tyg13

Yeah, the problem with "not fighting it" is that you'll naturally do what feels the best in the moment, and having fun will always feel the best in the moment over doing something boring.

The fall only comes later when all your having fun leads to a lot of not having fun (work piles up, relationships sever, projects fail etc.) I find living in a certain amount of fear of fun is healthy. If I feel like I've been having fun for too long, I've probably been neglecting something important that is going to really ruin my fun later.

I say all this, as I scroll through HackerNews looking for hits of dopamine instead of continuing trying to fix the CI issues that have been paralyzing my work for almost a day now. That's not good to be a fun conversation in my 1-1 if I ignore it for much longer...

pretty sure Krugman himself said his prediction was intentionally pessimistic to counter the hyper-optimism of his peers. and in fairness, he wrote that at the height of the dot-com bubble.

actually, thinking about it more, I wonder if we'll see something similar with LLMs where, the bubble will eventually pop, but the technology won't disappear, and we'll see it quietly improve and integrate further into our lives over time. probably not that wild of a prediction to make, but I do wonder still

Ah, but you see, it was a general purpose programming language. A general purpose, functional, optionally-typed programming language, with its own optimizing compiler and build system. In fairness, it wasn't originally developed to be our in-house language, but it was the creation of the CTO.

It was fun while it lasted and I had a lot of fun working on it. But it was really not a good business fit. The programmatic macro system was supposed to allow us to build customer-facing DSLs on top of it, but everybody just wanted Python anyways.

Yup, and every time it breaks, you've got to pester someone whose job probably isn't maintaining that thing actively.

I worked at a startup with massive NIH syndrome, once. We even used our own in-house programming language, because it was "better than anything else out there on the market." It did have a lot of nifty features that others don't have: a pretty novel type system, programmatic macros, a built-in build system and other fun bells and whistles -- but also not-so-fun ones like having no syntax highlighter, LSP, or debugger, and having to constantly shuffle around your code to avoid ICEs in the compiler.

The compiler wasn't the product, but we found ourselves fighting that thing more actively than any of the real problems our custom programming language was supposed to solve. The CTO found himself spending all his nights and weekends mostly trying to get the compiler to not explode.

A few years later, after I had long left (for that reason, among many) I heard they switched to Python. Can't imagine how long it took them to get that all rewritten.

Must we always see this restated every time? It's getting a bit stale always seeing these kinds of comments on articles about LLM.

The incessant need to constantly leave "the code doesn't work like <bad implementation>, it works like <good implementation>" frustrates me to no end. No amount of directions against it in project MEMORY, CLAUDE.md, or even embedded in the prompt seem to be able to stop it from doing this. I don't understand how it could have gotten into the training because I've legitimately never seen an actual person write code comments like this.

I too have settled into a kind of dual Claude/GPT model setup. I will often use one to review the other's work, or critique the other's plan in some way. Sometimes I'll have Claude implement a feature one way, then have GPT do it the other way, then have them both review each other's implementation. Then synthesize a final plan from the previous implementations+reviews.

I might just be having fun with models, but I have actually noticed their capabilities vary somewhat, and so my (perhaps vain) hope is that by using both, one can catch each the other's blindspots. It's still unclear to me if that's consistently happening, but I am making substantial progress in my personal and professional projects, so something seems to be working.

most large companies, maybe, but small-to-medium-sized businesses can and will tell you to take a hike. there are no consumer protections in the US regarding returns beyond the goodwill of the company

Exactly. You as the programmer know that the loop counter won't overflow, and in general, essentially nobody would actually write it that way. But if you don't assume it can't happen, the possibility for signed overflow is everywhere in address computations.

This is also a major blocker for auto-vectorization. Can't coalesce a load of a[i], a[i+1], a[i+2], a[i+3] into a load of a[i:i+3] if there's a possibility that `i+1`, `i+2` or `i+3` wrapped around (thus causing your "contiguous" load to be non-contiguous). This is a big reason why you shouldn't use `unsigned` for loop counters, especially if they're going to be used as an index into an address calculation.

I see what you're going for, but I don't see how your example is UB. If `p` is a pointer, and, after your `if (p)` check, `p` is dereferenced unconditionally, then yes, your check for `p == NULL` could be removed, and the code under the `if` would be removed as well. But the example you've constructed is not UB.

Exactly. I see this common idea trotted out that "where there's a will, there's a way" -- if the government bans something, the ban will never be effective, because people still want that thing, and so a ban will just encourage violating the law.

But that's highly contingent on that thing being something people are willing to violate the law over, and on the convenience of that thing not being significantly impacted by prohibition. Neither of which are true for prediction betting (it's almost identical to sports betting in that regard, imo.) The only reason these markets proliferate is precisely because they are legal.

No, you don't understand. We're...

- mining the 95th percentile, leveraging the Pareto Principle

- optimizing and ubiquitizing under-optimized paradigms

- pioneering agentic solutions to aggressively expand product frontiers

- innovating high-risk strategies to serve underserved markets

- digging deep into the inner recesses of my being and extracting what's left of my soul through my nostrils

And so much more.

