greybox

The UK has tripwire forces in Estonia, this ship has already sailed my friend.

This article simply has it's facts wrong. I live and work in Iceland as a software engineer, I work a ~37hr week and work 5 days a week. Local councils tried a 4-day work week a few years ago and ended up not implementing it.

I'm not sure where they are getting their numbers from.

> only possible because most of the rest of the world was devastated by WWII

Maybe this is the situation the Trump administration is striving for

I don't understand why. Why would I want a Facebook AI assistant? I dont understand why its in messenger and WhatsApp either?

I recommend skimming over the first few chapters of crafting interpreters, the main value there is the recursive descent algorithm and abstract syntax trees, the rest is implementation. I've been developing my own language [1] and that's how I got started

The ideas in crafting interpreters are not language specific, the examples are in java, but I used C++ for instance. Im sure you could transfer the same ideas to Go. Then again I've never read the go book you are referring to

[1] https://youtu.be/azR1mUfFjHI?si=PsP-7o-w1yIN4xyq

I don't see AI inference becoming the main computational primitive. It will always be faster and more efficient on the execution side to just write some code to do a task, than it will be to ask an AI to do the same task. Unless nobody knows how to write code anymore, and everyone just loves paying Google/OpenAI rent to avoid having to think for themselves.

One question I continue to ask myself when I see impressive AI examples like this, (because it is impressive) is "are we solving the right problems"? Instead of training an AI to produce a tonne of JS to create something that's been done before, should we not be engineering better tools to allow people to precisely craft software without the need for AI.

I worry that because we are now able to instantly produce a bunch of JS to do X thing, we will be incentivized not to change the underlying tools (because one, only AI's are using it, and two AI's won't know how to use the new thing)

I worry this will stall progress.

Yes

That was fun, thank you! Whatsit Daily Challenge Completed in: 3:28

#1 (1:02) #2 (0:43) #3 (0:29) #4 (0:43) #5 (0:32)

https://www.whatsit.today/

> the most powerful technology humans could ever hope to build

If you're correct, that's a rather depressing thought

I'm troubled by the amount of people in this thread partially dismissing this as science fiction. From the current rate of progress and rate of change of progress, this future seems entirely plausible

But (as I understand it) how the Fed tracks inflation is the consumer price index, which does take things like "the price of shoes" into account.

One unintended benefit of this move might be reducing greenhouse gas emissions from global shipping ... if US consumers are consuming more US made products, the supply chain for those projects will have gotten significantly shorter in nautical miles.

I'm hesitant credit President Trump with this too soon though, after all, his motto is "drill drill drill", but It's going to be interesting to see what happens.

If a pair of shoes today costs $30, and a pair of shoes tomorrow costs $60 (not saying this will happen, just positing a scenario), from a consumer perspective, there has been 100% inflation in the price of shoes. It doesn't matter that the price increase is due to tarrifs on imports from Vietnam.

Something I try to remember when discussing politics or playing Scrabble: "You can be right, or you can have friends"

Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”

“[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise,” the researchers wrote.

Working fine for me

Iceland is a nice halfway point between the EU and the American continent, its a 5 hour flight from Boston and a 3.5 hour flight from London, its not a bad place to consider

thank you for your contribution to society!

Insane, I wonder if we eventually end up with a non-search-engine indexed version of the web that's more like browsing in the 90s where websites just had to link to oneanother to get noticed . . . .

I love that the solution to LLM scraping is to serve the browser a proof of work, before they allow access - I wonder if things like new sites start to do this . . . It would mean they won't be indexed by search engines, but it would help to protect the IP

I very much liked this:

> We made painting feel like typing, but we should have made typing feel like painting.

I think this quote is worth ruminating for a few while. It reminds me of some Bret Victor talks.

I've not yet managed to successfully write any meaningful contribution to a codebase with an llm, faster than I could have written it myself.

Ok sure it writes test code boiler plate for me.

Honestly the kind of work im doing requires that I understand the code im reading, more than have the ability to quickly churn out more of it.

I think probably an llm is going to greatly speed up Web development, or anything else where the impetus is on adding to a codebase quickly, as for maintaining older code, performing precise upgrades, and fixing bugs, so far ive seen zero benefits. And trust me, I would like my job to be easier! Its not like I've not tried to use these

I completely agree, I was coaching someone recently who finished the CS50 computer science course, who had some very funny ideas about what programming was, It was very clear that they had big holes in their understanding, so I took the exact same tact with them and went through everything from Transistors to High Level Languages! I'm so glad others are thinking the same thing. It made such a huge difference to them and I was so much more confident they understood what I was saying, because it provided a baseline that I could bring them back to if they didn't understand something I was saying.

I guess what needs to improve more than anything, is the teaching and documentation of these new APIs. There are over-arching ideas that pull things together, but they aren't alluded to in the documentation, you need to attend a training session, or speak to someone who has.

You make some very good points here. I've watched the talk too and criticism of it is important.

I have to say though Blow is right when he says: "you can't just Draw pixels to the screen"

I am a game engine programmer at a 'medium sized' games company and it is becoming VERY difficult to hire anyone to work on graphics code. DX12 (and others of the same generation) is a massive step up from what previous generations (DX11) used to demand of the programmer. Doing anything at all with these APIs is a massive task and by Microsoft's own admission (I can't find the quote from the docs anymore, citation needed), DX12 is extremely difficult to learn without experience with previous graphics APIs.

I see a lot of people using the argument: "but these APIs are only for developers that want to really push the limits of what the graphics card can do, and want to implement very low level optimizations." and that's partially true. But it's now the industry standard and it's nigh-on unteachable to anyone without previous experience.

Unless something changes, the hiring pool is going to continue to decrease in size.

Iceland is already in Schengen, it's a bit like Norway in that respect, without the benefit to it's currency that all the oil brings

Should be renamed: "How to not offend people with fragile self-esteem"

I kind see the points he´s making, however I think there's something subtle here that's worth talking about:

> Rather than empowering the next generation of web developers to achieve more, we might be training them for a career of learned helplessness. Imagine what it will feel like for the average junior developer to face a segfault rather than a familiar JavaScript Error.

I feel this slightly misses the point. We should be making sure that the next generation of Software Engineers have a solid grounding in programing machines that aren't just google's V8 Javascript Engine, so that they are empowered to do more, and make better software.

We should be pushing people to be more than just Chrome developers.

Also, while I understand what the author is getting at, referring to lower level developers as demigods is a little unhelpful. As someone who switched careers from high-level languages to a C++ engineer, I can attest to the fact that this stuff is learnable if you are willing to put the time and effort in to learning it. It's not magic knowledge. It just takes time to learn.

This is great, A tighter feedback loop is always better for everyone.

I'm also getting some serious Déjà vu for the web tools of the 2000's. History really does rhyme

You need to be strong to withstand what life throws at you, nobody is going to do that for you. But that doesn't mean that you have to experience these things alone. It's sad and not normal (outside of the US at least) that a friend & colleague goes through something like that and nobody reaches out and people forget.