stahorn

The difference between the fire fighter and the fire safety inspector. The former puts out fires and saves lives and is of course a hero. The latter complains about things that never happen, wastes everybody's time and money and is generally annoying.

No mass domestic surveillance of citizens is an old trick also. Country A doesn't surveil their citizens and Country B doesn't do theirs. But then they set up the infrastructure and both surveil each other's citizens and then exchange information. Then when they have all the infrastructure, it would be almost a crime to not use it to catch criminals. I mean, think of the children...

I think this would be good for everybody, not just kids. It doesn't even have to be complicated: Just that after a certain amount of time scrolling/watching, put in a message asking if it's maybe time to stop with some information about how these algorithms try to keep you for as long as possible. Maybe a link to a government page with more information.

It doesn't have to be perfect and there will of course be easy workarounds to hid the warnings for people that want. The goal is to improve the situation though, not solve it perfectly. Like putting information about the dangers of smoking on packages of smokes; it doesn't stop people from smoking but it does make the danger very easy to learn.

Just like we want to know where the food we eat comes from, we want to know where the information comes from. Of course there's the limit of journalists having to keep their sources secret in many cases. But original publisher I think should be possible.

Sounds a little bit like the stories from Feynman, e.g.: https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...

The students had memorized everything, but understood nothing. Add in access to generative AI, and you have the situation that you had with your interview.

It's a good reminder that what we really do, as programmers or software engineers or what you wanna call it, is understanding how computers and computations work.

The proper way to work with git: Commit like a madman on your private branch. Short messages, written in seconds, just to be able to remember what you were doing if you are interrupted and have to get back into your work later. If you have a CI pipeline, often you have to make small changes until it works, so no reason to bother with smart commit messages.

At some point, you will have something working that makes sense that clean up. Then use interactive rebase to create one or a few commits that "makes sense". What makes sense is one of these topics that could create a whole bike garage, but you and your team will have some agreement on it. One thing that I like is to keep pure refactorings by themselves. No one cares to review that you've changed typos in old variables names and things like that. If it's a separate commit, you can just skip over it.

Depending on if you are completely done or not, the resulting branch can be sent as a PR/MR. Make sure that all commits have a reason why the change was made. No reason to repeat what the code says or generate some AI slop message. Your knowledge of why a change was done in a certain way is the most valuable part.

Of course, this way of working fits my work, that is not cloud based in any way and with lots of legacy code. It creates git history that I would like to have if I have to take over old projects or if I have to run git bisect on an unfamiliar code base and figure out some obscure bug. You might have a completely different technology stack and business, where it makes sense to work in some other way with git.

Like that one time the Spotify algorithm found a cool band. Only problem was that they were Chinese. If the name of a band uses some language that's based on some form of the latin alphabet, I can always type something similar to the name and a search engine will find it for me. With Chinese, no chance at all.

You're doing it wrong: You should just feed other peoples AI-generated responses into your own AI tools and let the tool answer for you! The loop is then closed, no human time wasted, and the only effect is wasted energy to run the AI tools. It's the perfect business model to turn energy into money.

Here's one. A great read: https://www.amazon.com/Plentiful-Energy-technology-scientifi...

It's available online also: https://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/PlentifulEnergy.pdf

I read it 14 years ago or so, after the Fukushima accident. I don't think the science has changed since then, or since the 90s when this project was shut down. There continue to be so much money in coal, gas, and oil and it's from there I think most of the opposition to nuclear stems from.

Apart from fast reactors, there's also the traditional reactors and storage of spent fuel. Finland's close to opening their process facility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

I was ready for a deep-dive into things like asyncio in python; where it came from and what problems it promised to solve!

I've become a bit cynic, and I think it will take time until it becomes better. Eventually though, there will be large protests that turn into law that change the dynamics of the now very centralized web.

London was known for having so thick fog from burning coal, and in 1952 it was such a bad event that 4k people died and 100k got badly affected from it. It is was started the Clean Air Act of 1956, that eventually led to clean (cleaner?) air in London.

Another one is Amsterdam. It was a car-centric city up until the 70s, where they started to rebuild it to be a walkable and cyclable city. This started because people protested the dangerous roads, which culminated with the "Stop de Kindermoord" protest.

Maybe if we live long enough, we get to experience a decentralized web again. Next time will come when it's supported by laws, that in turn stand atop a large understanding in the population of why those laws are good and needed.

I also think about this. With the amount of history I've read, I'm not surprised that suddenly there's autocrats that take power. I just wonder, is there some good example from history of what did turn the tide towards democrazy, liberalism, and humanism?

I think a lot of it has to do with inertia; people have made such a great job in the past in the wester world, with infrastructure, education, law, medicine, and so on, that even when real proper idiots take power, most things just continue being good enough. It takes a lot of time for idiots and autocrats to make their impact, which when (hopefully) voters will switch and get good people back in power.

Same when you a few times per year need to write some short bash script. It's really nice to not have to remember how it really works again!

It's like the world turned upside down in the last 20 years. I used to pirate everything as a teenager, and I found it silly that copy right would follow along no matter how anything was encoded. If I XORed copyright material A with open source material B, I would get a strange file C that together with B, I could use to get material A again. Why would it be illegal for me to send anybody B and C, where the strange file C might just as well be thought of as containing the open source material B?!

Now when I've grown up, starting paying for what I want, and seeing the need for some way of content creators to get payed for their work, these AI companies pop up. They encode content into a completely new way and then in some way we should just accept that it's fine this time.

