professoretc

But the screens should look different, right? That's the point of building separate iOS vs. Android versions is to make each version "native" to its platform. The feature-set should be the same, but the interfaces can diverge.

If you want to know what flying first-class 50 years ago was like (and you live in southern California, and you have money to burn) you can try the Panam Experience (https://panamexperience.com/). It's a replica of a Panam 747, together with a "crew" in period-correct costumes, that tries to recreate the entire experience of flying in the 1950s. (Bearing in mind that the plane is a replica, located on a soundstage.)

A proof is not like a program. The goal of a program is to "do the thing", thus you can make the argument that it doesn't matter what the code looks like as long as its works right. But the goal of a proof isn't to "do the thing" (where "the thing" is just to print Yes or No), it's to communicate. An unintelligible proof is really just a first draft.

That article (slash advertisement for Speechpad) spends a lot of words not explaining why human captioning is preferable in general to automated captioning. If I, a human, make a mistake in captioning my videos, am I any better off than if I'd used whisper and it messed up?

I think the algorithm recommended Chris to me because of his topology videos, and from there I watched all his "old computing devices" stuff. Something about the Boston accent, the dry humor, and the occasional audio jump-cut make his stuff quite funny.

> And, the US providers seem to all be racing to make that capability inaccessible to anyone who isn't at a Fortune 500 and able to use their "cyber" versions.

Because it's valuable. I'd be surprised if the big providers didn't go even further with this idea. Need your agent to write some C++? Gotta upgrade to the "system developer" package (a $100/mo add-on to your subscription). SQL? You'll need the DBA package. Working with hardware/firmware (or anything that might be construed as reverse engineering or hardware hacking)? You'll need a verified computer engineering account for that.

A Vitamix is not an immersion blender; an immersion blender is one you "immerse" in the thing you're blending, i.e., a stick or wand blender.

https://www.seriouseats.com/best-immersion-blenders

Wand blender don't make things hot enough to cook, so OP is indeed using raw eggs in their ice cream. Which is probably fine, it just means their ice cream isn't using a cooked custard base.

> Some markdown flavors for example use \(\), which is probably the worst of them to use.

Some markdown flavors say they use `\(\)` but they also use `\` as the escape character, so in practice you have to use `\\(\\)` which is definitely the worst.

The post I was replying to said,

> UB was coined only in the first C standard, in 1989. Prior to that there was no "If you do this, anything can happen".

I.e., the context is, before UB existed as a concept, how would these things be categorized. And I was trying to offer the correction that, before UB existed, it wasn't "all behavior is defined" but rather many behaviors depend on your particular local environment. While that may technically be implementation defined, the current standard requires that implementation defined be documented, and UB-like edge cases were most definitely not documented anywhere consistently in the old days!

More like, "if you do this, what happens depends on your particular combination of hardware, operating system, and compiler. Don't ask us."

"Look around to look around."

Plus, if the LLM goes down (or gets "upgraded" to a model that does the translation differently/wrong), you still have the tool available locally.

They'll qualify their answers in English but as the article mentions, if your prompt asks for a confidence score, that "uncertainty" doesn't translate into low numerical confidence.

If my compiler "went down" I could still think through the problem I was trying to solve, maybe even work out the code on paper. I could reach a point where I would be fairly confident that I had the problem solved, even though I lacked the ability to actually implement the solution.

If my LLM goes down, I have nothing. I guess I could imagine prompts that might get it to do what I want, but there's no guarantee that those would work once it's available again. No amount of thought on my part will get me any closer to the solution, if I'm relying on the LLM as my "compiler".

I just tried QBasic 1.1 and it includes context-sensitive help: press F1 on a keyword to get documentation for it.

> An interesting side effect might be that only people locked out from using LLMs will learn how to program in the future, as vide coding doesn't teach you the fundamentals.

While thinking about/working with LLMs, I've been reminded more than once of Asimov's short story Profession (http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio...). In it, no one goes to school: information is just dumped into your brain. You get an initial dump of the basics when you're a kid, and then later all the specialty information for your career (which is chosen for you, based on what your brain layout is most suited to).

The protagonist is one of a number of people who can't get the second dump; his brain just isn't wired right, so he's sent to a Home for the Feeble Minded to be with other people who have to learn the old-fashioned way.

