jerf

24 ms·

301.
by jerf 3mo ago
I think there's a core of a good idea here, but as others have pointed out, letting the LLM be your "weaver" is going to be very tricky. It's possible that what you have here is an idea for what I consider to be eventual
302.
by jerf 3mo ago
I feel like you're kind of making this more complicated than it actually is, either because you're overcomplicating it or because you're trying to tee up some rhetorical point, but the answer to your question is really quite
303.
by jerf 3mo ago
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a criminal court concept. This would be a civil suit. Those use different standards, like "preponderance of the evidence". I agree that if the claimant had to prove the AI system is vi
304.
by jerf 3mo ago
There was an interesting study recently which showed that if you put a human-written short story up against an AI-written short story, the AI wins. But if you put an anthology of AI-written short stories up against an anthology of human-wri
305.
by jerf 3mo ago
There's a hidden equivocation there. "Handling" errors, as far as the language is concerned, mean you do something with them, but explicitly discarding them is most definitely a "something". From a human perspecti
306.
by jerf 3mo ago
Yeah, the process I described was several years. Depending on how you measure this could well be a 15-20 year process overall, but even what I witnessed was at least 5 years, and that was already the tail end of an ongoing process. I'm
307.
by jerf 3mo ago
Everything is correlated to everything [1]. Which means there's a good chance this is somehow correlated in one way or another to race/gender/other protected classes in the US, just by the math of everything being correlated
308.
by jerf 3mo ago
I entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time. B
309.
by jerf 3mo ago
Anyone who refers to "the HN gestalt" already knows all that or they wouldn't have phrased it that way. It isn't just me but it's a short list: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&pr
310.
by jerf 3mo ago
I completely agree that's a reasonable question. I'd also observe that between dark matter and dark energy, there's good reason to believe that we may not have a full accounting of all fields. I am just observing that if you
311.
by jerf 3mo ago
You don't have to wonder, because they are. They're manifestations of fields. I think it is a reasonable answer to tell people "if you're looking for the short list of simplest things, the number of types of fields there
312.
by jerf 3mo ago
Accessibility is not just about getting text out. It's about the navigation flow, integration into various OS features, Aria attributes in HTML and what they do. Plus you may not count this as "accessibility" but things like
313.
by jerf 3mo ago
That's part of the reason I'd find it so funny, yes. The reason why I consider it a possibility is that LaTeX has two things out of the gate: The technical capability, and a small but arguably rabid user base. It's the sort o
314.
by jerf 3mo ago
"I don't know when the extreme intellectual property viewpoint entered software engineering as a mainstream opinion because I have never before seen it expressed so strongly in this community" It's not copyright maximali
315.
by jerf 3mo ago
I feel like it's fair to say that you have not "fixed the issues with browser layout" if you lose accessibility and input. System fonts I can live without, we can push our own, but those two things are a big deal. Even input
316.
by jerf 3mo ago
The use case of "I have a big pile of data and I need to ensure that it survived transmission intact" isn't going anywhere. Just being in an analog computing world would not make the way some data needs to be precise go away.
317.
by jerf 3mo ago
Over the years many people have hypothesized that once WASM was really mature, it would become practical to fix the issues with web browser layout by sending down custom layout machines to users. I would find it hilarious if LaTeX turned in
318.
by jerf 3mo ago
If you want to understand the issue with analog computers, design a SHA-256 circuit for one of them and consider the consequences of trying to push a megabyte of data through it. While that is an extreme example I chose precisely to make th
319.
by jerf 3mo ago
We software engineers have a different experience with AI than most other fields. We have vast arrays of guardrails in our field, with unit testing, CI/CD, source control being relatively easy since we mostly produce textual artifacts,
320.
by jerf 4mo ago
I see no reason any portion of SpaceX justifies its current valuations. I also think taking what is probably ultimately a successful and profitable company in SpaceX, even if it is maybe not as successful and profitable as Elon might say,
321.
by jerf 4mo ago
Feedback: "Modern programming languages reflect a consensus on the most important programming concepts, including lexically scoped variables, closures, objects, pattern matching, and type parametricity. Why, then, yet another programmi
322.
by jerf 4mo ago
So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI? The information content of this is rather minimal. Even if everything he says is literally true it's hard to tell through the massive, mas
323.
by jerf 4mo ago
I don't know about everyone else, but if you told me that for the next couple of years I, and everyone else, would have only Opus 4.5, I wouldn't exactly cry about it. Especially if in the meantime it got cheaper and maybe a bit f
324.
by jerf 4mo ago
It is unclear what you are asking. What you are asking sounds more like using something to add color to the monochrome on the screen, like the Magnavox Odyssey [1] or the Vectrex [2]. But that would be orthogonal to what this is doing. [1]:
325.
by jerf 4mo ago
Something I haven't seen anyone else mention is that this is problem 15. The author probably did the previous 14 problems too. IIRC the problems aren't strictly cumulative but you do generally end up warmed up and with hints about
326.
by jerf 4mo ago
I suspect it's mostly the training data. I am also on team "make illegal states unrepresentable". It may get talked about a lot on HN, but I'm still at the point that I'm surprised when I see a code base that I didn
327.
by jerf 4mo ago
I think it would be a reasonable definition of "social problem" that it requires two people to have it, and that they must have it in relation to each other, which is to say, some sort of social interaction or communication must b
328.
by jerf 4mo ago
There's a reason "the rich" were scare quoted. I also think it's an oversimplification. It suffices merely that there is some well-resourced entity that appears to want to use "child age verification" as an obv
329.
by jerf 4mo ago
I'll be intrigued to see if this is true. The experience of the Steam Controller may not translate to the Steam Machine. The Steam Controller is a unique controller. The Steam Frame is a unique VR headset. Obviously not the only thing
330.
by jerf 4mo ago
I need to figure out some way to communicate how these things really work. I think lots of people around here would agree that "the rich" are doing nefarious things. But people get real fuzzy on what those things really are and ho

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