dawidloubser

6 ms·

1.
by dawidloubser 11mo ago
Yes
2.
by dawidloubser 11mo ago
Often the answer to "some very clever language" is a lazy functional language like Haskell, where it's quite common to express problems naturally on infinite or near-infinite lists (of numbers, users, whatever...) in this way
3.
by dawidloubser 1y ago
It was taken on a wet plate camera (capturing images on sensitised glass pates), which has remarkable resolution, typically far beyond most smaller cameras even today. The photo was artificially lit, most likely with flash powder or magnesi
4.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
And hydraulic power back seats, and a hydraulic sun roof (!!) and hydraulic power aerial, and hydraulic controls for the air suspension. Some models even had a hydraulic glass partition between driver and passengers. Absolute nuts. But the
5.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
I've always been into vintage Mercedes-Benz cars. A talented and wonderfully jovial mechanic ran a specialist workshop east of Johannesburg, in Brakpan (South Africa). For a long time he had a Mercedes 600 - similar to the linked video
6.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
But surely you can see that the economy does not serve us. Who is "us", anyway? The economy, and the worldwide technological system that it fuels, behaves like its own organism with its own ultimate goal unbeknownst to us. By look
7.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
I guess the more succinct the code, the more the reliance on understanding what a function actually does - either through experience, or by reading the docs. The words function is simply: words :: String -> [String] So that
8.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
I like to idealistically think that in a capitalistic (free market) society we absolutely have the option to not use things that we think are wrong or don't like. Change your search engine to one that doesn't include AI-generated
9.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
Provided that we ignore the ridiculous waste of energy entailed by calling an online LLM every time you type a word in your editor - I agree that the utility of LLM-assisted programming as "autocomplete on steriods" can be very us
10.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
I think that anybody who finds the process of clumsily describing the above examples to an LLM in some text box using english and waiting for it to spit out some code which you hope is suitable for your given programming context and codebas
11.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
Based on my experience of building several payment gateways, it is my opinion that it's pretty much always "3 lines of code" (which isn't true about this library - more like "3 steps") to post a payment, even t
12.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
Excellent example clearly from a fellow soldier from the trenches! As somebody who has built several instances of both payments- and travel booking systems, I have seen things in systems that "adhere to published schemas" (often b
13.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
Another shout-out for Jellyfin. Somewhat unusual in that it's build with .NET technologies and runs on Linux, but it's proven to be an excellent media server for many years now.
14.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
That's a nice thought, but unfortunately the environmental cost of "storing" all of this material - i.e. all the billions of tonnes of plastic pollution already out there, and in there (inside you in the form of microplastics
15.
by dawidloubser 2y ago
That's a great use-case! But what about when GPT hallucinates - gets it wrong. What happens when you have sent a (potentially legally-binding) quote to your customers, and you have to back out of it? Humans make mistakes - whether dire
16.
by dawidloubser 3y ago
You make a very good point in general, but at this point cars are already so absurdly over-regulated, it's basically impossible for the "new guy" to break into the market at all.
17.
by dawidloubser 3y ago
| "...a blow to auto manufacturers who have spent millions lobbying against similar legislation and fighting against it in the courts." Does anybody know which car manufacturers? I'd like to make sure I never support them dir
18.
by dawidloubser 3y ago
This is hilariously brilliant. Thank you for almost killing a fellow engineer through laughter.
19.
by dawidloubser 3y ago
I find it interesting that the article and paper which it summarises takes the analogy of representing steam locomotives as a species with a "driving force of survival" that far. Steam Locomotives are simply a *product* in a compe
20.
by dawidloubser 4y ago
One of the first incantations of this idea that I encountered, when I had just started working at my first corporate job back in the day, was Robocode ( https://robocode.sourceforge.io/ ) - it was great fun, and I see it&#x
21.
by dawidloubser 4y ago
I guess this will push more and more bloggers to start looking at static site generators like Hugo ( https://gohugo.io/ ) and either hosting themselves, or on one of the many "built in" cloud hosting providers tha
22.
by dawidloubser 5y ago
I have been focusing on film-based photography for 15+ years - mostly printing in the darkroom, but also often scanning - and can wholeheartedly recommend Vuescan on Linux. About 6 years ago, however, I switched exclusively to the open-sour
23.
by dawidloubser 8y ago
PlayVS | Senior engineers (front-end, back-end, full-stack) | Santa Monica, CS | Full-time | Onsite The official high school esports league platform - We work with game publishers and high school governing bodies to build and operate sancti
24.
by dawidloubser 8y ago
For anybody else excited when they hear "open" and "AGI" in the same sentence, if you don't know the OpenCog project, the wiki (especially if downloaded in book form) makes for fascinating reading: https:/&#x2
25.
by dawidloubser 9y ago
I don't quite think so. There are specific laws governing the use of of, say, photographic equipment within a private property. If a web server, on other other hand, willingly serves content to both a browser being operated by a human,
26.
by dawidloubser 9y ago
Actually, it's not. In your analogy, the storefront is completely passive and unaffected. What is actually happening, is that somebody is walking into the store, asks a question about the stock or the price of the products on sale, whi
27.
by dawidloubser 9y ago
Well... for some of us, when you say "functional programming", you say "Haskell". And it certainly had all of those features, and much more, more than 20 years ago. I really like another poster's recommendation that
28.
by dawidloubser 9y ago
As long as Ethereum apps are powered by a deeply-flawed programming language (Solidity) and VM (EVM), this will happen over and over again. Writing provable, secure software is difficult, and highly unlikely if your environment doesn't
29.
by dawidloubser 9y ago
Agreed. As a photographer, I use and love Guetzli, and it offers a bona fide size reduction of more than 30% over typical JPEG compression algorithms at a similar visual quality level. But it's extremely computationally-intensive, taki
30.
by dawidloubser 10y ago
Ever since reading this essay 14 years ago (has it really been that long?!) I have always thought: Haskell. He's talking about something like Haskell - but with whatever additional powers of abstraction and simplification mankind manag

More ›