lll-o-lll

Is this an ai written article?

> In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently

The whole point of this story is to explain thermodynamics (or entropy). He wrote a little note! I can’t begin to believe this was written by a human who’s really read Chiang.

This is a garbage summary and it really highlights the thrust of the article. My summary: “Human beings have a strong tendency to anthropomorphise and that leads to us granting LLMs human like qualities incorrectly.”

You can see where the LLM has gone wrong. It’s hooked in to “summary” and therefore given excessive emphasis to this part of the article. The plato’s cave analogy is stupid; and what on earth is it going on about with ghosts?

It’s not shortening, sure, it’s dribbling nonsense.

With a stable population, post scarcity is surely possible technically. Just invest resource into improving everything that already exists.

I also agree that we will never have a post scarcity society; but this is more about humanity than technology.

Yep, just like like looking at a birds feather through a microscope explains the principles of flight…

Complexity theory doesn’t have a mathematics (yet), but that doesn’t mean we can’t see that it exists. Studying the brain at the lowest levels haven’t lead to any major insights in how cognition functions.

> Unfortunately they represent a huge usability hit over API Keys for the average joe. Involving cryptography to sign a JWT per request makes an API significantly harder to consume with tools like Postman or CURL.

Just generate the JWT using, e.g. https://github.com/mike-engel/jwt-cli ? It’s different, and a little harder the first time, but not any kind of ongoing burden.

You can even get Postman to generate them for you: https://learning.postman.com/docs/sending-requests/authoriza..., although I have not bothered with this personally.

No. The key issue is just the rise and rise of inequality. As more money funnels to the top (thanks covid) the top buy more of the available assets leading to asset inflation.

Nothing will reverse this other than a tax on wealth. Tax wealth, not income.

Interesting. When I read this I was thinking “that can’t be right, the whole internet relies on tcp being “reliable”. But it is right; https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/347059.347561. It might be rare, but an unencrypted RPC packet might accidentally set that “go nuclear” bit. ECC memory is not enough people! Encrypt your traffic for data integrity!

To stop or slow down the attacker who is inside your network and trying to move horizontally? Isn’t this the principle of defense in depth?

This narrative is bullocks and I’m sick of hearing this framing. “The UK deserves it because colonialism”.

Contrary to your statement, the UK is a center of education, innovation, and still a major player in finance. The current malaise infects the West and is much more than “brexit” or “colonial hangovers”.

That sounds… awesome! I want one; links to a part list or anything?

To summarise your view, more surgeons means not enough experience in a given surgery to maintain base levels of skill.

I think this is wrong; you would need a significant increase, and the issue I was responding to was “shortage”. There’s no prospect of shortages when the pipeline has many more capable people than positions. Here in Australia, a quota system is used, which granted, can forecast wrong (we have a deficit of anaesthetists currently due to the younger generation working fewer hours on average). We don’t need robots from this perspective.

To your second point, “rare surgery”; I can see the point. Even in this case, however, I’d much rather see the robot as a “tool” that a surgeon employs on those occasions, rather than some replacement for an expert.

Niri is pretty, but I find sway to be faster. Hotkeys and instant switch is just better (for me). I will continue to experiment, but sway feels more productive currently.

You are implying linear improvement, which is patently false. The curve bends over.

> Do we really want to be in a world where surgeon scarcity is a thing?

Surgeon scarcity is entirely artificial. There are far more capable people than positions.

Do we really want to live in a world where human experts are replaced with automation?

You are forgetting:

0.5 User 1,563,018 puts their credit card details in to make the world’s first online transaction!

0.50001 The web is filled with spam and unsearchable for real information

0.9 Some smart nerds figure out an algorithm to find the signal in the noise

1.9 Google throws out “don’t be evil” because search is cost, ad’s are money

4.1 Google and the rest of the AI/s subvert human decision making in ways that marketers could only ever dream

∞.∞ Humans toil in slavery to the whims of our corporate overlords

I wanted a different dystopia.

> Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands.

Electric Kettles - Microwaves. The components that make up the actual boiling of water are now standard and all come from the same chinese manufacturer. You can pay $20 to $1000 for the same thing. The expensive one will look much better. Microwaves are the same - large numbers of manufacturers to all the same guts just different skins.

Retail clothing is the most obvious example. There used to be mid market clothing manufacturers that would produce clothing locally and try to compete on quality. That’s almost gone now. There’s just not enough demand.

More powerful than a “fuzzing” test io would be a deterministic test io. I.e., one you can tick forward the various concurrent branches deterministically to prove that various races are safely handled. This makes it possible to capture all those “what if thread A executes this line first then B is executed” etc. Something that is missing in most concurrent frameworks.

