bunderbunder

10 ms·

91.
by bunderbunder 1mo ago
The problem I'm seeing is that most of that additional output is just increasing pressure on the real bottlenecks such as design, QA, operations, support, etc. Which is why we're seeing this dual phenomenon of programmer productiv
92.
by bunderbunder 1mo ago
There's a part of me that agrees. There's also a part of me that misses the earlier days of Hacker News when the subject matter was much more eclectic and seemingly every day I'd have a chance to learn about something complet
93.
by bunderbunder 1mo ago
For starters, it's not just APIs. Like I pointed out with the C example, programming language syntax and semantics also evolve over time. But also, LLMs' use of RAG to keep track of API evolution is limited. You can see this if yo
94.
by bunderbunder 1mo ago
But they don't really have that option. They're trapped in a Red Queen's race. The world keeps moving on, and so the models need to be retrained so that they can keep up with new information. Otherwise you'll get stuck w
95.
by bunderbunder 1mo ago
I've been using the Caveman plugin and it helps quite a bit.
96.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
I expect a lot of the social anxiety can be mitigated by arranging things so that students get a chance to know the examiners and build a rapport with them ahead of time. (E.g., if they’re an instructor then make sure they have office hours
97.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
Thing is, we don’t have strong reason to believe the AI companies are just reinvesting profits. There’s a lot of credible analysis saying inference COGS also exceeds the prices they charge. In which case they’re just burning the candle at b
98.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
Essence of Decision is a great book that explores this idea. It looks at different models for understanding how organizations make decisions, and arrives at broadly the same conclusion: a model that assumes people are particularly in cont
99.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
The thing that really made the Enganced Games à debacle isn’t that the participants failed to beat top clean athletes. It’s that they failed to beat their own performance from when they were still clean. Meaning that they didn’t just fail t
100.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
That said growing vocabulary is widely regarded as one of the most important steps towards being able to interact with the language in a more authentic way. My concern is that AI-generated translations and example text still tend to get the
101.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
I think what we are seeing with all these AI detection tools is a whole lot of shooting the messenger. Technology made the problem of lazy students impossible to ignore, but the solution might be decidedly low-tech: have students spend some
102.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
To go with the gym analogy, thus far it would seem that using AI to help study seems to be working out about as well as the Enhanced Games did. Before we get ahead of ourselves and hype up AI as a tool for making people smarter, let’s first
103.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
I’ve seen a similar thing with globalization. Macro scale, it’s great. Much number go up. Zoom in, though, and it also impoverished my hometown and many others like it. A whole generation saw their job prospects gutted, and had no realistic
104.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
Yup. But that also gets to the “they’re both right” angle. Zig’s convention may not be how the Bun developers wanted to work, but it’s a good choice for the kinds of projects Zig is designed for. Which overlaps a bit with, but isn't th
105.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
Considering it’s already been ported to at least 5 different platforms, I can’t imagine one more would be impossible.
106.
by bunderbunder 2mo ago
That one’s interesting to me because it speaks to both sides of the debate. Yes, safe Rust is good for catching those kinds of errors at compile time. But also, it should theoretically be very easy for a compiler to avoid those problems in
107.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
Pretty sure all we’re waiting on is someone to put in the effort to port KOReader to the platform.
108.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
I think lot of Americans overestimate how much China needs them. (Understandable, I suppose, since the UK made a similar mistake vis-a-vis the EU about 10 years back.) From a Chinese perspective I expect China’s largest customer is China. T
109.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
(Speaking as a lapsed participant in a zen community. Opinions are my own, so others may disagree.) The challenge for these “Zen and my job” types of work is that much of Zen practice is (deliberately) a bit of an inkblot test. If there’s a
110.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
It is. The next post in the blog expands on the idea in concrete terms. The author doesn’t explicitly say so, but based on the shape of it I would assume all we have right now are the introduction and first full post of what is intended to
111.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
“Now”? This is nothing new. For about 30 years now Microsoft has been constantly repeating various flavors of this “make it so a thing can automatically and silently run programs as soon as it touches your computer” thing. It’s always done
112.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
Yes. Just this evening I had to help my mom. She was convinced a web form she needed to fill out was broken. The problem was a required input control was so heavily styled that it was genuinely difficult to recognize it as interactive. Poss
113.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
I think that’s the response the “it’s never a real problem until suddenly it is” observation was trying to head off. There’s always someone who doesn’t want to take the advice of all the people who’ve been burned because “well it’s never ha
114.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
That is the nominal motive, but I think that the real motive is that it makes it easier for average developers to pile on more complexity. Back in the day we just accepted technical constraints that didn’t prevent us from doing anything mis
115.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
I’ve mainly handled it by pushing my team to be extremely conservative about what dependencies we take, especially if they pull in scads and scads of transitive dependencies. This elegantly mitigates three problems in one go: update churn
116.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
Think of it like a rainforest ecosystem. Very complex and tangled, even fragile. But it’s the tangled fragile complexity that makes it interesting.
117.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
I would argue that, over the time scales at which Von Neumann probes would hypothetically spread, “report home” may be a useless or even wasteful requirement. Even if somebody were still around to hear the message, what is the likelihood th
118.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
Of course not. That isn’t what the article was trying to say. The thesis was, “I would like to suggest that the hardest part is the one that gets a single sentence: ‘mines local material and builds a copy.’” And so naturally the points in t
119.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
It possibly goes a little further, though, since we’re talking about multi-step agentic loops here. So in addition to next token prediction there are of iterations of collecting input from outside sources. I’m still hesitant to interpret th
120.
by bunderbunder 3mo ago
I don’t really like much about C++ anymore, but I still enjoy reading C++ articles and listening to C++ podcasts, and I would consider it beautiful. Oftentimes the things I dislike about it are also the beautiful things. The term “beautiful

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