xen0

It seems the voucher codes they 'find' are not the result of them searching the Web.

They are simply codes provided by partnered businesses and may be beaten by codes you can get by searching yourself.

If true, then this is them outright lying to the user.

And you know, if they don't find a coupon code for you, one might still be at least a little annoyed that the original 'salesman' didn't get their affiliate commission; it instead being pinched by another.

Huh, don't know how I missed that. I was hoping for them to have done some analysis themselves.

Glancing through the code for some of the 'easier' problems Claude (his best performer), it seems to have broadly correct (if a little strange and overwrought) code.

But my phone is not a good platform for me to do this kind of reading.

I'm a bit curious to see how close the solutions were.

When it couldn't solve it within the constraints, was it 'broadly correct' with some bugs? Was it on the right track or completely off?

RIP Spadge.

I spent a lot of time on the Team 17 forum when I was young, and it was nice that he engaged with the community as much as he did.

I think 'bit' risks confusing storage with the type (a Boolean is often stored using at least a byte, not a single bit).

I too can invent numbers.

My invented numbers say there's no meaningful difference in line counts between statically typed and dynamically typed languages.

So how will we prove any of us wrong?

I'm reminded of one of my Maths lecturers.

He argued that most proofs really only involve one insightful step. Really difficult ones might require two.

The rest is just 'turning the wheel'; each step is just doing the only thing you can do. The point of practice is to make those steps obvious; to learn to turn the wheel.

I guess when it comes to looking at core dumps, I don't even know where the wheel is, let alone how to turn it because it's something I have never done. It maintains that air of magic to me.

Wouldn't want your root kit to introduce an unwanted security vulnerability.

Sometimes I start to feel like I'm pretty good at what I do.

Then I read one Raymond's investigations like this and realise I'm still not that good.

> It is yet inevitable

The cool thing for you is that this statement is unfalsifiable.

But what I really took issue with was your timeframe in the original comment. Your statements imply you fully expect AGI to be a thing within a couple of years. I do not.

What makes you think AGI is either here or imminent?

For me the current systems still clearly fall short of that goal.

I really do wonder who these engineers are, that the current 'AI' tools are able to write so much of their code.

Maybe my situation is unusual; I haven't written all that much code at Google lately, but what I do write is pretty tied to specific details of the program and the AI auto completion is just not that useful. Sometimes it auto completes a method signature correctly, but it never gets the body right (or even particularly close).

And it routinely making up methods or fields on objects I want to use is anti productive.

Smoking, in many countries, is no longer aggressively advertised (if it's advertised at all).

Gambling in some of those same countries is now very aggressively advertised.

The intersection of paths taken by pedestrians and trains is much more limited than that for pedestrians and cars.

And notably, trains don't stop for pedestrians.

Or another way:

Roads are a shared resource. Train tracks are not.

You need the increased space, which means you have the traffic waves.

You need the space because of variations in cars; some have better brakes than others, some may be heavier so need more time to slow down, others may be on wetter patch of road, etc.

And one car may not even get the signal, so only slows down when it observes the vehicle ahead of it doing, an observation that needs time.

Or a car starts accelerating as the one in front just stalls.

It may all be better than human reaction times, but for robustness, which is really very necessary, you're going to get the same dynamics.

And this all assumes only good actors; somewhat optimistic in my view.

We already have systems that permit pedestrians to cross with priority over cars; they don't need lights.

They don't scale to really busy streets, and one of the failure modes would be perpetually blocked vehicles.

And this still leaves other road users that aren't autonomous cars up in the air.

If you want to avoid traffic 'waves', so all vehicles accelerate and decelerate at the same time, you must remove _everything_ that might introduce unexpected variance.

Which basically removes people.

A simple fact is that faster moving traffic is necessarily less dense; the gaps between vehicles must be larger to account for small variations that matter more and more at speed.

This is a terrible world for pedestrians, bicycles, or anything other than an autonomous vehicle.

Sometimes when writing 'fiddly' code, I'll have a bug.

But I can't find the bug. I get the wrong answers but can't trace it through the logic.

Maybe it's a dumb thing like a missing index increment? Or a missing assignment and I just can't see it.

Maybe it's easier to just tear down the mess and write it again.

This is how I feel whenever I deal with AI generated code.

And here I am using QWES.

I find it much more ergonomic to have the three fingers on the same row.

And L Ctrl is not a stretch at all. Although for some reason I usually bind L Alt to crouch...

On the other hand, an advantage with using a valid 'zero' value as a default state is that nothing will break when given it.

It's a perfectly valid location whereas 'sentinel' values are not.

Given US presidential elections have, twice in my lifetime, been won by person with fewer votes than another, this would not be a concerning change.

Going to bed early and waking up early (relative to my schedule today) is something I _can_ do.

I had to do it for several years.

I felt like absolute shit every morning. I felt sick and couldn't eat before 10.

Every Day.

I don't have that now I can get up later.

So what are you for?

The largest forms of tax revenue in the UK are, in order:

* Income Tax

* National Insurance

* VAT

* Corporation Tax

In terms of amounts received, the first is by far the largest and is overwhelmingly paid by 'higher earners'. The top 50 % pay over 90% of it. The top 1% pay ~30% of it.

National Insurance is less progressive. I would argue that should change but it is what it is.

I can't argue against VAT being regressive, but breakdown of 'amount of VAT paid by income' isn't available.

Ok, so who is paying for health care?

Because it isn't the 'disadvantaged', many of whom are going to need it.

How else does a state apply pressure? The health implications are real; this stuff was cheap and available and market forces kept them there.

Cigarettes and alcohol are heavily taxed. A similar racket?

Would you prefer an outright ban?

Lactase persistence is somewhat focused in Europe, being the norm in the more northern countries.

That doesn't sound right...

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

The most industrialised countries in the dataset correlate with the lowest belief.

But the population in those areas is not increasing much, unlike the others.

Unfortunately, neither China nor India are in the dataset.