jason_oster

5 ms·

31.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
Between the elimination of the fairness doctrine, the rampant sensationalism (a phenomenon so common it has its own derogatory name: clickbait), the corporate ownership of media outlets, and the pervasiveness of advertising, I can't im
32.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
> they're all lumped into the same bucket, even when they shouldn't. Why should they be separate? The same technology generates text, images, video, audio, 3D models, actuator and stepper motor control sequences, video game con
33.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
I’ll admit, at first, I thought the human vs machine comparison was about humanoid machines. But that’s too narrowly defined to be a useful comparison. Most machines in use today are not humanoid. Then to boldly claim that humans are more e
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
Yes, and I've also personally been responsible for cutting about a million dollars per year in AWS expenditure, and never saw a single cent in bonus payouts or equity. It just got repurposed in the budget. Same with building launching
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
It's an absurd scenario because Big AI is simply not in the Big AI Law business. They are also not in the Big AI Accounting business, the Big AI Pharmaceutical business, or the Big AI Web App business. It is absurd because the CapEx an
36.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
Uh, this read is completely insane. A fantastical look into the mind of someone who thinks about many disparate things and is looking for ways to connect them. This is post hoc rationalization at its finest. I had a much longer post here in
37.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
> and had to run glue code to copy things in and out of Webassembly memory. Not surprising. The FFI boundary is always a bottleneck. If you can eliminate it, you will see where the WASM JIT shines. You have far more control over mechanic
38.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
GitHub, Gitea, and Forgejo specifically store all commit hashes for PRs in the `refs/pull/` namespace. The end result is that 50 people pushing commits for six years and deleting all of their branches after squash-and-merge loses
39.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
Chalk it up to different perspectives. I - being old as dirt - was also around for it. Circa 2002 or 2003, we were writing CMSs in PHP which were already well beyond the simplistic concept of rendering HTML tables from database columns. Sma
40.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
Who programs the neural network frameworks and the tooling that classifies and cleans up training data? Oh, you're saying it's all getting automated. I see. So acceleration to AGI, ASI, and beyond is just a couple of years away.
41.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
Your argument is something along the lines of: 1. People dislike X, so a small amount of water being used for X is bad. 2. People like Y, so a large amount of water being used for Y is good. You can't draw any conclusions from this, ap
42.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
Plain old HTML with vanilla JS is not exactly a pit of success but React is much closer to a pit of despair. The former tends to be clunky but effective, while the latter requires a PhD in complexity avoidance to stand a chance. JavaScript:
43.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
I don't particularly doubt your experience. But if you have struggled to maintain an app that is effectively complete upon inception, it means that changes in your environment are so common that it's a surprise you get anything at
44.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
And then there's France, which gets about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy.
45.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
Can't tell if you are spending time in the wrong circles or just shitposting. Here's one: https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM?si=6u54mry0TLgS868a
46.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
I agree in general. But making this claim with a narrowed definition of generative AI that doesn't match what is being used in practice is setting up a strawman.
47.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
Are you sure about that? Most of the mid-2000's jQuery components bundled their HTML and CSS in bespoke template strings within JS. If you remember, jQuery's `.css()` method accepted JSON to set CSS properties, and `.html()` accep
48.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
Good times! Iraq acquiring 4000 PS2 for military purposes was a hoax [1], but the fear was palpable at the time. I was an obnoxious teenager, ridiculing the idea of a PS2 supercomputer. It would have been approximately impossible to achieve
49.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
There is almost no maintenance work for bespoke apps apart from infrequent updates to keep OS and hardware compatibility as the environment slowly changes. Keep in mind, these are not products in the endless feature treadmill promoted by sc
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
My non-programmer friends have created: - A mod manager for Vintage Story in Swift. - A GameShark Pro adapter using an ESP32 that hosts a web app for dumping N64 ROMs and searching for cheat codes.
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
I don't follow. Aren't you arguing something more like "no one is a programmer now"?
52.
by jason_oster 4mo ago
This. I have been out of the tech startup labor market for many years. But when I was doing hiring in a startup around 2017, we had to put specific, conscious effort into accepting inexperienced candidates. The default mode for hiring is fi
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
I agree, I wouldn't classify PHP as "not writing HTML by hand". But that's not what I'm talking about. Most websites in the last 20 years have heavily leaned into client-side rendering, picking up with jQuery circa
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
Do you normally listen to quacks? You clearly don't believe them. Why are you even paying any attention to it?
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
They were replaced by other WYSIWYG website editors like Wix and Squarespace. These replacements are evidence in favor of the original claim. The specific products are irrelevant.
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
> people would have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around 2005. They did. Now it's all JSX or htmx or some other favored template or DSL monstrosity. Most people do not write HTML or CSS, and haven't in decades. You
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
That’s not the root. The root is the human drive for survival. We can stop any time, now. Money was already a satisfactory root cause.
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
> And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices. As a counterexample, tobacco taxation is less effective for reducing smoking than alternative policies [1]. So, yes, we can hope that higher taxes help people make better c
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
If we are going to be pedantic, let's do it correctly. The specific, direct problem is advertising, where the money flows. Algorithmic feeds are designed to capture attention, and the reason for attention capture is eyes on advertiseme
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by jason_oster 4mo ago
Progress happens in a series of S-curves. While your observation is correct that advances occur initially rapidly then taper off, the next step tends to arrive sooner than the previous, and with greater magnitude [1]. Tim Urban's artic

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