bunderbunder

4 ms·

1.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
They've got those, too, but I didn't feel like paying extra for a Blu-Ray player.
2.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
The challenge, though, is that you can't tell with the naked eye whether that vintage Tupperware happens to be some of the stuff that contains lead.
3.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
That's beyond hyperbolic. Yes there has been consolidation in the mainstream media industry, but I still have better access to more distribution channels than I did in the early 2000s. Especially when it comes to indie stuff.
4.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
The funny thing is, it may be less convenient but it's also more enjoyable. Endlessly scrolling some algorithmic feed hunting for something to watch can be done without getting off the couch, but it isn't actually fun. Walking to
5.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
Copyrights are such constrained monopolies, though. More or less on the same level as how Nike has a monopoly on Air Jordans, but not on shoes in general. One of the most interesting things about media consumerism is the extent to which peo
6.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
I also question the extent to which this is true. Lately I've been helping my mom downsize. She's got boxes and boxes of household goods that she held on to because it belonged to her mother or grandmother or great aunt or whoever
7.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
This is part of why last year I mostly switched to just borrowing DVDs from my public library. Avoiding ads by not paying seems to do the trick rather nicely. The quality and variety is better than what I can find on any one streaming ser
8.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
I doubt they really care about coal miners’ actual votes. The US coal mining industry employs fewer than 50,000 people. I live in a major coal producing state and while it was an important industry in my grandparents’ time, these days it is
9.
by bunderbunder 5d ago
Framing it in terms of the price people might be willing to pay for a single product in isolation frames the point I was making, which was about price competition, right out of the picture. Maybe I'd be willing to pay $10 for product A
10.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
Except of course it relates. All else being equal, we will prefer $X COGS over $2X COGS because that helps us with both profit margins and price competition.
11.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
I had actually been thinking more about all the non-LLM functionality that go into the harnesses. I'm not going to name names and I haven't done any rigorous testing, but my general impression is that choice of harness matters mor
12.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
I’ll grant that for specialized applications like coding agents and mathematics, but even there I suspect that most the real gains are actually taking place in the harness. But I suspect returns may have already diminished into negative ter
13.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
I’m not so sure about that. Already AI vendors are back to cutting prices to try and keep customers from cutting back on their usage. My own employer is working hard at pivoting to much smaller fine-tuned models for established use cases, a
14.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
Perhaps more noteworthy for general home and business computing, doesn’t it also allow for lower latency?
15.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
I don’t really know much about how this stuff works, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t even have to do anything punitive. We might just need to find and close whatever weird loophole allows the folks who are participating in this gold rush t
16.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
So, sure, we can special plead the Turing test out of the picture. But if we don’t propose an alternative to take its place, we’re left right back at the same silly situation that the top level commenter was observing and that Turing was tr
17.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
GPT-3 might not have said “load bearing” as much, but a savvy interrogator could still catch it out nearly every time just asking dumb gotcha questions like, “How many Rs are there in strawberry?”
18.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
And this is why I mildly dislike the term “software engineer”. If a mechanical engineer took your colleague’s approach toward their work, they would be legally liable for engineering malpractice.
19.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
People also misunderstand the bar that was set by the test. It was more subtle than “Can the computer convincingly carry one side of a dialogue?” His “imitation game” had three participants: a human participant, a computer participant, and
20.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
When I went down the path that the article advocates, I found that code quality improved but design quality suffered. Everything may have been implemented to spec, but that spec was Byzantine and the implementation was bloated. Which perhap
21.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
They are, but a REST API likely isn’t a good alternative because few RDBMSes speak REST. More likely they meant creating a database interface library in whatever programming language the application uses. And then have it talk to the DB thr
22.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
For one example, I might choose against stored procedures when I’m at an organization with internal policies or a devops setup that makes schema migrations costly and I expect the table and indexing structure to change less frequently than
23.
by bunderbunder 6d ago
I used to be pro-sproc, but I agree that making queries part of the database schema can be burdensome and creates some development friction that I’d rather avoid. I’ve mostly moved on to storing queries as *.sql files in the application’s r
24.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
It isn’t, and nobody said it is. The ruling in question did not find that Google had a mobile OS monopoly. It found that they had monopolies in both the ad server and ad exchange markets, and was using them to reinforce each other in an ant
25.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
Way back in the aughties I saw an interesting analysis (on a now defunct blog) indicating that under typical usage C# implementations tend to outperform C++ implementations in long-running business applications. The supposed reason was that
26.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
But here I feel like we’re at risk of heading down the same old doom spiral that plagues any conversation about programming languages when people try to treat it as a competition: getting pedantic about what’s technically possible in a lang
27.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
Zig is aiming to be lower level than Rust. As the project homepage prominently advertises, it has no hidden memory allocation or control flow. It also gives more control over how memory is allocated, which is potentially useful in applicati
28.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
Further up he discusses that using a functional paradigm is possible, but concludes that it doesn’t feel like a practical choice because of how Zig does memory management: > But the language quickly forces you to diverge from the functi
29.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
And if your job is to train people to become mathematicians, that is absolutely what you should be doing.
30.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
Because regardless of the point TFA is making, that interpretation makes less sense for the specific comment. It doesn’t fit with the immediate context, which was a response to a thoughtful comment about how humans do math. And it require

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