regularfry

There was a music editor I remember getting on a late Your Sinclair edition cover tape which displayed proper music staves and gave you 4-note chord output. Blew my mind a bit at the time.

Just going to nitpick on one thing:

> "Can you review this" [link to PR] is getting a rubber stamp because humans have never been good enough at "just spotting bugs" to make this worth it and now any LLM is better than a human.

Spotting bugs is the one thing we do have evidence that code inspection is good for. But there's a massive difference between the type of code review there's good evidence for and a github-style PR review, so it's mixed but not entirely without foundation.

That's fine if the interaction with the service is within the scope of your code. If you want to, say, mock out terraforming a bunch of IAM permissions to least-privilege a lambda such that you can check it actually works, you don't have a seam where any app-level tests can go in.

That's where the difficulty is, where the round trip to testing this stuff on live services is painfully slow and error feedback is mixed at best.

Persistence. If you're going to have a physical metaphor, don't throw out one of the most useful features of the thing you're emulating.

I'm sure this is exactly the sort of group they meant: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39n19dw1ggo

Or maybe him: https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/cable-thief-ja...

"Almost exclusively" would seem to point in a very home-grown direction.

> But they fail to scale for teams where you want a distributed version system, automated tests and CI/CD pipelines.

I don't think this is true? Certainly you could have done those things with Delphi but it pre-dated DVCS and CI/CD being common concerns.

> Also you want to reuse code via package management systems.

Again, these tools pre-dated package management systems being in common use because they pre-date internet access at any sort of bandwidth being a reliable assumption. No reason they couldn't have one. Perl did at the time, which I mainly put down to it being in common use where internet access was a reliable assumption, but very little else did.

> And a single code base for several target systems (cross compilation , electron) is also nice

You can absolutely do this with Lazarus, which picked up where Delphi left off. Flash also counts here.

It's just a colossal misread of the demographics. The community was always a mix of people who wanted to build a printer, and people who wanted a printed thing. The community has massively exploded since the early years, and it's almost entirely made of people in the latter camp who, critically, no longer have to go through the former campsite to get there. It doesn't mean there aren't people in the first camp, or even that there are fewer of them. They're just a rounding error now.

You can tell when it happened, because the E3D v6 nozzle pattern went from being a de facto standard across everything to something you need to buy an adapter for, and nobody really seemed to blink.

Taking their spiel at face value, it's intended as a mimic of System One in humans. System One is also not smart.

You don't need to ask anyone else's permission. The thing that got me over the hump was wanting secure chat with an AI agent running on my own hardware. Asking WhatsApp for an API key just rubbed me up the wrong way.

Snikket claims to solve this but assumes it's got a routable IP address. If you've got it on a VM somewhere cloudy you're probably fine but I had to really jump through hoops to get it working behind NAT on my own hardware.

Has someone got a quick explainer for why adding a planet would result in less lithium? Is it just that a super-earth would be big enough and have so little lithium that it would measurably water down the other elements?

Billipodes. Obviously.

That sounds like a reasonable estimate for the gap between any pair of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, just from varied depth of implementation of more recent standards.

This is (mostly) the way. Samsung TV without networking configured, XBox for everything - which is problematic in its own ways but it's a known quantity. It doesn't prevent it from "helpfully" hopping on a nearby unsecured network but a) I haven't spotted one of those in a while, and b) it hasn't ever been able to get updates to change its behaviour to make it start doing that if it previously wouldn't.

Yes, but as a consumer you want to pretend they aren't. Seriously, buy from anyone else.

Because... it's an accurate description of the concept it's being applied to?

In my experience the thing that Fable is superb at - unmatched by any other model so far - is downgrading to something else at the slightest opportunity.

> The efficient frontier of LLM inference is a line, not a frontier.

The efficient frontier of portfolio theory is also a line. Not sure I get your point here.

It's also the hardest point at which to try to work, because when you change the model architecture you need to completely retrain from scratch.

FYI: I backed off the page after about 5 seconds because the scrolling is unusable.

Yes, the bailing-out explanation is right. With a mouse it's intentional that you should be able to push the pointer off the button with the mouse button still pressed to cancel.

Ah, but don't you see? Something Must Be Done, and "gun part detection" is, indeed, Something. (ignoring that it fails the "thing" part of the definition, because it can't possibly exist)

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Macbooks were doing the same sort of room-monitoring real-time EQ tricks that Sonos speakers do. They own the hardware and the software, there's a real advantage to them in having such tight control over the audio environment.

The audio design in Macbooks is intense. Fixed hardware so they can tune the hell out of it. Multiple mics for directional sensing - I don't know if they use that for real-time tuning, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Yeah, but speakers aren't the whole system. Even if you've got perfectly flat speakers, the room they're in won't be.

Can confirm. When I was in that world we'd have a shitty boom-box on a shelf that got pulled out for exactly that purpose. But you'd always start from the studio kit and work down, never the other way.

The little Sonos bluetooth speakers do something like this. I went in search of a teardown to figure out how on earth they get any sort of bass response from that size enclosure, and the innards turn out to be kinda boring. The trick is almost entirely from shoving the real-time room response through software correction. If that could be packaged up for Linux laptops, it would be amazing.

Yes, they should be discoverable. There are platform conventions for this: on Windows you'll see underlined letters; menus show you the shortcuts. Tab is a pretty much universal "move to next field" shortcut and I don't think that's particularly discoverable if you don't already know it.

There's nothing wrong with a keyboard driven UI having buttons as long as they advertise their key, though. That's one way discoverability is supposed to work. It means you can fall back to the mouse when it makes sense.

Minor point, but a few years ago there was noise about waxworms being able to break down PE into ethylene glycol somehow, which would mean enzymatically breaking C-C bonds. No idea where that research ended up.

In theory so does AWS, but the Bedrock model selection is badly in need of a refresh.