graboid

Thanks. And yes, I forgot to mention, here in Germany it as apparently also more costly than regular laser surgery.

Did anyone here do the eye surgery where they make a cut and slide in a permanent contact lens? My eyes are too bad for lasering, but this method would apparently still work. The doc tried to sell it to me as the better method irrespective of how bad your eyes are, since it is reversible (you can remove the lens).

Maybe also Janet? https://janet-lang.org/

Yup, to anyone reading this, I want to second-recommend Kagi. Also super-customizable.

To me, it seemed a bit better than GPT-4 at some coding task, or at least less inclined to just give the skeleton and leave out all the gnarly details, like GPT-4 likes to do these days. What frustrates me a bit is that I cannot really say if GPT-4, as it was in the very beginning when it happily executed even complicated and/or large requests for code, wasn't on the same level as this model actually, maybe not in terms of raw knowledge, but at least in term of usefulness/cooperativeness.

This aside, I agree with you that it does not feel like a leap, more like 4.x.

The same techniques that native apps use to process large documents should be possible in JS/WASM land, no? Given, you probably won't reach native performance, but it seems to me a snappy text editing experience even for large documents should be perfectly doable using web tech.

Ruby always seems so appealing. Can anybody tell me how the Ruby ecosystem looks like w.r.t.

- (Desktop) GUI

- Natural language processing

I would really like to learn Ruby, but I can only justify the effort if I can use its ecosystems for some private projects, and I often have been burned by languages not offering too much in those two areas. And speed-wise, as I understand, Ruby is the same ball-park as Python?

Thanks for the details, appreciated.

That is interesting! Do you find that setup useful for CRUD-style apps too? What parts of your application would typically be written in WASM then? I am asking because if I look at my usecases, I mostly see rendering logic done by a JS framework and a restful API that does little more than serving the frontend by querying the DB and mapping between models.

I agree that WASM is the better option. In my opinion it is however not viable for public-facing sites. The bundle size even if you pull all the tricks is just too big.

I am talking about having to download >1MB in the best case before the site is functional. Simply unusable on slow mobile connections. React/Vue/etc. are often sub 100kB, you can even have something like Preact.js at 3kB if you want. I don't understand why this is seemingly not given more priority at MS: https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/41909 My prediction is that this will kill off the technology if they don't find a solution.

I think for a lot of "simple NLP" stuff like constituency parsing, dependency parsing, POS tagging, etc. there have been fast and accurate models/algorithms for quite some time, and putting even a pruned, quantized, hyper-optimized LLM at them would feel like shooting a shotgun at a mosquito.

> It seems as if there are actually a ton more special case primitives I need to know, when I could get away with a lot less syntax in other languages to be productive.

I think most special forms do not complicate syntax, as they look like your standard s-expressions, they just have differing semantics from regular functions.

If you look at Common Lisp, I feel like you got a point. It is a huge and complicated language, and while it embodies many of the nice Lisp characteristics, I feel like minimalism certainly is not one of them. But there are other Lisps/Schemes that are much smaller, with a lot less special forms.

Thanks! I guess I am okay with antiquated English. I've put it on my list!

Always have been interested to read something of that author. Would you say that these books are accessible for a non-native English speaker? I often read in English, but I fear I might struggle to catch subtle word-plays and the like...

The Plains - Gerald Murnane [1] -- liked it a lot, poetic, sad and thought-provoking

Tokyo Express - Seicho Matsumoto [2] -- very japanese crime story, liked it

And my absolute delight:

50 Years of Text Games - Aaron A. Reed [3] -- I am just a sucker for everything text game/hypertext/interactive fiction. This book is amazing.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1593668

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38588764-tokyo-express

[3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aaronareed/50-years-of-...

Where did he/she even mention Rust?

I think it is not the "novelty wearing off", but rather people being disappointed with the decrease in quality. I have been paying for the GPT-4 version for months, but recently, I find myself using it less and less, as the usefulness of many answers is just not there any more. Keeping longer conversations also has become more frustrating (more forgetting/hallucinations). Haven't tried out the API yet, I now heard multiple times it's supposed to be better.

Can you elaborate? Rooms + exits can already be done by creating links.

> I've found that a lot of social conservatives tend to be unconsciously afraid and ashamed of Lisp out of moral panic due to its implicit associations with homosexuality (the gay lisp stereotypical speech attribute, and lambda being associated with gay rights).

This is hardly believable to me. How did you arrive at that conclusion? Isn't the community of Rust, a language I think that you can safely call a lot more popular than Lisp these days, also very vocal about supporting LGBTQ+ rights?

1) is so important. There are so many cool and interesting languages out there that are developed by a single person/small teams and which

will probably never gain traction because of a missing ecosystem of libraries.

Generally agree.

