adonovan

5 ms·

31.
by adonovan 7mo ago
> The “will lead astray” part is concerning. If you already have a clear idea in mind, you probably don’t need to have the debate with coworkers. Yeah, I certainly wouldn't trust it to run any distance unattended, and I started this
32.
by adonovan 7mo ago
I’ve been an overt AI hater but have found very recently that, though I still hate a great many things about AI, it has become useful for coding. In 10m Gemini correctly diagnosed and then fixed a bug in a fairly subtle body of code that I
33.
by adonovan 7mo ago
One annoying trope I keep seeing in Gemini output is the punchy invented concept name in a tripartite list: - “The Pledge”:… - “The Turn”:… - “The Prestige”:… (For this particular example I used real terms from the stage magic world, at le
34.
by adonovan 7mo ago
Likewise! I often marvel at the patience of readers of earlier times. Of course, they had more time and fewer distractions, and I suspect that there was a dynamic at work in which both the writer and reader derived a certain satisfaction fr
35.
by adonovan 7mo ago
Good question. We don't know the true figure, but we extrapolate the denominator from estimates of the total number of Go users and the fraction of Go users that run gopls.
36.
by adonovan 7mo ago
Good point: I-cache is memory too. (Indeed it is SRAM, so its bits might be even more fragile than DRAM!)
37.
by adonovan 7mo ago
> "what is the role of humans in a scenario where work is no longer necessary?" People have been fantasizing about this scenario throughout the industrial era--read William Morris' News from Nowhere (1890) for example--but
38.
by adonovan 7mo ago
It's true that in the very early days Google used cheap computers without ECC memory, and this explains the desire for checksums in older storage formats such as RecordIO and SSTable, but our production machines have used ECC RAM for a
39.
by adonovan 7mo ago
Very interesting. The Go toolchain has an (off by default) telemetry system. For Go 1.23, I added the runtime.SetCrashOutput function and used it to gather field reports containing stack traces for crashes in any running goroutine. Since we
40.
by adonovan 7mo ago
Not sure why you were downvoted. I love the breathless enthusiasm of the article, but I still have no idea why (or if) this is important. What did you learn from Opus?
41.
by adonovan 7mo ago
...you would have the same balance as before, because this is not an article about implicit boxing. ;-)
42.
by adonovan 8mo ago
> Hydrogen is the smallest molecule. It leaks through seals, embrittles metals, ... Second smallest, after monatomic Helium molecules (which have similar problems of storage, embrittlement, and leakage).
43.
by adonovan 8mo ago
They certainly could be prosecuted; see https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-chicago-urges-doj-t... . But at this point the DoJ acts more like Trump's personal law firm.
44.
by adonovan 8mo ago
Full determinism is also highly prized by compiler writers because it massively simplifies the task of reproducing and debugging problematic executions.
45.
by adonovan 8mo ago
They are cognate: cochineal is a red dye derived from a red insect a little bit like a ladybug.
46.
by adonovan 8mo ago
The lesson of the post is that Go is compiled to machine-specific object code mapped to a non-writable text segment in an OS-specific process. What's really magical is that compilers save you from such dangerous and non-portable detail
47.
by adonovan 8mo ago
Sure, but in combinatorics the number of atoms in the universe (say 1e80) is not a large number. For example, the factorial of 59 is larger. If you own 30 pairs of shoes, there are factorial(60) ways to arrange the individual shoes in a seq
48.
by adonovan 9mo ago
I see what you did there.
49.
by adonovan 9mo ago
I think you should change the cherries to a battery and call the game Correct Horse Battery Stable.
50.
by adonovan 9mo ago
> The one big problem: gopls. We need the first line of the script to be without spaces... Specifically the problem here is automated reformatting. Gopls typically does this on save as you are editing, but it is good practice for your CI
51.
by adonovan 9mo ago
My coworkers learn, and an important part of my job is teaching them. LLM-based tools don't.
52.
by adonovan 9mo ago
Predicting is easy. Predicting correctly less so.
53.
by adonovan 10mo ago
This (amazing) hypothesis has been challenged by new evidence; see for example https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4780611/ .
54.
by adonovan 10mo ago
Also, the temperature is not high enough (compared to the steam coming out of a gas/oil/nuclear plant) to obtain much work from the waste heat.
55.
by adonovan 10mo ago
> England “gave up” scientific and technological leadership during the 20th century. (That’s a tongue-in-cheek take on it, don’t read too much into it.) Was forced to give up, due to the economic devastation of WWII, might be more accura
56.
by adonovan 10mo ago
“A lone coder, trained in the direct manipulation of symbols—an elegant weapon from a more civilized age—-is now all that stands between humanity and darkness.” etc
57.
by adonovan 10mo ago
“Formulas that update backwards” is the main idea behind neural networks such as LLMs: the computation network produces a value, the error in this value is computed, and then the error quantity is pushed backward through the network; this r
58.
by adonovan 10mo ago
Notably this Onion piece was added to the home page of MIT’s architecture department the year my cohort of grad students moved from LCS into the newly opened Stata center. The building was was fun to explore, but had a number of defects th
59.
by adonovan 11mo ago
Go read about the Black Death.
60.
by adonovan 11mo ago
Also reading framed as “beating the competition”. Why does it have to be zero sum?

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