Sharlin

17 ms·

361.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
The cynic in me is wondering whether it's more about how revealing how the sausage is made might bring bad publicity.
362.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Languages were simpler (except for certain ones, like C++ which was a beast even in 1992), and incredibly complex and magical optimizers weren’t yet a thing, never mind a feature expected of a "passable" compiler. One could still
363.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
And this is because Ptolemy’s catalog in which he ranked stars by their apparent brightness on a scale of one to six, one being the brightest. Ptolemy’s scale was (much later) retrofitted to a log scale (base 100^(1/5) or about 2.512),
364.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
It's one and the same, or rather, one is a special case of the other. The homogeneous coordinate system used to represent affine transforms in R^n using linear transforms in R^(n+1) is exactly the same as what is used to represent proj
365.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
That's just being pedantic for the sake of pedantry. "Era" can refer to just about any period of time longer than a year or so. With fast-moving technology two years ago can feel like prehistory.
366.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
It's unfortunate, but what can you do? It's where players are, for better or worse.
367.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
When it comes to AI, it really does seem so.
368.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Fortunately we have type systems to encode many contracts at compile time, including stuff like optionality. Certainly no modern language would still repeat Hoare’s "billion dollar mistake"? Right? …Oh.
369.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Yep, the unfortunate flipside of "let's use stem cells to rebuild stuff" is always "let's use stem cells to give us cancer". Technology might help alleviate the cancer part compared to blind evolution, hopefull
370.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
I just reflected a bit on the fact that there’s essentially nothing but foliage and slivers of sky visible from the windows of the apartment I currently live in, unless you’re right next to a window getting a particularly wide view. Perks o
371.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Great article. Small nitpick though: while I understand that P3 deserves specific mention because it’s so ubiquitous now, it’s not like Apple invented the idea of wide-gamut displays. Adobe RGB, commonly used by wide-gamut computer monitors
372.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
In many cases, NonMaxU64 and NonMinI64 (aka SymmetricI64) would be much more useful though. But Rust is aiming to eventually add a more general way to create types with user-defined ranges, such as the "pattern types" feature curr
373.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Given that this specific style is the result of being reinforced over and over again via RLHF, "inadvertently" isn't really the word I'd use.
374.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
On desktop (Firefox) at least if I navigate to another folder, the URL changes but the browser back button doesn't change the view back to inbox. On mobile (iOS Safari), if I open an email, then try to navigate back, it takes me all th
375.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
The Outlook web app breaks browser navigation, I thought we had that figured out in SPAs like, more than a decade ago. But it does load almost-instantly (less than a second) so that's nice at least.
376.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
It's Copilot all the way down.
377.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
I’m pretty sure we have bread in plastic bags in Europe too. At least here in the less civilized regions. In these parts they’re usually the plastic-clad aluminum wire sort though.
378.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
I would counter that: a) it seems likely to me that in the end, few normal people know what to do with the ability to create their own software for their private use, b) getting bespoke software working on the platforms that the majority of
379.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Honestly, what are the positive viewpoints of generative AI in the end? Are there others major ones than the following? * My vibe coding machine goes brrrrt and that's all I care about * My college essay cheating machine goes brrrt a
380.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Astronaut meme: it was never about cost savings
381.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
I'm pretty sure I've seen this in Black Mirror .
382.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
It’s not cross-platform if the platform is the browser… Lot of vibed nonsense in the README in general.
383.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Except if you pay them for a support contract. So there is a way, and it's actually a pretty obvious way.
384.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
To be fair, I don't think anyone is claiming that the process is anywhere close to formal. The word "vibe" implies anything except formality. What Perlis probably meant that formal methods are useless unless you already hav
385.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
(It's an old, old joke.)
386.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
There was a time when stuff like "Unreal Engine, trending on ArtStation, 8K resolution" actually worked when prompting image gen models because such labels actually correlated with higher-quality images in the web-crawled training
387.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Editors (as in, the human kind) are not co-writers either.
388.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
I remember back in the 2010s the debates between "oracle" and "agent" AGIs, and the arguments that AGIs that only answer questions would be safe and certainly nobody would ever be stupid enough to just let an AGI out of
389.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
(This is correct in many jurisdictions but not in all; for example moral rights are not a thing everywhere.)
390.
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Nope. Copyright simply doesn't work like that. Unless there's real human creativity involved in the process, they can't just claim copyright to LLM output.

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