heikkilevanto

> It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines

You mean like stopping at a red light?

> Of course all governments want to control every move and thought of their citizens. It makes governing easier. We expect that in autocracies.

Are you implying that all governments are autocracies? Rather pessimistic view, in my opinion.

Ownership is one question. IMO, a more interesting question is who is responsible when the code does some real-life damage.

I started to use github copilot with vscode, but have never been too happy about the system. Over the months I gravitated to much more agentic workstyle, hardly ever editing much code by hand. The vscode IDE was getting more in the way. I had already started to look at OpenCode, and when I found it has a web interface, I was happy to switch over. I use a simple editor (KDE's Kate), or just less to skim through the code and/or a git diff. OpenCode has some free models in it, but I think I will need to get some kind of subscription for a better one. But it won't be copilot any more. The market is moving so fast that I don't know what are the most resonable models, or the most flexible way to set them up so I can switch when prices change yet again.

Why would FBI ever announce that they are investigating something? Is it that time of the year where they have to convince budget makers about their importance? Or are they trying to direct attention from something else? Epstein?

Yes, that is the law here in the EU. You are not allowed to send me emails unless I took some positive action to subscribe. Rightly so.

I use SqLite for a small hobby project, fine for that. Wanted to read the article to see why I should not, but it attacked me with a "subscribe" popup, so I stopped there. The comments here seem to be based on daydreaming on scaling to a lot of users who need 24/7 uptime, which is not always the case.

I guess EU will have to retaliate, and forbid any US based routers, for exactly the same kind of reasons

> Saying you are not your work is wishful thinking. Try giving it up and check in on how much of you is still the same.

I retired a few years ago, and I believe and insist that I am very much the same person.

To see a person only as what they do at work seems awfully limiting. Even when I was working, I was also a sailor, musician, woodworker, home brewer, cat person, chess player, leather guy, and a good number of other things. And yes, even after retiring, I am still a computer guy. I even like hobby coding projects more than I did.

And before that, COBOL was supposed to allow computer users to write in almost plain English without even knowing the machine instruction set.

It did change the programming landscape, but there was still a huge need for this new kind of programmers.

I like their privacy policy

> I find it interesting that a substantial number of people seem to think it's wrong or unethical to cold-email someone about a potential recruitment or business opportunity if they post their email in a public place

I find it interesting that some fucking spammers think that just because they found out my email somewhere, they should be allowed to waste my time and resources for their shit.

That is explicitly illegal here in EU. Unless I have clearly given you my consent, you are not allowed to spam me. Is informed consent really such a difficult concept to understand?

> Not everything is a state secret.

No, but almost everything is a potential DDOS. And slight modifications to emails, documents, and calendars can cause a lot of havoc that may be hard to detect.

Well, if you have a perfect evaluation function, you don't need to search. And if you can do a perfect search to the end, you don't an evaluation function. Un(?)fortunately none of these extremes seems reasonable for a game like chess (and even less for go). So most software use both search and evaluation. And a whole lot of optimizing and other tricks. With impressive results.

I just bought Kampot peppers from https://www.unclespepper.com/ which is in Germany, the name notwithstanding. And yes, I paid with my Danish Visa card. No problems except that I had to adjust my ad blocker once.

If we consider the prompts and LLM inputs to be the new source code, I want to see some assurance we get the same results every time. A traditional compiler will produce a program that behaves the same way, given the same source and options. Some even go out of their way to guarantee they produce the same binary output, which is a good thing for security and package management. That is why we don't need to store the compiled binaries in the version control system.

Until LLMS start to get there, we still need to save the source code they produce, and review and verify that it does what it says on the label, and not in a totally stupid way. I think we have a long way to go!

A bit too mathematical for my taste. I learned my tuning theory by owning a harpsichord, and learning to tune it. A harpsichord is more sensitive to the "rounding errors" in equal tuning, owing to the richer overtones, so equal temperament does not sound quite as good a compromise as it does on a piano. And those historical temperaments are so much easier to tune by ear. Besides that is what the they used at the time of Bach, so historically correct for playing Baroque music.

I thought the article would be about the various meanings of operators like = == === .=. <== ==> <<== ==>> (==) => =~=

Several times, to be sure

Same here. Tried out Proton and Fastmail, and chose Fastmail. Been happy with it for a few months so far.

I wonder how the data in Danish MitId is managed and stored. The thing is used for everything here, from doing taxes to buying real estate to getting a library card.

I think there must be a continuous spectrum between the extremes you describe.

I had a similar experience many decades ago, taking a long overland trip and being out of touch of news for almost half a year. Coming back, I realized that the world had gone on perfectly well without me following all the daily drama. Most news seemed so irrelevant for a while after that trip.

Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.

I admit I have never worked with it, but I have a strong feeling that a formal verification can only work if you have a formal specification. Fine and useful for a compiler, or a sorting library. But pretty far from most of the coding jobs I have seen in my career. And even more distant from "vibe coding" where the starting point is some vaguely defined free-text description of what the system might possibly be able to do...

Slowly degoogling my life. Switched to FastMail a while ago, it works. Have written a simple shopping and todo list web app, and a minimal photo gallery. All very simple, mostly for one user only: Myself. Using these as excuses to learn about coding with LLMs. As I have retired a few years ago, I can afford the time, and work with no stress or deadlines. Also slowly improving my beer tracker system. All this as perl-based cgis under Apache, running on my home server/workstation.

Good explanation on tokenizing English text for regular search. But it is far from universal, and will not work well in Finnish, for example.

Folding diacritics makes "vähä" (little) into "vaha" (wax).

Dropping stop words like "The" misses the word for "tea" (in rather old-fashioned finnish, but also in current Danish).

Stemming Finnish words is also much more complex, as we tend to append suffixes to the words instead of small words in front to the word. "talo" is "house", "talosta" is "from the house", "talostani" is "from my house", and "talostaniko" makes it a question "from my house?"

If that sounds too easy, consider Japanese. From what little I know they don't use whitespace to separate words, mix two phonetic alphabets with Chinese ideograms, etc.

Strange, I remember trying the Silmarillion a few times, many years ago, and finding it very hard reading. Whereas I re-read the Aubrey-Maturins every few years and find them easy, if not always light weight.

I juts counted, 44 books so far this year, with lots of variation. Not

I can not say much about quitting the social media, as I never really started. Just HN, and some youtube (always start on my subscription page, only some late nights do I look at the main page with its algo suggestions). The occasional computer game (from doom to chess). Some hobby coding (retired couple of years ago), music, and yes, lots of reading.

I don't know, but for me Perl has not died at all. I still use it for smallish scripts and some CGI. Maybe I am an old retired fart, but it is the tool I reach for, when the problem looks like Perl-ish. Like I reach for C or other languages when I need that kind of things.

I have never been much info blogging, but I am in the habit of writing things down in small text files on my computer. It has almost the same benefits as a personal blog that has no outside readers, and a bit less stress about having to write something or worry about what I can say in public...

I hate titles like "Why don't you use blah-blah". Usually because blah-blah might be an acceptable (maybe good?) solution to a problem which I don't have. Let me ask in return: Why should I even care about blah-blah. If the first (two?) paragraphs don't give a clear answer to that, never mind!