This page was posed here on hacker news a few months ago, and it really shows that this is just what's going on:

https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche...

Maybe another 10 years and we'll be in the spot when these things are considered illegal again?

I imagine there will be the same problems as with Facebook and other large websites, that used their power to promote genocide. If you're in the mood for some horror stories:

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series

When LLM are suddenly everywhere, who's making sure that they are not causing harm? I got the above link from Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/diseconomies-scale/) and if his text there is anything to go by, the large companies producing LLMs will have very little interest in making sure their products are not causing harm.

As someone that speaks English as my second language, the trick of English is to memorize all the exceptions and then accept that the English spelling is just made up to mess with foreigners.

Looking at you, the "b" in debt, that I was pronouncing for a long time growing up and learning a lot of words from reading.

I took up social dancing in my 20s, including salsa and Argentinian tango. I think that it is a very good way to experience the difference between being very good at something and being able to teach.

I've been on courses with some people that are clearly exceptionally good at dancing but are a bit lacking when it comes to teaching. Then I've had the pleasure of having teachers that, while still very good at dancing, would not win the high level competitions. When it comes to teaching though, they are just wonderful to be around. They are exceptionally good at spotting what you are doing wrong and giving you an explanation of how to fix it. Not only that, but they make you feel good about learning.

One concrete memory I have is from a cuban salsa dancer trying to teach me, a poor northern European, how to move like a cuban. His frustration was very noticeable and not making it easier for me! Then an example of the other type of teach, is the crazy Australian tango dancer that not only had fantastically fun and simple workshops, but also spotted and explained simple fixes. When I was struggling with a move, he told me to rotate my foot, which I did, and I stopped struggling. When us attendees in the class talked about some high level move being complicated, he said that it is not at all complicated, and showed us how it's simpler than it appears.

Pair programming if done on task such as "let's make this completely standard thing we've done five times already and need a slight variation of" is horrible. When working with new developers, if they're senior or junior, is great though. It doesn't have to be full days but a few hours a day of pair programming brings someone up to speed incredibly quickly.

When there's hard problems to track down, I think all developers go to pair debugging. If not only for the rubber duck effect.

E-golf had an updated battery in 2017, that increased the capacity by 50%. The 2014 version was sold with 200km (125mi) range, but the real range was closer to 125km (75mi). The 2017 version was sold with a 300km (185mi) range, but 190km (115mi) real range.

The range of both depend on if you drive in cold weather and if you drive on a highway. I bought and E-golf in 2017 that I drove long distance once on the highway when it was -20C (-4F). I then got around one hour of driving and one hour of charging... Do not recommend!

If you want more stats about the cars, this webpage is great:

2014 version: https://ev-database.org/car/1040/Volkswagen-e-Golf

2017 version: https://ev-database.org/car/1087/Volkswagen-e-Golf

A piece of advice I heard many years ago was to not be afraid to throw away code. I've actually used that advice from time to time. It's not really a waste of time to do a `git reset --hard master` if you wrote shit code, but while writing it, you figured out how you should have written the code.

"... relatively short paragraphs (possibly up to a few pages)"

I love things like this that just shows me how much I view the world from a certain perspective. I don't think I've ever had a paragraph even on one page! The closest I know is that some writer, that I forgot the name of, had several pages of stream of consciousness that I think was without paragraphs and punctuations.

When you thought you made "smart" solutions and many years later you have to go in and fix bugs in it, is usually when you learn this.

Next big thing: AI that writes as British football hooligans talk about the referee after a match where their team lost?

I think it's similar with all things that hook into our dopamine centers, like alcohol, food, sugar foods, tobacco, gambling, drugs, games, ... It has to be regulated to the correct amount to benefit society. Outlawing them, like with prohibition in United States, just moves it all to black markets. Having them completely free, as has been the case with all of them at some point, also brings harm to society. Somewhere in between those two points is where it's correctly regulated.

For example, maybe gamling can continue being legal but advertising for it be outlawed or severely restricted? Can gambling have the same sort of warnings as on cigarettes, maybe with children going hungry because the parent gambled away all the money for the month? Another way is that some part of the revenue from gambling could go to programs such as Bolsa Família that you bring up? Or to fight gambling addiction in some way?

That's my pragmatic view of these types of thing: try to find what actually works and hurts society the least. You'll never find any perfect system with no harm anyway.

Yeah, but you have to remember that people answer questions such as "are you an alcoholic" a bit different in different countries. Go to any polish person drinking beer every day and they will say they are of course not an alcoholic (real example).

On the page you linked there's another link to just alcohol consumption: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcohol-c...

It paints a different picture. Also good to know is that Norway and Finland has similar setup, with Vinmonopolet and Alko.

I grew up in Sweden, where strong alcohol is only sold in a state owned company and the same for gambling, so this probably make me have another view of this than people from other countries. I do believe that there has to be some sort of laws around how social media, or really "endless scrolling of content" is done. It's seriously addictive, I feel it myself, and just letting people "be free and choose what to do" results in addicts in real life. If people and society is hurting because of this, it would be good to fix it.

I think that an easy start is to require every platform that has addictive endless scrolling, or endless suggestions for what to watch next, to have a soft limit. After some regular time, information is shown that "you are on an addictive platform and taking breaks from it is good for your mental health". "Algorithms are made to keep your attention, often by making you angry and upset. Remember that this is easily fixed by stepping off this platform". It is basically a version of "smoking kills", or "don't drink and drive", but for the digital age. I think it is an easy thing to legislate (as easy as those things get), still allows people to be "free", and that could actually have a positive effect on the world.