ekidd

10 ms·

91.
by ekidd 5mo ago
No offense taken. I was going to argue that companies got to choose their own auditors, so of course there were some bad ones out there. But looking at the market, it seems like (1) the race to the bottom has gotten ridiculous, and (2) th
92.
by ekidd 5mo ago
The unfortunate reality is that a lot of software does have hard constraints. And a lot of these constraints are "gatekept" by regulators, compliance policies, insurance companies, etc. If someone slops together a medical record
93.
by ekidd 6mo ago
> E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there. Desktop Linux has gotten better, though much of the improvement happened decades ago. I believe the first person to
94.
by ekidd 6mo ago
For what it's worth, eBay in the US currently has some used 3090s for about $1,300, including some marked "Buy it now." I got mine used for about $1,000, and I'm really happy with it—it's a very solid gaming card
95.
by ekidd 6mo ago
I mean, as a senior developer, the number of bits in an "int" is "who the hell knows, because it has changed a bunch of times during my career, and that's what stdint.h is for." And let's not even talk about ma
96.
by ekidd 6mo ago
You can't realistically replace a frontier coding model on any local hardware that costs less than a nice house, and even then it's not going to be quite as good. But if you don't need frontier coding abilities, there are sev
97.
by ekidd 6mo ago
Yeah, ARC Raiders has a lobby system to sort people by aggressiveness. Which is interesting, because the early Steam reviews loved the fact that the game was mostly cooperative. Most players were helpful or neutral, but some would attemp
98.
by ekidd 6mo ago
Yeah, I can build a Slack "clone" in a couple of weeks with my own two hands, no AI required. But it's not going to actually be competitive with Slack. Just to pick an incredibly, unbelievably basic enterprise feature, my t
99.
by ekidd 6mo ago
Thank you. Those are not the same test at all. I agree that something weird is up with Opus. But this post doesn't actually prove anything, and the title is misleading editorializing.
100.
by ekidd 6mo ago
I agree that robots are much further off than people expect, in raw technical terms. As you point out, the sensors and actuators in a human hand are far beyond the state of the art. But all of that is assuming a world where research is be
101.
by ekidd 6mo ago
Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete. That is, humans would be economic dead weight, any job could be done better by AI/robots, and "comparative advantage&q
102.
by ekidd 6mo ago
The other article on France's gold reserves mentioned that France sold their older gold bars in the US, and used the money to purchase higher-standard gold bars in Europe. In their case, they did that over many decades and just finishe
103.
by ekidd 6mo ago
> A box of gas, left on its own for long enough, will engage in a pattern of collisions that in a certain interpretative framework correspond to an LLM forward pass. That's a fun thought experiment. Greg Egan based a delightful sc
104.
by ekidd 6mo ago
> I trust none of us would presume that the decentralized labor of pen & paper calculations somehow instantiated a “psychology” in the sense of a mind experiencing various levels of despair Your argument is based on an appeal to in
105.
by ekidd 6mo ago
> just look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme As someone who has been married for a couple of decades, I, too, would recommend divorce to many of the (often-fictional) people asking Re
106.
by ekidd 7mo ago
As someone who has moved back and forth between Mac and Linux around 3 or 4 times since 1992, Linux is actually surprisingly reasonable. For laptops, I just buy from Dell, with Ubuntu preloaded, and everything works. (Dell's build qual
107.
by ekidd 7mo ago
There's a well-known (and frequently encouraged) workaround for the orphan rule: Create a wrapper type. Let's say you have one library with: pub struct TypeWithSomeSerialization { /* public fields here */ } And
108.
by ekidd 7mo ago
(A), honestly. You might think you can keep 16 year olds from looking at porn, if they want to. You can't. You have never been able to. All you can do is teach them that the law is stupid and pointless, and they should treat rules with
109.
by ekidd 7mo ago
I am fairly doubtful that it makes sense to be using async function calls (or waits) inside of a hot loop in Rust. Pretty much anything you'd do with async in Rust is too expensive to be done in a genuinely hot loop where function ca
110.
by ekidd 7mo ago
We have been able to automatically inline functions for a few decades now. You can even override inlining decisions manually, though that's usually a bad idea unless you're carefully profiling. Also, it's pointer indirection
111.
by ekidd 7mo ago
I have actually very convincingly recreated a moderately complex 70s-era mainframe app by having an LLM reimplement it based on existing documentation and by accessing the textual user interface. The biggest trick is that you need to spend
112.
by ekidd 7mo ago
> I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom. The notion that 99% of the workforce and military will be AIs isn't "copium", it's grounds for absolute terror. One of two things will be true:
113.
by ekidd 7mo ago
Nope, the War Powers Resolution gives the president broad authority to respond to an active attack on the United States (which makes sense). But it does not allow the President to unilaterally start an aggressive war against some random c
114.
by ekidd 7mo ago
> We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. The difference this time is
115.
by ekidd 7mo ago
> It was slightly salty french fries, buttered and coated in sugar and cinnamon, like cinnamon toast. Bang on. Makes a lot of sense too, if you think about it. The closest existing food I know to this are churros, which can be truly ex
116.
by ekidd 8mo ago
> Managed databases are a scam. I, too, once believed this. Then I had the displeasure of watching a $10,000 server fail during Christmas travel (about 20 years ago now). A single RAID drive failed. Then, during the rebuild, a second d
117.
by ekidd 8mo ago
I have been a lead engineer for a few decades now, responsible for training teams and architecting projects. And I've been working heavily with AI. I know how to get Claude multi-agent mode to write 2,500 lines of deeply gnarly code in
118.
by ekidd 8mo ago
I have systematically and successfully banned OpenSSL across all of my Rust projects. Sure, RusTLS shares a few C crypto primitives with OpenSSL forks. But I've never been happier with the overall library.
119.
by ekidd 8mo ago
> You really thing the adminstration's goal is for Americans to not have running water & electricity, thinking that will keep them in power? That makes no sense. The GP post literally said that the goal was not to have free
120.
by ekidd 8mo ago
> What is it about robbing one group of people to pay another that you would expect to "work"? Well, let's say we get one or two more breakthroughs in AI, and it succeeds in automating literally every job that can be don

More ›