There are a lot of “it depends” here. I’ve worked at orgs where best engineer gets promoted to manager because… best engineer! And the result can be a train wreck. I’ve seen the reverse where managers from a business background are managing engineers (also can be a train wreck). There are also plenty of great managers who don’t “lead”; they go about their work building a great working environment and helping others succeed (often a senior engineer will be providing the leadership portion).

A good organisation will be good at offering opportunity to the right people and giving them the tools they need. I agree that a good org is rarer than it should be, which is probably the source of much cynicism.

First a caveat - I’m not a manager. I am at the top of the tech tree in a large org, which carries with it “leadership responsibilities”. I’ve also worn many hats over the years in various employment, so I know a thing or two about management.

I think you are generally wrong. Yes, ‘manager’ carries with it a certain amount of administrative and organisational responsibilities, not to mention the important ‘soft skills’ with conflict resolution and the like. But to deny or minimise the value of providing leadership is to miss the forest for the trees. The good managers I work with (and in my role I work with many) are definitely leaders in the traditional sense. They are the cool, rational, respected hands that provide guidance, break ties in debates and help drive the team/s forward. They are required to think strategically at times, and are certainly invaluable tactically.

We are all accountable to someone, all the way up to the CEO (who is accountable to the board). To diminish the role and contribution of managers at the bottom of the management stack is to be wilfully ignorant of the value they are providing.

> Relative latency savings cross-DC become less interesting the longer the distance, so there's nothing wrong with TCP there.

Long fat pipe sees dramatic throughput drops with tcp and relatively small packet loss. Possibly we were holding it wrong; would love to know if there is some definitive guide to doing it right. Good success with UDT.

This is very interesting and disturbing. We are outsourcing our decision making to an algorithmic “Mentalist” and will reap a terrible reward. I need to ween myself off the comforting teat of the chatbot psychic.

Yeah, but the parent is moaning about people shirking their responsibilities because of a self diagnosis.

That might be a projection; just a punctual person peeved off with the chronically late; but I was just adding the point that being challenged in this area isn’t an excuse.

I’m on-time for work stuff; I’ve figured out how to compensate. Personal life, ok, different story, but the responsibility has always rested with me.

Yeah, but if you have it you need to compensate for it. It’s what calendars, reminders, todo’s etc etc are for.

Speaking as one with a huge challenge in this space. No one is going to go “oh, you have ADHD, well, I guess you don’t need to fulfil that expectation…”

Difficult people are not “assholes”. Someone saying “your engineering practices are shoddy and the quality of your code is bad” does not make them an asshole. It makes them french maybe.

My point is that there are people low on the agreeableness scale, and they can often be exceptional engineers. You have to manage them, yes, but taking the easy way out of “i’ll sack anyone who’s prickly” will mean a shit team. You need people (or at least one), who will say “that won’t work because…” “this is bad because…” “this will fail because…”.

The authorization model is bespoke to your ecosystem. Whether you do that with claims, scopes or assertions is irrelevant. None of these are hacks, but they can’t be simply standardized either. Provisioning/Deprovisioning is a separate concern; SCIM is one way (but just in time provisioning can also be achieved with both solutions).

There’s no reason to choose SAML other than for legacy integration.

Wait. You were going to ditch rust because of 16 second build times?

Long term storage with blu-ray optical media is the way. Check out this guys testing: https://blog.ligos.net/2022-04-02/The-Reliability-Of-Optical...

Hot, cold, time - no problem. Just keep them out of sunlight.

You can still create modules in zig, just use the standard handle pattern as you might in c/c++. I think that many of us have worked in “large company”, and the issue you describe is not resolved with the “private” keyword. You need to make your “component/module” with a well defined boundary (normally dll/library), a “public interface” and the internals not visible as symbols.

That doesn’t save you in languages that support reflection, but it will with zig. Inside a module, all private does is declare intent.

In languages with code inheritance, I think inheritance across module boundaries is now widely viewed as the anti-pattern that it is.

Or you change it and respond with “You were warned”.

I seriously do not get this take. People use reflection and all kinds of hacks to get at internals, this should not stop you from changing said internals.

There will always be users who do the wrong thing.

Not everyone has to follow the MS approach of not breaking clients that rely on “undocumented” behavior. Document what will not be broken in future, change the rest and ignore the wailing.

It’s antithetical to what Zig is all about to hide the implementation. The whole idea is you can read the entire program without having to jump through abstractions 10 layers deep.