Yeah, actually I completely agree with you. This discussion has gotten way out of hand.

I don't think that altruism is specific to Christianity. I clarified that in a sibling comment (which you seemed to indicate you had read?), and that what I meant was Christianity specifically requires that good deeds must be purely altruistic. It's not considered true charity to do something with the expectation of any kind of reward. Am I wrong in thinking this is distinctly Christian? I'm genuinely interested.

If you were interested in demonstrating my lack of education, I'm not sure you have done so.

But I'm happy to conclude this exchange with your feeling satisfied on that point. I don't imagine you're interested in an actual debate on substance, given that your only argument is essentially that I'm ignorant, and I don't know what I'm talking about.

Thank you for lending your expertise in this matter.

Why not eliminate tax entirely, then? Is that a conclusion you'd support?

> The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.

Much can be said about the problem of government waste, and it certainly is a problem, but there's an underlying assumption in this kind of talk, which I'd like to attack. That assumption is: "people are poor because the government taxes them too much, and wastes their money". Republicans in the US run and win on this platform again and again.

The problem is that it's simply not true. Government wealth has been falling for decades[0] -- nations are increasingly rich, but governments are increasingly poor. I don't even need to include a source that shows effective tax rates have been falling for the same period (no surprise -- that's _why_ governments are so relatively poor). As nations have continued to get richer, most of that wealth has been concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small group of private individuals.

Governments are not sequestering your wealth -- rich people are.

[0]: https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-3/

26% AI generated? What does that even mean? How is Pangram arriving at that figure?

> Nobody wants to give away a slice of their net worth to pay for bullshit wars and ballrooms.

The vast majority of people in America are already doing this, because their wealth is entirely derived from their income. Your complaint isn't relevant to the discussion of wealth vs income taxes.

Sure, I never claimed that Christians invented charity. They're certainly not even the only religion that advocates universal charity.

To be clear, what I see as distinctly Christian is the idea that charity must be purely altruistic -- it's not seen as Christian to desire recognition for your charity, or to perform charitable acts with the hope of being rewarded with eternal salvation. They must be done purely out of duty to God, and love for others (which are essentially identical requirements, since "God is love").

But if there's ignorance behind that thought, I'm open to being educated.

> Everyone's job is to please their manager.

Indeed. I've spent my professional career seeking out positions at companies of increasing prestige and technical renown, each with a higher reputation for professionalism and performance than the last. And yet this invariant has held in every position.

As far as I can tell, the only difference between each company has been the quality of the manager I was supposed to please, which I have noticed (perhaps predictably) is not strongly correlated with the company's reputation or success.

The vast majority of people tuning into those kinds of slop streams are not really active listeners. It's more akin to turning on the radio while you work/clean/perform some other task that doesn't require strict focus or attention, with the added benefit that you can personally interact with the streamer (chat) when you have attention to spare. But I'd wager most viewers never directly interact or even pay much active attention to the stream at all.

I wouldn't be surprised if the same dynamic is playing out with these AI slop podcasts.

Not only have you misinterpreted my comment to attack claims I never made, you've also used this misinterpretation as license to insult me. Lovely.

I don't think you can really escape this anywhere online. Hacker News has the same problem, really.

I'd even argue that we should encourage _more_ of this behavior, if it leads to more charity.

The idea that you have to do good deeds without expecting any kind of reward or recognition seems distinctly Christian to me. For Christians, the intent of this requirement is to ensure people remain humble (pride is a sin, of course) but this clearly contradicts the (imo much more relevant) principle of self interest. You can't really expect people to do something for other people without some kind of reward -- be it the promise of eternal salvation, some kind of social credit, or simply an internal sense of satisfaction.

As long as people aren't merely simulating charity to receive it, I don't see any downside to allowing people a bit of social reward for their giving.

The way some people talk about AI is so distinctly religious to me. The comment above reads like some perverse prophecy. The author is clear to indicate that it's only supposition, but it induces a sort of second-hand embarrassment in me to hear someone talk about "Claude's Law" without a shred of irony.

Not really sure you gain much, either. Unless false confidence is your goal.

I've noticed a prevailing narrative (mostly observed on Reddit) that DLSS 5 "rewrites" artistic intent, painting NVIDIA as sort of carelessly slopifying games without any care for aesthetic in the sole pursuit of selling more AI. I don't really see any confirmation of that on the technical side, and personally I agree with you, I think the results look completely fine, but I guess there's no accounting for taste.

Part of me wants to just chalk it up to general AI backlash, but it also feels like there's a bit more there that I can't quite put my finger on. Gamers just generally being a contentious and picky demographic? I'm not sure.

This is only true if people's want for it exceeds their want to not break the law.

For illegal drugs, people who want them want them a lot, so them being illegal isn't a strong deterrent; although, legalization has still absolutely increased the number of users (i.e. legality was acting as an effective deterrent for some.)

For illegal gambling, sure _some_ people won't be deterred by legality, but most people aren't hardcore gambling addicts; they're just engaging as a form of "harmless fun." They're not looking to go to jail to toss $20 on a sports game.

No, I only use the finest, home-grown, naturally-produced Human Brain slop to make my comments.