand back in awe while nothing changes and you still get hundreds of repaints.

> I actually really like Android as an operating system, the internals seem remarkably well thought out and ideal for the mobile use case

Just no. I developed for android for a long time and I have seldomly seen a worse and more confusing SDK and code base. I can give you many examples but the core layouting algorithm having quadratic complexity with the number of widgets and the single base-view class having 60.000 lines of code are just the tip of the iceberg.

Regarding the argument about LLMs having difficulties auditing their work:

I wonder whether we are entering the era of throwaway software. Just like cheap plastics and improved processes has enabled us to rapidly manufacture anything we want for a very low price, maybe LLMs give us the same for software. Produce it cheaply and if it breaks throws it away and reproduce it.

Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain.

But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?

> In many cases the skills are available in house to do the necessary vetting, but these people are already overwhelmed with their existing day to day.

This is an interesting topic. We treat vetting output the same as doing the work ourselves, but that is not the case.

Doing the work is not the same as reviewing work done by others.

I have heard reports of software engineering companies that have gone full agentic. Their seniors only review stuff written by LLMs and it burns them out, because they have to switch context constantly.

I find this interesting because part of being a senior developer is that you are experienced enough that you won‘t make grave mistakes anymore. This is the case in many professions: you are relied upon to not make grave mistakes.

But those same people are now swamped with stuff that they are not able to review, so they will let a grave mistake slip through at some point.

So they really can‘t trust themselves anymore?

> but I am absolutely in the camp of "there are many tasks where pattern matching is just as effective as actual understanding“

What if „being effective at something with pattern matching but not understanding it“ just means that you have identified only 90% of patterns and keep failing to learn the rest for whatever reason.

I was originally sceptical of LLMs and am far from the „agents will magically fix our future“-crowd, but sentences like these trip me up:

> „But pattern‑matching is not system understanding, and plausibility is not correctness.“

Why not? Who says that? Who proved that system understanding is not just more complex pattern matching?

> „LLMs predict tokens, not consequences“

Same here. LLMs output tokens but who says that they don’t form some internal group of token-predicting tensors that move together and constitute the internal model of a „consequence“? It is like saying humans don’t have thoughts, they just have electrical impulses moving their tongues.

I too think that LLMs seem to be a very specific form of intelligence, maybe resembling the parts of our brain that do language-processing, but it is a fact that they at least fake intelligence very convincingly. And that we actually don’t know how they do it.

You see it when looking at the location of the microphone on his shirt.

The term for this is „buffer hiring“.

It's true that there are few obvious bugs, but there are many subtle bugs now, usually outside the main interaction flows. 5 years ago, apple's software felt bugfree, essentially.

examples:

- if I change a note on my iphone and wake up my mac, I need to restart the notes-app before it syncs the change.

- if somebody leaves me a FaceTime video-message, I get an "unread"-badge that doesn't get away after I watch the video. There are multiple ways to get to that video and only one of them clears the "unread" badge.

- if I add a pronounciation field to a contact in my iphone, SIRI stops working and I need to restart my iphone to get it back.

Tested this, works for me.

I exercise 3 times a week (running, martial arts, weight lifting). I ran marathons, I exercised 5-6 times per week for the last 5 years.

I am truly fit, but … I still don’t feel like exercising.

Most of the time it’s like brushing my teeth, it is just something I do because it is right.

A similarly scoped book series is „AI game programming wisdom“, which contains a multitude of chapters that focus on diverse, individual algorithms that can be practically used in games for a variety of usecases.

In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally.

Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.

No.

With databases there exists a clear boundary, the query planner, which accepts well defined input: the SQL-grammar that separates data (fields, literals) from control (keywords).

There is no such boundary within an LLM.

There might even be, since LLMs seem to form adhoc-programs, but we have no way of proving or seeing it.