ookdatnog

Don't iterators necessarily "forget" the structure of the tree? I can see how you can write an iterator to, for example, compute the size of a tree, or generate the set of all variables that occur in an expression tree.

But it's not obvious to me how you'd write a generic iterator that supports something like finding all free variables in an expression tree, or even just express a tree mapping function that constructs a new tree with the same structure (for example, "make all variables in the expression uppercase"). It's been a while since I worked with iterators so correct me if I'm wrong and this is in fact easy with iterators.

With something like Haskell's recursion-schemes library [0] these operations are all just a few lines long, guaranteed to terminate, and don't need to be updated if your data structure changes (for example you add new expression nodes). I'm not aware of any non-functional programming language that can do that. See for example the freeVars function at the bottom of the linked recursion-schemes doc.

[0] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/recursion-schemes-5.2.3

Not commenting on general trends, but I don't think my opinion on IP shifted massively as a result of the rise of LLMs. I can summarize it as follows:

- It seems desirable to have some system that allows creatives to be paid for their work.

- Whether current IP law is the best system we can come up with is highly debatable. But nevertheless it is the system we have, and its existence is to some extent justified.

- If we look at the "pefect case" where IP law functions as intended (for example, an author publishes a book in which they invested years of their life), then breaking IP law (sharing that author's work without their consent) in that instance seems, to me, immoral.

- Nevertheless there are plenty of excesses in the system where I would judge that the application of IP law is unjustified and breaking the law is morally justified (naturally I still don't recommend it). This includes, for example, paywalled papers from publicly-funded research, works that can no longer reasonably be purchased (for example games for old consoles), most if not all software patents, ...

So the question simply boils down to: is sports commentary justifiably protected under IP law? I think the answer is a pretty clear-cut "yes" here, I don't see how it falls under any case of IP law overreach.

The AI's job as described in this article is two-fold:

- The relatively trivial task of extracting textual data from the screen.

- The task of obfuscating that they're publishing other people's work as their own.

When I clicked the article I assumed they'd try to automatically construct analysis of the game by using AI to analyze frames of the game, but that's not what they are doing. They are extracting some trivial information from the frames, and then they process the audio of the referee mic and commentary.

In other words, the analysis has already been done by humans and they just want to re-publish this analysis as their own, without paying money for it. So they run it through an AI because in today's legal environment this seems to completely exempt you from copyright infringement or plagiarism laws.

> The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic.

While my opinion on ad tech has been negative for years, over the past couple of years I've come to realise how much this business model depends on outright crime to survive.

If you have YouTube ads on any device, you probably noticed (at least in my country) that a large fraction of ads are for either extremely low quality products (such as shitty mobile games, apps of dubious value that probably exist mostly to gobble up your data, or just shady IRL products), or outright scams of various kinds.

In one case I saw an obvious scam ad that impersonated a famous person in my country. I reported it to YouTube, and got back an email a while later that said that the ad did not break any of their rules and my report was dismissed.

Some weeks later I read a news article that reported that that exact scam had scammed some old people out of large amounts of money.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was genuinely surprised that my report had been dismissed. While I already thought YouTube is to blame in serving users scam ads, I had naively assumed that YouTube doesn't want to serve scam ads, it's just hard and expensive to filter them out systematically.

But no, they want to serve scam ads. Even when they get pointed out they refuse to remove them. A dollar paid by a scammer is just as good as a dollar paid by someone trying to advertise a real product. And they're not liable for the scam, so why would they care?

But surely that's too simplistic. Even a complete sociopath would understand that having your website/app overrun by scam ads will tarnish its reputation over time, or invite more aggressive regulation. So these long-term risks don't seem to be worth it. Unless, of course, scams are a very significant fraction of ad revenue.

So this is my hypothesis: scams ads provide a very significant fraction of advertising revenue on at least YouTube, and possibly most social media, perhaps to the point where the business model would not be viable without them.

Stupidity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for believing in Trump's particular delusions. You can be stupid and not delude yourself into thinking that others must lose for you to win.

> Half the people complaining about Trump's actions say that it's all according to Project 2025, and half the people say what you're saying, that's it all chaotic incompetence with no plan.

I think this is a misunderstanding (not sure if it's on your part of on the part of some of the complaining people): the Trump admin's agenda and strategy are clearly following Project 2025, for the most part. But Trump's tariff obsession does not originate there. I'm quite certain that even the most pro-tariff of the conservative think tanks are uncomfortable with how far he's pushing it.

I get the impression that the zeal behind Project 2025 is not motivated by their economic ideas but mostly by their perception of being in a culture war that they are now on the cusp of winning (they aren't). They deeply hate and resent the "liberal elites" (academics, journalists, etc) who they feel have too much influence on American culture, and the dream that keeps them going is not merely defeating these liberal elites electorally, but utterly destroying them. To "put them in their place", as it were.

