432 karma · joined October 10, 2023
When armed men can take you out of your home or your car and whisk you away without a judicial warrant and without due process, it is very reasonable to be afraid.
I swear, do you people even hear yourselves?
If it is reasonable for a young person to have flatmates, then that should be because they are a student or an artist and are working only part-time while devoting the rest of their time to their studies or their art.
But a person working full-time? Who may be a single mother or father with a child to support? They should be able to afford a place to live, without roommates.
And in an LLM, the size of the inputs is vast and often hidden from the prompter. It is not something that you have exact control over in the way that you have exact control over the inputs that go into a calculator or into a compiler.
Except that at least for game development, C and C++ are still the go-to tools?
- You're not going to take an electric bike mountain biking
- You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
- You're not going to use an electric bike to go bikepacking across the country
To echo another commentor, we're not. And even if we were, this is not how it should be done. Enforcing the laws is one thing, but we have to have due process. Without due process, we have no rights.
The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat. But these are healthy, unprocessed carbs and fats. Whole grains and olive oil.
People going for high fat, low carb / low fat, high carb are usually doing so while also sticking to real foods.
There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for "value provided to society". So, when you provide value, society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask society for value back.
Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people should have to contribute to society if they expect society to support them, but the problem with this lie is that, despite how capitalists make it sound, the market was not designed with this ideal in mind, instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around.
But the real truth is that money does not reward the person who contributes the most value, it simply rewards the person who makes the most money. Money is not "value", money is power. And the system rewards profit no matter how it's acquired.
This means that you can provide a good service that people want, but you still need to advertise and compete in order to be rewarded for your contribution.
It also means that you can do something valuable, like cleaning up all the trash off of a beach, but that doesn't mean that the market will reward you for your contribution.
And it also means that if you have a thing and you want to make profit selling it, you can run a manipulative ad campaign that convinces people that they truly need it, and the market will reward you.
And as for single-player aimbots, I agree that it doesn't do anyone any harm, but what's the point? It's like running the course of a marathon on a segway. If you're just doing it by yourself, then I suppose it doesn't hurt anyone, but you can't really say that you ran a marathon, can you?
It bothers me that all of the AI "artists" insist that they are just the same as any other artist, even though it was the AI that did all of the work. Even when a human artist is just copying the styles they've seen from other artists, they still had to put in the effort to develop their craft to make the art in the first place.
I know that Jonathan Blow can be abrasive and one-sided in his talks on programming, but I think we should be open-minded about Jai. Yes, he is making this language because he doesn't like C++, but you make it sound like he is hating on C++ just for the sake of it.
I mean, is it really so hard to imagine that someone might not like something about C++? There are plenty of people who think we could have a better systems language, which is why we have seen languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin pop up.
In Blow's case, he has said that he doesn't like Rust because he feels that satisfying the borrow-checker slows down iteration time[1], which is important especially in the early stages of game development when you are still experimenting with mechanics are where requirements and architecture are still very much subject to change.
As far as what Jai offers, it seems his focus is on making a simple but powerful language (contrary to C++'s ever-growing bag-of-tricks), with fast compile times (less than 3 seconds on a full build of his new game), better build and dependency management (no more cmake), and powerful meta-programming features.
In a talk on the language[2], he demos how he is able to use the language's meta-programming features to develop powerful code-analyzing and memory-analyzing tools.
These tools, in particular, hint at his philosophy: lots of ideas in programming like RAII, garbage collectors, and borrow-checking exist to save the programmer from themselves. He's not interested in this and believes that these features come with hidden costs. Instead of accepting those costs, he would rather have a language that gives him the tools to save himself.
Personally, I don't understand the hate. If Jai is a good language, then it will benefit all of us. If it's not, then his making it still hurts none of us.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdpD5QIVOKQ
> “the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop” as a “content farm” first designed to optimize for “the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.” Its algorithm: “More Hemingway, less Dos Passos.”
https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-americ...
Only when the details you are explaining are relevant to the story you want to tell and the themes you want to cover.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin explores a planet populated by an offshoot of humans who have developed a genderless existence where they experience sexual characteristics only once a month and are genderless the rest of the time.
The book does not explain how this works biologically or why this came about evolutionarily, because that is not the point. The interest of the author was to explore the cultural and sociological implications of this situation. If a group of humans lived without gender most of the time, how would this affect their culture and society? And what does that in turn say about our own gendered society?
Diving into the biological nitty-gritty of this fictional scenario would distract from the social themes the author was trying to explore.
At the same time, it's crazy that urllib (the library mentioned in the article), broke their API on a minor version. Python packaging documentation[1] provides the sensible guideline that API breaks should be on major versions.
[1] https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/discussions/versionin...
When I ask it to use a specific MCP to complete a certain task, and it proceeds to not use that MCP, this indicates a clear lack of understanding.
You might say that the fault was mine, that I didn't setup or initialize the MCP tool properly, but wouldn't an understanding AI recognize that it didn't have access to the MCP and tell me that it cannot satisfy my request, rather than blindly carrying on without it?
LLMs consistently prove that they lack the ability to evaluate statements for truth. They lack, as well, an awareness of their unknowing, because they are not trying to understand; their job is to generate (to hallucinate).
It astonishes me that people can be so blind to this weakness of the tool. And when we raise concerns, people always say
"How can you define what 'thinking' is?" "How can you define 'understanding'?"
These philosophical questions are missing the point. When we say it doesn't "understand", we mean that it doesn't do what we ask. It isn't reliable. It isn't as useful to us as perhaps it has been to you.
You're right though that there is a basic flaw in the economy that older folks don't want to talk about.
OOP is a collection of ideas about how to write code. We should use those ideas when they are useful and ignore them when they are not.
But many people don't want to put in the critical thinking required to do that, so instead they hide behind the shield of "SOLIDD principles" and "best practice" to justify their bad code (not knocking on SOLIDD principles, it's just that people use it to justify making things object oriented when they shouldn't be).
I guess this argument was supposed to convince me to stop being such a luddite and accept the inevitable future, but really, in an increasingly post-truth world, it made me want to go and get myself a stack of reference books.
I'm definitely more of a gardener myself, and I've always considered the architect software engineers of the world to be silly and unfun and prone to locking themselves into an over-engineered architecture before they even understood the problem properly, but they really are just different approaches to software development and each of them has their strengths.
In indie game development, the requirements are often unclear, and I am still exploring what the game idea might be, still trying to "find the fun" of a game, and so the gardening approach works quite well.
In other fields, where you have clear requirements figured out from day one and the consequences for not meeting those requirements is much higher, the architect's approach has its wisdom.
I'm using ENet for my RTS project and found that Steam's networking code offers many of the same features offered by ENet (including the reliable, in-order delivery of packets, which is invaluable for an RTS Game). I was able to abstract things out so that my game uses ENet on LAN games and Steam networking for online games, and the rest of the game code is none the wiser.
Coding is like writing, in the sense that it's often faster to write a sloppy first draft followed by a better second draft than it is to agonize over getting the first draft right on the first go. The first draft is generative. Its purpose is not to be good but instead to let you get something built quickly and to let you explore the problem, so that you know what edge cases you'll need to account for in your final architecture.
But this still of working will never get through management because the moment you show them a working product, they'll tell you to ship it and won't give you a chance to rewrite.
I think the best way to solve this is to flatten the hierarchy. Get rid of the notion of managers who rule over engineers and give ownership of the code back to the engineers. Have the engineers and product "owners" make decisions together in a democratic fashion.
DuckDuckGo also has an option where you can turn off the AI search so that you don't have to specify every time. I've found DDG sometimes gives me better results than Google and sometimes doesn't.