Through various adventures he eventually realizes that everyone who was "taped" is incapable of learning new material at all. His Home for the Feeble Minded is in fact an Institute of Higher Studies, one of only a handful, which are responsible for all the invention and creation that sustains human progress.

> On a phone keyboard, sure, it's as hard as an accent sign (á, for example), difficult but not twrrible. But on a keyboard? Yeah, no one is typing in Alt combos when literally any other construction will do.

For me, --- gets converted to an em-dash (—) while typing, if I have my input method (ELatin) enabled. I'm so used to typing in while working in LaTeX I can easily slip it in elsewhere.

Correct; the ability of a model to reproduce source material verbatim does not necessarily make the model's existence illegal. However, using a model to do just that might very well present a legal liability for the user. I would be interested to see the extent to which models can "recite from memory" source code, e.g., from the various MS code leaks. Put another way, if I'm using LLM code generation extensively, do I need to run a filter on its output to ensure that I don't "accidentally" copy large chunks of the Windows codebase?

I wonder why that would be? Presumably if the batteries are low then the pressure the machine "thinks" it's inflated the cuffs to is higher than the actual pressure...

And with eye/face tracking it can tell if you really watched it, with a smile.

I miss TkDesk, which I discovered many years ago when I was first trying Linux, partly because it supports unlimited splits, not just two. In fact, if I'm remembering correctly, when navigating to a subdirectory the default was just to open it in a new split. You ended up with splits containing the full path from wherever you started to your eventual subdirectory (you could scroll the view of splits horizontally once there got to be too many).

https://tkdesk.sourceforge.net/

This also lets you run QEMU over SSH, if you want. I use this in my assembly language course; towards the end I give an assignment to write Hello, World! as a 16-bit real mode MBR bootloader. Students can do the whole thing on our SSH server, including testing in QEMU (and even attaching GDB to it to debug) not needing to install anything locally.

I saw "Hugginface" listed alongside C++, React, and SQL as skills on a resume recently. Wasn't quite sure what to make of that.

Maybe that's why the models are so eager to spit out reams and reams of code, it lets their masters claim a higher percentage (even if most of the code they emit is never used).

Doesn't it still treat 64-bit code as something of an afterthought?

My wife and I agreed to expunge "just" from our vocabulary, at least with regards to asking to do this. It's almost always kind of belittling, implying that the thing you're asking for is easy and obvious, and you're an idiot/lazy for either not doing it already or trying to explain why its more difficult that it looks.

That's called a "unity" build, isn't it? I was under the impression that it was a relatively well-known technique, such that there are existing tools to merge a set of source files into a single .c file.

> I think any NPC with dialogue important to a goal (a quest, a tutorial, etc) is going to be hard to use generative AI for. It not only needs to be coherent with the story, but it needs to correctly include certain ideas. I.e. if the NPC gives a quest to go find some item at some location, it needs to say what the item is and where it is.

That was my experience when I was experimenting with using current LLMs to generate quests. You can of course ask for both a human-readable quest description and also a JSON object (according to some schema) describing the important quest elements, but the failure rate of the results was too high. Maybe 10% of quests would have some important mismatch between the description and the JSON; the description would mention an important object but it would be left out of the JSON, or the JSON would mention an important NPC but the description wouldn't, etc.

As a player, I think it would get frustrating quickly if 10% of quests were unsolvable, especially since, as a player, you don't know when a quest is unsolvable; maybe you just haven't found the item/NPC yet.

> > apparently in C++ a structure cannot really have zero length

> Yes it can: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/attributes/no_uni...

A structure with no members can be made to have zero length as a member of something else but not as part of its own definition. I.e., the `[[no_unique_address]]` attribute is a property of the member, not of the struct on its own. It's somewhat annoying that you can't flag an empty struct as being really empty, and have no-unique-address-ness applied everywhere it's used automatically; you have to flag every use with the attribute manually.

Prefixes come first, 1 byte each, order doesn't matter except that REX, if present, must come last. Then the opcode, 1-3 bytes. Followed by Mod R/M byte, if present. Followed by SIB byte, if present. Followed by address/immediate, 1, 2, 4, or 8 bytes, if present.

Ugh; there's a reason why I'm switching my architecture course to MIPS32.