One thing that would derail their plans is if Trump lays waste to the economy early in his term, so that he's likely to lose the midterms and a Democrat becomes the next president, and perhaps even making their political movement unviable for years or decades. So even his pro-tariff supporters are uneasy now: the tariff policy is so extreme that it is likely to interfere with their overarching goal.

That only explains part of his behavior. Something peculiar to Trump's mindset is the pervasiveness of zero-sum thinking. There is nothing about growing up spoiled that necessarily creates this mindset; in fact I'd expect the opposite (by which I mean, I wouldn't expect people who are never forcibly confronted with scarcity and zero-sum competition, to be obsessed by scarcity and zero-sum competition).

I agree that Project 2025 broadly sets the agenda, but when it comes to tariffs specifically, I'm under the impression that Trump is singularly obsessed with them and the conservative think tanks are, even if they're pro-tariff, uneasy with how far he's going with it.

In the culture of the contemporary American right, cruelty is a sign of strength and mercy (or even just empathy) is seen as weakness.

I'm convinced Trump is 100% sincere in his belief that his economic ideas are brilliant and will lead the US to a golden age.

I think his (and much of the far right's) mind is characterized by:

- a deep incuriosity and unwillingness to learn about the world

- extreme overconfidence in his own judgment

- an understanding of the world as being pervasively zero-sum (shared with Putin); your loss = his win

- obsessive preoccupation with the dynamics of humiliation: he feels an extreme need to be perceived as strong and to humiliate his enemies, and he greatly fears being humiliated

I feel like these characteristics explain most of his policy. The idea of tariffs arises from his zero-sum mindset: the only way to gain is by making someone else lose. This is of course factually wrong, but he's too incurious to learn from history or economics. And, of course, he's massively overconfident, so the thought that someone else could know better does not occur to him. And once the ball is rolling, his fear of humiliation will ensure that he has to stay the course. His perceived enemies (which is everyone) have to come crawling to his throne, begging to have their tariffs reduced while praising his brilliant policies, and then he might consider it. So if that doesn't happen, his only options are (a) perpetually retaliating with ever-increasing tariffs, disregarding the consequences entirely; or (b) capitulating in the trade war (lowering or abolishing tariffs) while not admitting that it's a capitulation ("don't worry, my brilliant policy fixed the mass influx of fentanyl and illegal immigrants from Canada, so now we can drop the tariffs on Sri Lanka" or something similarly incoherent).

I think most teachers are not naive wrt the transactional perception of education in their students. However, what keeps a passionate teacher going is the belief that, if they do their job well, at least some significant subset of students will take genuine interest in the material. I don't think it's naive to hope for that, I've seen this happen a lot when I was a student.

What OOP is lamenting is that that's no longer possible.

Where are you getting "since the trump adm." from? This is what OP wrote:

> but in the last 10 years or so, it seems to me that there has been a huge increase in violence, and I have huge fears about guns.

They do not mention Trump at all, and don't even vaguely hint at this being a problem of the last two months.

Not commenting on general trends, but in the specific case of this story: sometimes reality itself just isn't nuanced and one side is simply wrong. The current US administration's economic policy is disastrous. I don't see this is as a political statement, just a statement of fact. You don't have to be left leaning to agree with this statement.

It's hard to imagine what "nuanced" takes one can make in good faith. The traditional defense of Trump's tariff threats that I've heard the most is that he isn't planning on actually doing it, that it's all 5D chess to force Canada and Mexico into concessions (whatever those may be). But that defense has been rendered obsolete by the fact that the tariffs are now here. So what nuance are you looking for, exactly? What is there left to say in defense of this economic policy?

I agree with your assessment in the situation you describe: greenfielding a project with tools you are unfamiliar with. For me LLMs have worked best when my progress is hindered primarily by a lack of knowledge or familiarity. If I'm working on a project where I'm comfortable with my tools and APIs, they can still be useful from time to time but I wouldn't call it a "superpower", more like a regular productivity tool (less impactful than an IDE, I would say). Of course this comment could be outdated in a few months, but that's what it feels like to me in the here and now.

Thanks, I might give that a try :)

> you don't get your own state by having the world, or Israel, or the US, or Iran "grant" it to you.

They are 100% dependent on Israel granting them their state. Take electricity for example. Before the current fighting, Gaza was on a rolling blackout schedule where each region only has electricity for a few hours each day. They have one diesel power plant (Israel enforces that all diesel is bought through Israel; it completely controls the supply), and the vast majority of the rest of their electricity needs were met by Israeli power lines (they also bought a little bit from Egypt).

Whatever economic activity they develop that is dependent on electricity (that is, nearly every modern economic activity) must be "granted" to them. Israel can (and has, and currently does) cut off electricity supply to Gaza at will, as a negotiating tactic or as punishment.

I'm sticking with emacs for now because it is the only editor I have encountered that actually works well in conjunction with a tiling window manager; by which I mean: it works well as a single process accessed through multiple windows (here I mean "windows" as in OS windows -- internally Emacs calls this "frames") although it has features for managing panes internally, it doesn't insist that you use them and each windows is very lightweight (no thick sidebars, embedded terminal, etc that are hard or impossible to remove). Vim offers the second feature but not the first (each window is a separate process), most other editors I've encountered do not offer the second feature.