There is a case for writing down the stuff you learned though (into your notebook, app, zettelkasten, whatever). When I try to note down a concept I learned, I feel like sort of explaining it to myself. And often, I will quickly discover holes in my understanding. A good note-taking software can also point out connections to other stuff (mostly in the form of other notes) I maybe wouldn't have made. Maybe others don't need that, but I am bad at making connections.

It is a nice language. I just wish they stopped adding features. Except for the one everyone wants, discriminated unions.

My experience has been different. It very often hallucinates variables or function identifiers for me. I never witnessed it doing that for code on the first output. But once the chat/context grows larger and I already asked for modifications to the posted code, it happens quite often.

A non-code example: Some days ago I asked it about "Searle's Wall" [0]. It gave me a mashup of the correct description and the Chinese Room experiment. So it clearly had the right answer somewhere in its data, but it mixed it up with the much more famous thought experiment.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260138925_Searle's_...

I think a lot of people are thinking about that right now. At least I read that idea a lot here on HN and on Twitter.

I personally cannot wait to try it. But for now, I wait until there are better options for local LLMs. Given the current development speed of all things AI, probably that won't take too long.

Cool project!

A quick question that I could not answer from reading the Github page: How married is the learning process to those "courses" you describe? If I have a topic X and start with 0 knowledge about it, could I use trane to learn it if there is no premade course yet? I assume to create a course about it, I would have to have quite some knowledge about the topic already, to be able to think of exercises and rate them in terms of difficulty/hierarchy.

If I build a desktop app using one of the above-mentioned technologies, there is almost nothing "distributed" about it. HTML, CSS, Javascript. Which is where 99% of my UI building happens. The only thing "distributed" what comes to my mind and what I think you mean is what would be an API call in the browser, to fetch some data that the frontend needs. The equivalent in Electron/Tauri/etc. is usually some bridging API that you can call instead.

I never missed any GUI builder. Browser dev tools are phenomenal IMO, you can drag&drop elements across your layout, change any part of your styles and instantly see the effects, measure rendering performance, memory consumption, debug your Javascript or simulate different screen sizes.

About React, nobody forces you to use it. There is a myriad of frontend frameworks, at all levels of complexity. If you feel your app is so simple that you don't need any framework, you can do without. Frameworks (and again, there is a huge world outside React!) came up because they make managing state in complex UIs easier.

Hours instead of weeks? What makes you assume that? An experienced web developer can iterate pretty damn fast.

I can understand the appeal and advantages of using native GUI tech. Really. But there is a reason people use stuff like Electron/Tauri/Wails. Web tech has seen so much investment, and as a result, you now basically have a app platform that runs anyhwere, offers a huge ecosystem and a great developer experience. Which I never found to be matched in any other GUI toolkit.

If there was a GUI toolkit that offered me all of this without requiring the bloat of a browser, then I would switch in an instant. It's just not there.

Yesterday evening I thought it would be fun to try to do a Raycaster in Javascript with the help of GPT-4. Experience was mixed.

1. Basic rendering logic was a breeze. I barely had to change anything, just copy paste, and I have a map with walls that were darker the further away they were, using textures, and basic movement using arrow keys. For an inexperienced graphics programmer like me probably saved hours getting to that point.

2. I asked it to add a minimap. Did not work perfectly at the first try, but after a few minutes of exchanging messages, it worked and looked okay.

3. I asked for an FPS display. Worked on first try.

4. Now I asked for a solution to render walls of different heights. Here I had to correct it a few times, or suggest a different approach, but it got it working halfway correct (but not very performant). Definitely took way longer than steps 1 to 3 combined (30+ minutes).

5. I asked for floor rendering (often called "floorcasting"). Here it completely failed. The code it suggested often looked like it might be the right approach, but never really worked. And the longer we exchanged messages (mostly me giving feedback whether the code worked or suggesting possible fixes), the more it seemed to hallucinate: very often variables suddenly appeared that were defined nowhere or in a different scope. At that point, it became increasingly frustrating for me, and I often closed the chat and "reset", by posting my complete working code, and again prompting for a solution to the floor rendering. Still, until I went to bed, it did not produce any working solution. In retrospect, it would probably have been faster to read a tutorial how the floorcasting should work, and implement it myself like a caveman, but that was not what I was aiming for.

It was definitely fun, and I can clearly see the potential time-savings. But maybe I have to learn when to recognize it won't bring me past a certain point, and I will save time and nerves if I switch to "manual control".

I would be pretty interested already in a work containing typical tropes of Shakespeare, stylistically Shakespearean, but still original enough to be not a rehash of any of his existing works. I guess I would not be the only one to find that exciting or at least mildy interesting.

But your point is of course valid, it would not be a 'work of Shakespeare'.

> Um… I have a lossy-compressed copy of DISCWORLD in my head, plus about 1.3 million words of a fanfiction series I wrote.

You mean word-for-word in your head? That's pretty impressive. Are you using any special technique?