cogman10

27 ms·

571.
by cogman10 5mo ago
I made a small pantry application to track what foods I have in storage. It can spit out a json blob of that information which I feed into an LLM to make meal suggestions optimizing the ingredients I already have.
572.
by cogman10 5mo ago
No, that's a silly test. If I want to bring in a world renown battery expert from China, it's ridiculous to also add on "and you must speak English well". English fluency has absolutely nothing to do with expertise. Wh
573.
by cogman10 5mo ago
> were/are trying to stop fraudsters, script kiddies, nasty people, and governments from trying to exploit weaknesses and take unauthorised control of devices and services. While I don't doubt that's a motivation, the prob
574.
by cogman10 5mo ago
Wow, I think I have almost the exact opposite opinion here. Java is an ok language, but what really makes it shine is the JVM. It's one of the fastest VMs out there and is one of the most customizable ones as well. For example, prett
575.
by cogman10 5mo ago
I'd argue that the city owning the venue can't be a monopoly as the next city over is a different owner. That might be different if we were talking about the county or state taking ownership. IMO, these things shouldn't be
576.
by cogman10 5mo ago
I'm ok with either. Though I tend to think public ownership makes more sense because a city can only support so many venues in general.
577.
by cogman10 5mo ago
Started in the second half of Biden's presidency. The republicans argued that the IRS was already overfunded in the first half and refused to allocate additional budget for them. This isn't just a Trump thing, it's a Republi
578.
by cogman10 5mo ago
This sort of thing is a strong argument (IMO) that these stadiums, arenas, theaters should be owned by the municipality they reside in. Fine, we can call it a public good which is why they have nice tax incentives. But why stop there? If
579.
by cogman10 5mo ago
It kind of isn't. We are talking about using types in type optional languages. We aren't talking about the quality of those type systems or whether or not they are good type systems. If I was comparing type systems then it'
580.
by cogman10 5mo ago
The benchmarks between the two are close and the engineers that have used both (like myself) can attest that the differences aren't so wide as you might believe. I'd say that yes, ignorance plays a role here because a decent numbe
581.
by cogman10 5mo ago
> the incentive to change them is incredibly low There is no incentive to rewrite working software in COBOL to something else. You don't really change the people cost of maintaining that code all that much and you incur a huge rewr
582.
by cogman10 5mo ago
Yeah, city law can easily override deed laws. But further, eminent domain allows the city to strip away deed restrictions through a "one weird trick". The city can eminent domain the land from themselves removing the restriction
583.
by cogman10 5mo ago
It's not for you, it's for your IDE. And if you aren't using an IDE then you can pretty much ignore it anyways. You are in exactly the same position as if you knew or didn't know that type.
584.
by cogman10 5mo ago
> The biggest competitors aren't small models I disagree. Mainly because those small models are exactly what erode away the moat of needing a giant data center. Those smaller models have been proving themselves to not be far of fr
585.
by cogman10 5mo ago
> These models are building deep integrations into companies and the entire economy. Once that stabilizes, it will be like the electricity grid—pumping tokens to fuel decision-making across the entire global society. Good luck unplugging
586.
by cogman10 5mo ago
I think Zitron's problem is he's equating AI to OpenAI and Anthropic. I'd agree with him that both those businesses are in a dangerous position given how fast they've burnt through cash. However, that's not the en
587.
by cogman10 5mo ago
What I suspect isn't that AI goes somewhere, but I do think that the cutting edge companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are in a very precarious position. They don't have very much of a moat and the competition has been catching up
588.
by cogman10 5mo ago
Even more dangerous to the big 2 AI companies is the fact that the 20 different Chinese companies are catching up fast and for a lot lower cost. Why should someone pick Opus 4.8 when Qwen3.7 Plus produces similar results for about 1/20
589.
by cogman10 5mo ago
It's not an all or nothing thing. I think types are particularly valuable for libraries. A library author using copious types really helps the downstream user to know "Ok, this function returns a dict(Foo, Bar)". But after
590.
by cogman10 5mo ago
> A few tens of GW of battery capacity (i.e. a few dozen nuclear plants worth of capacity) that can switch on/off in milliseconds can do a lot for grid stability. I think this is a misunderstanding of the problem. Now, don't ge
591.
by cogman10 5mo ago
I think an even better example is what happened to the Tacoma Bridge. You have an oscillating frequency and phase that needs to be precisely tuned in order for everything to work well. If something is out of sync wrong, you can end up wit
592.
by cogman10 5mo ago
It may actually be the case in the US. The problem is it's really hard to take something like this to court. For starters, the arbitration clause is designed to make sure that these cases never get to the supreme court. Lower courts
593.
by cogman10 5mo ago
Yeah, contract law is simply busted here. If it were sane, these contracts would be deemed null and void. In fact, common contract law does require that both sides be compensated. It doesn't require fair or reasonable compensation a
594.
by cogman10 5mo ago
"Here's a device we sold you, but when you first turn it on you need to sign this 30 page contract which says you actually don't own the device, if you are mad at us you have to go to our preferred arbitration, and we reserve
595.
by cogman10 5mo ago
Yeah, it's frankly ridiculous that "smart" devices need internet access. Why shouldn't my smart oven behave exactly like my Brother printer? There's no reason my oven needs access to the internet, it can do everyt
596.
by cogman10 5mo ago
I think it'd be mixed. I think the knowledge of underlying hardware is useful and good to know. But also that sort of knowledge got dated pretty quickly in the early computer era. Further, the capabilities of things like optimizing co
597.
by cogman10 5mo ago
What I'm adamant about being able to upgrade is my software. The big problem with the apple ecosystem is that, while they've been pretty good about it, you are still at their mercy to receive regular software and operating system
598.
by cogman10 5mo ago
Basically the problem with American corporate thinking. Make a great product, stop innovating, and then spend the rest of the life of you company trying to extra as many dollars as possible from the first mover goodwill. Spend as few of th
599.
by cogman10 5mo ago
> Games explicitly do not promise online features remain available perpetually. No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either. Explicitly through a contract you HAVE to sign AFTER the purchase. That's a big problem I
600.
by cogman10 5mo ago
I purchased a toy that I expect to be able to continue playing with long after the company that made that toy loses interest in it. I don't expect the company to run servers for my toy, I can do that if they gave that opportunity. The

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