Progress towards what, exactly? Their own state? Or full citizenship of Israel? Or can you think of another acceptable outcome?

I don't think this is a symmetrical situation. Life in Israel is quite comfortable. Young people have hopes and dreams beyond sacrificing themselves in an eternal war. Palestinians in Gaza have an extremely bleak outlook on the future and effectively no hope that anything meaningful will change in their lifetime, and they feel collectively humiliated by decades of occupation. Sacrificing "everything" is a lot easier when everything looks a lot like nothing.

If you have some time to spare, read SICP [0] and do the exercises :) (probably easiest to use DrRacket [1] as the interpreter)

[0] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/SICP_Language.html

I love learning interesting niche languages and also wish it was still the case that learning interesting languages purely out of interest was common.

But I'm afraid that the network effects that favor large languages are only getting stronger over time. It's very hard to convince someone to learn a new language if they're used to finding the answer to almost every question they can think of on Stack Overflow and find free libraries for almost any task on GitHub. Your niche language will have neither of those things. Large languages will continue to consolidate and become impossible to displace, even if a new language pops up that is strictly better in terms of design.

Entrenched programming languages have reached the point where, I believe, they will never be displaced. So there are certain obvious mistakes, such as every object in Java being nullable, that we will have to live with in perpetuity.

That's not an unreasonable thought, but I think you underestimate how many people know that they are buying an illusion and are fine with that. To support that point: there are people right now who pay real money to chat with an AI companion that pretends to be their boy- or girlfriend. [0,1]

I think these people are, by and large, under no illusion that their AI companion is anything other than a computer program, but they get attached anyway and choose to live in the illusion.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/replika/top/?sort=top&t=month

[1] https://replika.com/

OpenAI is losing far more billions than they are raking in. I don't think any generative AI company is even close to profitable at the moment.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/30/microsoft-cfo-says-openai-in...

If you can read Lisp (Scheme) syntax, I think SICP [0] has the clearest demonstration of the utility of lazy streams. The problem it presents (calculating pi) is, admittedly, rather academic; but the concept of having values that evolve over "time" as first-class entities that you can abstract over is practically useful. I think that all of reactive programming (React, Angular, etc) is closely related to this idea (perhaps even originates from it), although the implementation and applications differ.

It's a long and effortful read, but the payoff is worth the effort.

[0] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

EDIT: I think the Perl article posted in a sibling comment uses essentially the same example (but for calculating e instead of pi), although I only skimmed it.

> My current best guess, is to hand the student stuff that was written by an LLM, and challenge them to find and correct its mistakes.

Finding errors in a text is a useful exercise, but clearly a huge step down in terms of cognitive challenge from producing a high quality text from scratch. This isn't so much an alternative as it is just giving up on giving students intellectually challenging work.

> That's going to be what they do in their careers

I think this objection is not relevant. Calculators made pen-and-paper arithmetic on large numbers obsolete, but it turns out that the skills you build as a child doing pen-and-paper arithmetic are useful once you move on to more complex mathematics (that is, you learn the skill of executing a procedure on abstract symbols). Pen-and-paper arithmetic may be obsolete as a tool, but learning it is still useful. It's not easy to identify which "useless" skills are still useful as to learn as cognitive training, but I feel pretty confident that writing is one of them.

I mean, if you compare with what unspeakable things dog breeders have done to dogs over time, bonsai kittens don't seem that much of a stretch.

Thanks!

I once read a quote that I can't find anymore (and neither do I know who said/wrote it), that went something like: "Imagine advanced space-faring aliens land in your backyard and invite you to take a tour in their spaceship. You quickly realize that their technology is millions of years more advanced than our own. That is what studying biology feels like."

I'm no biologist but I liked that quote :)

> Only the clinically insane are anti-washing machines.... so HN I guess.

- The article is called "In defense of the washing machine". It is not anti-washing machine.

- I haven't read a single comment that opposes washing machines. The closest comment I've seen is one that says that maybe we wash our clothes more than they need to be washed.

- All the top rated comments at the time I'm writing this comment are asserting the value of washing machines or ridiculing the twitter user who argued for replacing washing machines with communal hand washing.

How are you taking in this information and coming to the conclusion that HN is anti-washing machine?

This is a fascinating phenomenon that I've encountered before. It seems that some multilingual people cannot easily tell which language they are speaking and/or switch languages during conversation.

A friend who is learning Dutch once complained to me that Dutch speakers will switch to English the moment they hear you are struggling with the language. I suggested she should explicitly ask people to keep the conversation in Dutch.

In one instance, she did that, and the (native Dutch-speaking) person she was talking to agreed to her request, and then proceeded in English anyway! She asked that person multiple times, and they just kept speaking English without addressing her request. Baffling.