stevedonovan

The default model they are using for Web search is getting capable and is very visible. And now it invites people to keep asking questions.

They are quietly trying to become the chatbot that everyone uses to look things up. That strikes me as an intelligent move - not everything has to be done by an expensive frontier model.

Hypomania is very irritating, and can actually mess up a person's life. It's a neurotic defense mechanism that's opposite to depression

You could write in the language you are most eloquent in and prompt a bot to do a faithful translation.

Post both versions

Except for the power-to-weight problem. Would need very big wings!

Codex generates solid Rust in my experience. Just needs a little style guidance

It was my first taste of Swift, and has destroyed any lingering curiosity I had about it.

Yep, there's always syntax, whether it's 'friendly' or not.

And it still isn't natural language, where you can paraphrase, use synonyms etc. Good job for an LLM

But are they writing? In that specific sense of high prestige communication? Sounds like stolen aura.

Now, code by Gen AI is straightforward in comparison. Coding is not writing poetry, even if the lines also don't reach the right margin

"This post could have been a tweet", and so on.

It's a lovely metaphor for the soulful business of doing something really well, even if there is no 'market' for that kind of quality

I've been getting great results from Codex. Can be a bit slow, but gets there. Writes good Rust, powers through integration test generation.

So (again) we are just sharing anecdata

Heh,I read SF as San Francisco; point remains true. Except the Valley wants to force a future, not describe it

It's not inconsistent to say there's a financial bubble and also genuinely think it's a new era for software development.

There aren't enough programmers to justify the valuations and capex

These are a few well-chosen dependencies for a serious project.

Rust projects can really go bananas on dependencies, partly because it's so easy to include them

So the cognitive reality of being a billionaire is now available to everyone?

But this is one thing that Gen AI is genuinely good at, constructing computer programs under close human supervision. It's also the most profitable (but not enough to justify valuations) Also, it may be a big thing here but its pretty niche in the larger scheme of things

The article is about it encroaching in the domain of human communications. Mass adoption is the only way to justify the incredible financial promises.

So much for the old thermonuclear ramjet idea....

This is how Option works with ? in Rust. But short-circuiting in an expression does make sense

Is this not more a Cargo thing? Cargo is obsessed with correct builds and eventually the file system fills up with old artifacts.

(I know, I have to declare Cargo bankruptcy every few weeks and do a full clean & rebuild)

Ah, Elon paying attention to hid companies again!

Context poisoning is not a uniquely LLM problem

I agree, it's hopelessly over-cheerful and tries to be cute. The pizza metaphor fell flat for me as well

Ah, Edge/Bing went through this phase recently. A split personality, where sensible stuff appeared on the left, and Copilot laboriously typing on the right. I disabled it, really did not add anything to the experience.

Yes, same feeling I had, but with dual mode; can be compiled as a 'standalone' service over HTTP/REST (or whatever) and _also_ compiled as a classic module with a strictly defined interface.

One cool thing about standalone services which needs to be factored in is that they can be spun up and debugged very easily. But for deployment, we pay for all the network latency/marshaling overhead, and coordination complexity.

So, best of both worlds? As for polyglot, there does have to be a shared platform (C ABI, JVM, etc). (Go doesn't play so nicely with other languages due to goroutine stack allocation.)

Yes, and at least StackOverflow will often give you some minority opinion, not just a snippet to be pasted into your code. Especially if something a little tricky like cryptography.

Consider this classic: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12122159/how-to-do-a-htt...

Exactly. We learn to speak our mother tongue without instruction, but need to learn to write. And what is actually happening is training in putting thoughts out in a linear fashion, and debugging them. That's been the core of the curriculum for about 2500 years.

I suppose async web servers is the poster child of async, and drove a lot of the development. However, then _everything_ went async, adding the cognitive overhead of dealing with Rust async throughout the ecosystem, whether needed or not.

In short, it still feels like a leaky abstraction: marvelous to look at working code, but errors (both compile and run-time) expose the underlying machinery underneath the syntactical sugar.

This is probably heresy, but as a former Rust dev I'm enjoying web-services in Go more these days.

I've honestly never noticed the problem, so I never saw the problem with X in the first place.

(It is possible that I have never experienced a truly beautiful desktop, but my eyes are no longer particularly precise enough to operate at modern pixel densities)

Yes, the newtype pattern in Rust works very well, say to wrap a string. The somewhat annoying thing is that it is born without any properties so you have to teach it to be comparable, etc from scratch.

The newtype pattern in Go is easier to use, but isn't strict enough - your wrapped string can still appear directly in a string concatenation without a cast. Any wrapped integer can still be used to index a slice! Considering how careful the language is with mixed arithmetic (can't add uint8 to uint16 without casting) this feels like an oversight.

I would find such a lag very irritating, but it's fine on Linux. Using Bash for years and I realized that I could never remember all its corner cases - fish is much easier to fit in the head. And _personally_ I don't need to be POSIX. (The function loading system is pretty simple and makes so much damn sense after years of .profile etc)

Remember, using a loop is not a sin! (And I would hate us to get to the point where loops are automatically considered kindergarten code)

The ecosystem delivers a lot of pre-packaged essential complexity - e.g. only now Rust is starting to get the mature libraries to handle difficult domain-specific things. It is hard to program from scratch (no pun intended)