hoosieree

In an ideal world, "getting an education" and "getting a degree" are the same. In reality, any overlap at all feels like a win. Which is unfortunate, because some of the best learners are terrible students, and vice versa.

> Street lights deter crime.

Lighting affects property crime more than violent crime. It also depends on where the lights are, both in terms of neighborhood[1] and country[2].

On the other hand, lights dramatically affect how safe people feel[3] in an area, even if that feeling is not necessarily based on actual danger.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.3386/W25798

[2]: https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1745-9133.2004.TB00058.X

[3]: https://doi.org/10.1016/0169-2046(96)00311-8

But the honey produced by loudspeakers is not good.

C2 has an article for everything!

Dynamic typing is orthogonal to implicit type conversion, though admittedly dynamic environments do it more often. Watch out for (void*) in C or accidentally inferred union types in TypeScript.

Typical action movie hacking scene:

    Leader: How long until you can hack the mainframe?
    Techie: The other hacker is really good; at least 2 hours.
    Leader: You have 1. Get it done!
    [commence flying around the 3d filesystem]

Whenever I watch a scene like this, I mentally add a voiceover for the techie:

    [Techie thinks]: My actual estimate was 20 minutes. I can probably get it done in about 50, then I need to fly in the 3d filesystem for 10 more minutes looking busy so Leader doesn't get any big ideas.

Not a new issue:

    On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question

Can I get a list of the people who paid? I would like to sell them NFTs.

Sure, but I tend to think of a cost reduction leading to doing more of your core business. I would not expect it to change the essence of how interact with your customers.

Maybe I should not be so surprised. If some core service used in software becomes 1000x cheaper, it does tend to produce not just shifts in quantity but shifts in the kind of thing you do with it. For instance, if a language's garbage collector goes from annoyingly slow to basically invisible, it wouldn't be surprising for the preferred paradigm to change.

> Netflix moved online, and the cost of a bad recommendation was much less

This was the most interesting point for me. I found it surprising that changing the cost of delivering a movie could so dramatically shift company-wide priorities.

Maybe scrolling itself is the real problem, and bad scrollbar design is just a symptom. Think of how long it took you to get to this comment, and all the other things you could have been doing with your life. Was it worth it?

That's just a matter of perspective. My laptop is already perfectly isolated from your laptop, thank you very much.

Let's ROLL OUT!

"At the tone?" ...what kind of ship are you running here? Is it at the start or the end of the tone?

Appearances can be deceiving. In terms of expressiveness, Uiua is to Brainfuck as Python is to nand.

If you're not freely donating your time and energy to improving the proprietary dataset that powers Copilot, can you even call yourself Open Source?

[pitching to investors]

It's like Joan is Awful, but for AirBnB.

That surprised me too, but then I decided it was actually kinda brilliant. The alternative for when an array is "too big" to display is usually something like

    [1 2 3 ... 99999]

Which is unsurprising, but not very usable. Audio is useful!

They can be. I know J has libraries for databases, image, audio processing, etc. I've written an assembler in J and translated it to K. The array languages are pretty decent for prototyping machine learning stuff. Often you don't need any libraries at all.

Here's a 2-layer perceptron, first in Python+NumPy:

    import numpy as np
    X = np.array([[0,0,1], [0,1,1], [1,0,1], [1,1,1]])
    y = np.array([[0,1,1,0]]).T
    np.random.seed(1)
    w0 = 2*np.random.random((3,4)) - 1
    w1 = 2*np.random.random((4,1)) - 1
    for j in range(10000):
        l1 = 1/(1+np.exp(-(X @ w0)))
        l2 = 1/(1+np.exp(-(l1 @ w1)))
        l2_error = y - l2
        l2_delta = l2_error * l2 * (1 - l2)
        l1_error = l2_delta @ w1.T
        l1_delta = l1_error * l1 * (1 - l1)
        w0 += X.T @ l1_delta
        w1 += l1.T @ l2_delta
    print(np.round(l2,3))
    [[0.007]
     [0.991]
     [0.992]
     [0.01 ]]

And again in J:

    input =: 4 3 $ 0 0 1  0 1 1  1 0 1  1 1 1
    target =: 4 1 $ 0 1 1 0
    dot =: +/ .*
    sig =: {{ %>:^-y }}
    train =: {{
        'ignore_me w0 w1' =. y
        l1 =. sig input dot w0
        l2 =. sig l1 dot w1
        l2_error =. target - l2
        l2_delta =. l2_error * l2 * 1 - l2
        l1_error =. l2_delta dot |: w1
        l1_delta =. l1_error * l1 * 1 - l1
        w0 =. w0 + (|:input) dot l1_delta
        w1 =. w1 + (|:l1) dot l2_delta
        l2;w0;w1 }}
    5j3":0{::train^:10000 {{<:+:?.y$0}} each 1 ; 3 4 ; 4 1
    0.009
    0.990
    0.990
    0.011

Here's that assembler (for the Nand2Tetris assembly language) in K. It's intentionally golfed.

    L:({x^"\r "}'*'"/"\'0:0)^,""
    T:(("R",'$!16)!!16),(($`SCREEN`KBD`SP`LCL`ARG`THIS`THAT)!16384,24576,!5),((-1_1_)'L@&i)!{x-!#x}@&i:"("=*'L
    T,:n!16+!#n:?(({$[("@"=*x)&^`I$1_x;1_x;`]}'L)^!T)^`
    C:(" "\"D&A D+A A-D D !D D-1 -D D-A D|A D+1 0 A !A A-1 -A A+1 -1 1")!0 2 7 12 13 14 15 19 21 31 42 48 49 50 51 55 58 63
    D:$`" "`M`D`MD`A`AM`AD`AMD
    J:$`" "`GT`EQ`GE`LT`NE`LE`MP
    B:{,/$(x#2)\y}
    P:{c:*d:|"="\*j:";"\x;"111",/(B.7,(64*|/"M"=c)+C@"A"/"M"\c;B.3,D??d 1;B.3,J??1_j 1)}
    `0:({(P;{"0"^-16$,/$2\(`I$1_x)^T@1_x})[2/"@"=*x;x]}'L)@&~i

No problem, boss.

    @prompt("Find out if {programs} are correct.")
    def do_they_work(programs: list) -> bool:
        ...

I just pushed it to production. Dashboard is all green. See you when I get back from vacation!

I find students correctly infer what to do with "..." whereas they were afraid to touch "pass".

E.g, if I gave them this:

    def foo(x):
      ...  #add your implementation here
    
    def bar(x):
      pass #add your implementation here

I'd get back this:

    def foo(x):
      return x+1
      
    def bar(x):
      return x+1
      pass

Aerodynamic semicolon.

And the plain smile emoji is either a normal amount of happiness, or a malicious serial killer dead-eyes rictus.

:)

This is the right way to interact with LLMs in general. Ask for what you want, but independently verify the result. Don't be like that lawyer "...but I asked ChatGPT if it was telling the truth, and it said yes!"

I've just skimmed it but I think they're not using the model's output for codegen, but rather to choose what compiler passes to use and in what order.

My indoor cats: "challenge accepted".

Humans take a long time to get good at art; in the meantime they still have to eat.

So they compete with generative AI for a fixed number of jobs. The AI is cheaper and faster. Humans stop training to become artists.

Without new training data, the generative AI models stagnate. Progress in art stops globally, forever.

But for a brief glorious moment, we were able to say "huh, that's not bad".

Hate to break it to you but there is a vast market for mediocre content, and even Danny Carey has a bad day once in a while.

Oh my gosh I also noticed that!

Emacs?