bccdee

53 ms·

781.
by bccdee 4y ago
This is only true if you accept an extremely myopic view of storytelling. A Song of Ice and Fire is about the illegitimacy of the Lannisters' reign, the choice to execute Ned Stark for discovering it, and the ensuing civil wars. Ned
782.
by bccdee 4y ago
> My skills continue to improve, but ChatGPT’s are improving faster. It’s a matter of time. Nah, I don't think there's any way that LLMs can totally circumvent the problems of pervasive hallucination and low-quality output. The
783.
by bccdee 4y ago
The paradox they were referring to was A := (B), B := !(A). That's not a expressiveness issue, that's just a dependency cycle—there's no reason to allow it.
784.
by bccdee 4y ago
The problem with basic programming questions like this is that there are a million elementary online tutorials for doing this or that with a json schema. "Simple programming questions based on commonly-used technology" are somethi
785.
by bccdee 4y ago
Who is he being rude or condescending to? The `<h2>`s? He's not actually talking to anyone—he imagined up a non-technical conversation partner and he's being dismissive to them as a writing device to express how sick he is o
786.
by bccdee 4y ago
I think real arrays are the exception to this rule. They're the only non-posix shell feature I use consistently. Otherwise, whenever you want to gather a list of strings or filenames and then iterate through them, you need to worry abo
787.
by bccdee 4y ago
Git was the future, though. Git is the present. It's dominated for the past decade, and it's only grown more dominant during that time.
788.
by bccdee 4y ago
"Stan" has been fairly mainstream slang for about twenty years [1]. Being out of touch with popular culture is not a sign of Orwellian thought control. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_(song)
789.
by bccdee 4y ago
Bob Martin has made a real effort to tie himself to the specific phrase "clean code." If the author of this article had referred to clean code without using quotation marks, or talked about managing software complexity using any o
790.
by bccdee 4y ago
The language centres of our brain don't know what a dog is, but they can take the word "dog" and express it on a level that the logic centres of our brain can use. I don't know if "comprehending" is the right w
791.
by bccdee 4y ago
You could argue that GPT has a model of meaning somewhere inside of it, but that's besides the point. If that meaning is hiding latent inside GPT, then it's not accessible to any other system which might want to use GPT as an inte
792.
by bccdee 4y ago
> So people are going to be even more blindsided when someone develops an AI that uses GPT as its language comprehension component I don't think that would work, because GPT doesn't actually comprehend anything. Comprehension r
793.
by bccdee 4y ago
This draws a false dichotomy between "people use X" and "nobody uses X." There's actually a sliding scale of how many people use X. When a thing is illegal, fewer people will use it and the people who do use it will
794.
by bccdee 4y ago
Memento [1] is a pretty famous example of a movie which defies basically all structural prescriptions except for the basic flow of tension and resolution innate to all narratives. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me
795.
by bccdee 4y ago
That formula does not fit every story ever told, or even every popular story. Consider a romance story, where the protagonist doesn't "bring it back to share" at the end, because their journey is entirely personal. Or wildern
796.
by bccdee 4y ago
I think the questions raised about creativity by generative neural nets have pretty simple answers. Creativity requires a certain amount of thought put into it: A writer doesn't just mash other pieces of writing together into their own
797.
by bccdee 4y ago
This sounds like a nightmare lmao. Can you imagine trying to debug a system like this? Backend work is trawling through thousands of lines of carefully thought-out code trying to figure out where the bug is—I can't fathom trying to w
798.
by bccdee 4y ago
A great alternative for stuff like that is https://kdl.dev/ , which feels much more natural for DSLs.
799.
by bccdee 4y ago
I wouldn't say the best writing is invisible. But writing is an instrument to convey meaning. A pretty tool which doesn't do its job is no tool at all; meanwhile, even an ugly tool can build something beautiful.
800.
by bccdee 4y ago
I like using the Kobo store, because it sells some of its books DRM-free. When it does use DRM, it lists the book as being DRMed, and Kobo DRM is easy to remove anyway.
801.
by bccdee 4y ago
Hey, don't slander ipfs like this. It's is a perfectly good technology and it is not based on blockchain. Also, bold of you to bring up NoSQL seeing as how the sun has kind of set on that whole era. The new databases I'm seei
802.
Ask HN: What does artisanal software look like?
15 points by bccdee 4y ago|12 comments
803.
by bccdee 4y ago
The prologue, which famously begins with "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation," gets a lot of love. For me, though, I realized I
804.
by bccdee 4y ago
Yeah but that works through base64 data urls, which are clumsy. Epubs are zips of separate resources and that works great. We should have an equivalent for webpages and other similar documents—a digital-first competitor to pdfs. Or maybe ju
805.
by bccdee 4y ago
I wish there were a convention for sharing whole websites. Even a zip file containing an index.html plus images, css, other pages, etc. would be fine if browsers just supported it.
806.
by bccdee 4y ago
Seems like you could use a silicone caulk or something.
807.
by bccdee 4y ago
Agreed with the exception that djot also applies this to nested lists, which I think is a huge misstep. User ergonomics are more important than convenient parsing, and while many markdown parsers interpret your example in an un-ergonomic wa
808.
by bccdee 4y ago
That assumes that the primary feature of Google is the "quick answer" box. Of course the quick answer box is often wrong—that's why all the search results are right below it. The quick answer box sometimes saves you a click,
809.
by bccdee 4y ago
I think the main problem is that it doesn't actually have a concept of truth or falsehood—it's just very good at knowing what sounds correct. So, to GPT3, a subtle error is almost as good as being totally right, whereas in pract
810.
by bccdee 4y ago
The brainfuck is laughably incorrect too. It's mostly no-ops.

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