rabbits77

I’d argue that is not the most ideal Prolog solution. More like it’s simply a recursive implementation of an imperative solution.

For fractals you’ll want to be able to recognize and generate the structures. It’s a great use case for Definite Clause Grammars (DCGs). A perfect example of this would be Triska’s Dragon Curve implementation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMdiPC1ZckI

Well, to be fair it reads more like he can go back to school after a one year suspension. Not totally "kicked out".

Yes, it should not be crazy to see that a website started by people like Paul Graham and Sam Altman would naturally be full of hyped up VC nonsense. Their entire business model is to hype up these ideas and the startups working on them and then cash out!

Yes! It’s sad how ignorant of IBM and US technology industry history some of these comments are. Then again, I suppose every generation does a lot of its own “this time we’re different” myth making. Not everyone has the wisdom to see the broader context.

I recently left a job at a very different large company with a similar timeframe (a little under ten years). Pretty much everything this author states is related to my experience.

There is nothing all that special about Google. Maybe there was twenty years ago, but that ship has long since sailed. It’s just another large US tech company. Like Microsoft and IBM before it.

I've used www.firstrade.com for decades now. Not a well known name, but extraordinarily reliable.

the article states this person is walking in commercial area. that is what is creating the liminal space. she’s not strolling through the woods. she’s basically just bothered that her neighborhood isn’t gentrified enough yet.

There's a bit of contradiction in the article. The main objection is the author's feeling of uneasiness in open spaces. "liminal spaces" created by, for example, large parking lots. The author then complains that these wide open spaces are not "walkable". What? They are certainly walkable by their very design! What they are not, it seems is the real objection, are cozy spaces lined with tacqueiras and coffee shops.

This article predates the resignation of SawyerX (due to a lot of the abuse and misery heaped on him), who was the Perl release manager (aka "Pumpking") that was in charge of Perl 7.

The short version of it was that there was a bit of a power play by people who felt ignored and wanted a bigger part of what was felt to be an important development.

SawyerX goes into his a bit in a talk from 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1H9yKf8BI0

This has resulted in a new (2024) code of conduct so that leadership can proceed without the previous sorts of verbal assaults effecting things again. https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/new-standaards-of-condu...

I'd say you're being a bit overly cynical. There's plenty of good news in Perl too. specifically, since you mentioned smartmatch, that's been pretty well fixed as of a couple of weeks ago with Switch::Right https://metacpan.org/dist/Switch-Right.

As is tradition this was the subject of a very engaging talk at the most recent TPRC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x9LD8oOmv0

I have a Gemini too! I still use it sometimes, I just open Termux and use it as a highly portable scratch pad for working on small coding projects.

I wish that the handheld form factor had more options, but it seems that market is just too niche and otherwise dominated by tablets and phones.

No, it's the very definition of being able to generalize.

I have been unimpressed with ChatGPT4's ability to generate code for problems of even medium complexity. Even if given partial or complete code from another language and told to translate it!

If we're seeing a heavy drop in StackOverflow usage then my guess is that Stack Overflow was getting most traffic from some very basic queries and ChatGPT is eating that base out from under them. Better for StackOverflow that they partner with OpenAI and focus on serving the higher end that they have left.

"However, we must not forget that AI needs to learn as well from vast sources."

Well, that's actually the problem. This current wave of AI is not "learning" anything really. An AI with any sort of generalizable reasoning ability would just need basic sources on programming syntax and semantics and figure the rest out on its own. Here, instead, we see the need to effectively memorize variations of the same thing, say, answers to related programming questions, so that they can be part of a intelligent sounding response.

I was dubious at the value of GenAI as a search tool at first, but now see that it's actually well suited for the role. These massive models are largely storing information in a compressed form and are great at retrieving and doing basic rewrites. The next evolution in Expert Systems I suppose, although lacking strong reasoning.

The article begins by explaining that it’s a follow-up to an earlier article on Wayland!

Yeah, I mean I work inside a Fortune 10 company and after countless man hours across multiple teams we have exactly zero LLM applications in production and the pipeline heading to production is empty.

I guess it’s good at generating plausible blog spam and helping children with homework. I’ve used it to bootstrap my own writing. It’s not entirely useless but hardly world changing.

I think the biggest commercial use right now is Klarna uses it for basic lvl 1 support? I don’t know the details but it sounds like a good result from RAG over a fairly constrained corpus. So, again, nice but completely unaligned with the massive valuations in that space right now.

I am generally against forced arbitration, so I understand the push back against this. Then again, and maybe I am just overly tired right now, but I cannot imagine a scenario where I would be involved in any sort of legal action whatsoever against a chat server company? Can someone share with me a plausible example of where this would come into play for an ordinary user?

While I am sure there are faked videos out there somewhere I have personally performed multiple non-fake multi-board breaks as have many other people. Generally there is one "trick" though: pencils or small wooden dowels are used to space the boards apart which makes the stack of boards weaker than if they were stacked without spacing. I'd argue this is an allowable aspect of showmanship in that five separated boards is cooler looking than two or three stacked without spacing!

I completely agree. People in the US need to learn that happiness cannot come from a purchase, whether it's chemicals to ingest or whatever else is being marketed to them. It's amazing what americans will do to their bodies and minds except get exercise and eat fresh healthy foods.

Yes, of course. Things like numpy are far from new and in many cases are easy to use wrappers around the real computational workhorses written in, say, Fortran or C. For example, check out lapack https://hpc.llnl.gov/software/mathematical-software/lapack which is still, as far as I know, the gold standard.

Python is widely adapted not really because the language itself is any good or particularly performant (it's not at all), but because it presents easy to use wrapper APIs to developers who may have a poor background in Computer Science, but are rather stronger in statistics, general data analysis, or applied fields like economics.

Is that an instance of a "human in the loop"? Suppose a customer calls customer service and the service agent uses an LLM iteratively to get a good answer rather than the customer frustrating or even misinforming themselves. That seems to be like what you are describing.

Just released! NetBSD 10 is now available. As always an impressive list of supported hardware!

I always liked Quip. https://quip.com/

“We’ll be chartering buses to travel to and from schools around the Northeast. Sign up early if you’d like a seat on one of the buses.“

Will they be doing that “roll call” song too? https://www.tiktok.com/@theoffice/video/7254560650909928750?...

twenty years of research at a respected institution and still nothing other than hippy fairy tales? sounds about right, thanks for the update.

Ah, yes, the argument which ignores the fact that medical research also happens everywhere else in the world. If there was any medical value to any of this nonsense it’d already be well known in Europe, China, Russia, or India.

The article seems to be attacking MVPs which are not "viable". In the included graph of the development of a car I have seen version which show exactly the preferred path of development skateboard --> scooter --> bike ... as an example of an MVP! Here the author uses a new initialism "SLC" to describe this preferred path of development and the only reason seems to be some experience dealing with non-viable MVPs.

When Paul Graham is saying this is a talk he gives to 14 and 15 year olds, let's think of who those kids are exactly. There is zero chance he is giving this advice to a general audience at some arbitrary high school, much less students from even a modestly disadvantaged background. People at those places don't know or, even if they did know, wouldn't care who Paul Graham is. No, he's at the school his kids go to. The students are all in the same affluent circles as he is.

This is a pep talk for trust fund kids who can afford to mess around with start ups. It's probably lousy advice for most people outside the affluenza bubble.

I can't remember not being disappointed in pandoc. I used to try pandoc first for file conversions but at this point I try it last, only after exhausting format specific tools first. For example, the conversion from latex to html in pandoc is a joke, just unusable garbage, compared to the results of tex4ht.