ethmarks

9 ms·

61.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
But if you don't need to systematically examine every element one-by-one, lane layouts are pretty good. Sites like Pintrest use lane layouts because their content isn't meant to by systematically examined, but rather absorbed at a
62.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
What? The defining feature of masonry is that it supports mixed aspect ratios. That's its whole thing. If you aren't mixing landscape and portrait images, you shouldn't be using masonry layout.
63.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
You can't hold -5 apples any more than you can hold 5i apples, and yet we don't call numbers below zero "pretend numbers". I'm not arguing that imaginary numbers aren't imaginary, I'm arguing that calling
64.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
I think that calling numbers with a sqrt(-1) component "imaginary numbers" was a terrible decision. It makes a lot of people, especially students, think of them as pure-math nonsense without any practical applications. I think tha
65.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
I love Zed editor's git UI for this. If you click on the left gutter of a hunk, it opens a little interface in the top right corner that lets you either Stage or Restore that hunk.
66.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
Exactly. When was the last time you heard HTML called "HyperText Markup Language"? When was the last time you heard CSS called "Cascading Style Sheets"? We should stop saying "JavaScript" and fully switch to JS
67.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
And if each cell was a cubic micrometer (which is a side length 200-300 times smaller than a pixel on a typical screen and 50-100 times thinner than a human hair), it'd still stretch 3.7 kilometers, which is about the length of a comme
68.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
The average ChatGPT user isn't utilizing agentic workflows. And even for the people that do, just because an LLM isn't absolutely state of the art doesn't invalidate it from being useful.
69.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
I noticed that the boing sound gets deeper and lower with smaller-magnitude boings. Is the boing audio generated procedurally/realistically in response to the physics of the boing, or is just playing a premade boing sound effect that&#
70.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
Building datacenters in the arctic also has the added benefit that sysadmins would have to take polar bear safety lessons, which would be pretty funny.
71.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
> I wonder if it is enforceable. I can't imagine that it wouldn't be. If a company has explicit written permission from the copyright owner granting permission to use that copyright, then they can use it. Also, it wouldn't
72.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
Fair point. Perhaps I'm just too pessimistic or narrow-minded, but I don't believe that LLMs will progress to that level of capability any time soon. If you think that they will, your view makes a great deal of sense. Agree to dis
73.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
Well, as a college student planning to start a CS program, I can tell you that it actually sounds fine to me. And I think that teachers can adapt. A few weeks ago, my English professor assigned us an essay where we had to ask ChatGPT a ques
74.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
> My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies It's obviously not quite the same as programming, but my English professor assigned an essay
75.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
You can still argue that LLMs won't replace human programmers without downplaying their capabilities. Modern SOTA LLMs can often produce genuinely impressive code. Full stop. I don't personally believe that LLMs are good enough to
76.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
> most students will learn a lot less than say 5 years ago while the top 5% or so will learn a lot more If we assume that AI will automate many/most programming jobs (which is highly debatable and I don't believe is true, but j
77.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
Does your transportation system also have a risk of exploding catastrophically mid-flight? 'cause otherwise no deal. /s
78.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
There is some medium in low Earth orbit. Not all vacuums are created equal. However, LEO vacuum is still very, very sparse compared to the air and water we use for cooling systems. The main way that heat dissipates from space stations and
79.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
There's no air and negligible thermal medium to convect heat away. The only way heat leaves is through convection from the extremely sparse atmosphere in low Earth orbit (less than a single atom per cubic millimeter) and through ther
80.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
Not having used anything except for Firefox, I don't have any experience with migrating to different browsers. However, my understanding is that Chrome shows a little pop-up that lets you import from previous browsers rather than relyi
81.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
I think it matters to more than you might think. A significant portion of the non-technical ChatGPT userbase get really attached to the model flavor. The GPT-4o controversy is a good example. People got attached to 4o's emotional and e
82.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
Fun fact: that's called a generic trademark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
83.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
> Note also that the triangle has infinite perimeter but finite area. How common is this property in geometry? I know that fractals like the Koch Snowflake also have infinite perimeter over finite area, but I don't know what else do
84.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
And the mushrooms would be powered by cosmic radiation...
85.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
Perhaps you misunderstood my comment. I'm not advocating for vibe-coded AI-generated PRs, and I do think that blanket banning them is pretty reasonable for the reasons you stated. However, I don't think that banning all AI-gen
86.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
Gemini 3 is a 10 trillion parameter model?
87.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
> A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is at least arguably a reasonable policy. No, I don't think it is. There's more nuance to this debate than either "we're banning all LLM code" or "all of our features ar
88.
by ethmarks 10mo ago
Does it really make sense to describe Athas as an editor with "agentic AI editing" if, by their own admission in the roadmap, they haven't even begun implementing it? Seems like they should be using the future tense or listin
89.
by ethmarks 11mo ago
I beg to differ. Tactical use of a scientific or graphing calculator can absolutely replace large parts of the thinking process. If you're testing for the ability to solve differential equations, a powerful enough calculator can trivia
90.
by ethmarks 11mo ago
As someone who had a college English assignment due literally just yesterday, I think that "the vast majority" is an overstatement. There are absolutely students in my class who cheat with AI (one of them confessed to it and got a

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