bccdee

36 ms·

631.
by bccdee 2y ago
But I've read the book, and her solution to the "bottles of beer" problem involves encoding all the logic into an elaborate class hierarchy! I'm not rabidly anti-OOP, but the point at which I turn against it is when the
632.
by bccdee 2y ago
A lot of people see anything other than a Black & Decker drip coffee pot or a Keurig pod machine as "hipster coffee," somehow. But being perceived as hipsterish is the only thing that makes something hipsterish, so they can&#x
633.
by bccdee 2y ago
> A personal tutor might be able to teach a concept to all their students, whereas not everyone in a classroom passes. Why are you convinced that personal tutors are so much more effective? I'd expect the average student to be sligh
634.
by bccdee 2y ago
Do you always need that kind of prolonged argument whenever you learn a new concept? > Sometimes the YouTube video is more helpful than the private tutor. University lectures work like that. First the general lecture, which has 300 stu
635.
by bccdee 2y ago
Well, everyone's a kid for the first few years of their life, and children require a lot of care. The elderly require care. The unwell require care. Everyone wants care some of the time. We do have cultural institutions to do much of t
636.
by bccdee 2y ago
That's how getting old works, yes. You lose the ability to take care of yourself and begin to depend on others. Do you really think infirmity is something that can be avoided with the right grindset?
637.
by bccdee 2y ago
> the only imperative superior to ideology is survival I think it's more that well-meaning ideologues are easily replaced by self-serving pragmatists in post-revolutionary turmoil. There were plenty of Marxists in Russia vying for p
638.
by bccdee 2y ago
> free education Public schools are notoriously uncaring. It's expensive private schools which can afford to have small class sizes, so the teachers can develop personal relationships with the students. "Care" in this cont
639.
by bccdee 2y ago
I feel like you missed the point completely. Did you read the article at all? The social workers in the article are also professionals working for a paycheck. The operative difference is that a baker produces bread: If they can produce (say
640.
by bccdee 2y ago
Yeah but Megalopolis is, lmao. From the Wikipedia plot summary: > Crassus and Wow throw a decadent wedding reception. Ironically, the headliner is pop star Vesta Sweetwater, who appeals to New Rome's puritanical sensibilities by p
641.
by bccdee 2y ago
It seems like this review can find little to praise beyond the abstract idea of a benevolent visionary who struggles against a world full of philistines. I thought Kate Wagner's review was a lot more insightful: > Even though archit
642.
by bccdee 2y ago
> Ada did it first and it does not rule the world. Well I mean, Ada didn't do "it" first—"it" being whatever Rust did that led to it making such a big splash. If Ada had done that first, it would have made the
643.
by bccdee 2y ago
I was familiar with Ada, but I wasn't aware that it had an ownership system like Rust that could guarantee memory safety. So I looked it up, and the first result was a paper called "Safe Dynamic Memory Management in Ada and SPARK&
644.
by bccdee 2y ago
I'm not arguing that Go wasn't well-made. But "having good tooling early on" isn't a new paradigm. Neither is message-based concurrency. The new paradigm Rust introduced was compiler-enforced memory and concurrency
645.
by bccdee 2y ago
Yeah I should clarify that Go considers itself to be an incremental improvement on the Java/C# paradigm. You could certainly argue that it oversimplifies things.
646.
by bccdee 2y ago
Go is an incremental improvement over Java and C#. I like it, but it tried extremely hard not to break new ground, and it succeeded at that. Java and Ruby and Python (odd how all these languages came out at almost the exactly the same time)
647.
by bccdee 2y ago
That is static though. It may not conform to a particular notion of aesthetic purity, but a website is static if and only if you can serve it from a static file server. Client-side scripting is orthogonal to that.
648.
by bccdee 2y ago
A dynamic website is generated by the server in response to client queries. Static websites—pre-existing flat html files served as-is to viewers—came first, then PHP and CGI made dynamic websites possible & popular. SSR is the very defi
649.
by bccdee 2y ago
It made it into the Linux kernel, and it's still a relatively young language. I don't think any language has made such a large impact since Java or Javascript, both of which are nearly 30 years old now.
650.
by bccdee 2y ago
> Both early Unix and C compilers had simple structures, are easy to port, require few machine resources to run, and provide about 50%-80% of what you want from an operating system and programming language. > Unix and C are the ultima
651.
by bccdee 2y ago
Not really. Today's mediocre code is tomorrow's technical debt. LLMs often inject subtle bugs or misunderstand the context they're being used in and have to be badgered into respecting the parameters of requests. Would you ra
652.
by bccdee 2y ago
"A good cyclist using training wheels will go circles around a good cyclist who doesn't." No, training wheels only help bad cyclists. You can't generalize that and assume they will make a good cyclist even better. AIs ge
653.
by bccdee 2y ago
Stack exchange answers make up a tiny fraction of LLM training data. They've dumped the source of every open-source project on the internet into those things. They've been trained on plenty of high-quality code; the trouble is tha
654.
by bccdee 2y ago
Compilers actually output the binary that you ask them to, though. If all a compiler did was spit out a slurry of buggy assembly that misunderstands its context and has to be carefully scrutinized for errors, I would still be writing assemb
655.
by bccdee 2y ago
> A plant creeping toward sunlight isn't aware of the sunlight. Why not? Because the plant isn't conscious? Awareness can't be defined in terms of consciousness if consciousness itself is defined in terms of awareness—that
656.
by bccdee 2y ago
By consciousness, I mean my ineffable sense of here -ness and me -ness; the feeling that all the subjective experiences of my senses, redness and coldness and pleasure and longing are all "real things" happening to a "real
657.
by bccdee 2y ago
> [Sensing is] ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness. What does "awareness" mean to you? How can we tell whether one thing is aware of another? I would consider "x is aware of y" to only mean (fundamen
658.
by bccdee 2y ago
> The camera is not sensing, and is not reflecting on anything. What is sensing, if not ingesting data from sensors? What is reflecting upon something, if not processing data related to that thing? What is self-awareness, if not processi
659.
by bccdee 2y ago
Suppose I wrote a paper about how the low oxygen content on Mars means that Martian leprechauns, should they exist, must have extra-large lungs in order to thrive on the surface. Is this a sensible scientific publication? It's not wro
660.
by bccdee 2y ago
> the ability to process external stimuli via senses A camera does this. > You have the ability to reflect on your experiences. So does a camera pointed at a mirror. It captures sensory data about its own activity and then processes t

More ›