jerf

31 ms·

481.
by jerf 5mo ago
I fed an unpublished draft of mine to an AI. I saw it searching the internet and prompted it with the fact it could stop searching, it was not published. From there it guessed that it was me on the spot, which I thought was kind of funny. C
482.
by jerf 5mo ago
We need to get these companies to predeclare what names they're going to use for the next 50 or 60 years so we can avoid them. Pouring one out for all the "Alexa"s in the world.
483.
by jerf 5mo ago
Per the very last section, I chose to elide those. That's mostly because few languages worry about "laws" anyhow, and the lawfulness is less consequential in a non-lazy language because even if you nominally screw up the lawf
484.
by jerf 5mo ago
And when the CEO says "Hey, we really need to make our contact information more visible because I get a lot of customer reports that they can't figure out how to contact us", sure. When the founders say they want the picture
485.
by jerf 5mo ago
In general a neural net does not have any way of knowing "why" it is doing what it is doing. This completely applies to humans too. Metacognition means we can make some decent guesses, and sometimes the "reasons" are at
486.
by jerf 5mo ago
Supporting "Option" is not "having monad". An Option data type can implement a Monad interface, but you can have an Option data type with no particular monad support in your language, or you can have an Option data type
487.
by jerf 5mo ago
One of the things that so often gets lost in politics is the concept of a stopping principle . If you know you want to do X, be it "enforce traffic tickets", "spend money chasing drug trafficking", or anything else, you
488.
by jerf 5mo ago
I don't think it's bad writing. These people actually get angry at the idea that other people do math that might not connect to the real world. And they specially have it out for infinity. I say do whatever math you like. It is he
489.
by jerf 5mo ago
You may appreciate my own contribution, https://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2958/ , which includes an entire section titled "If They're So Wonderful Why Aren't They In My Favorite Language?", a
490.
by jerf 5mo ago
Yes, I hate to be a grammar nazi online but I believe the correct tense is "Ramp's security team indicated that the issue wioll haven be resolved on May 16, 2026." per Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of
491.
by jerf 5mo ago
"Claude" is a big program that wraps a coding agent around a specific model. It would be the specific model that "stands up to you". I post this pedantry only because it may be helpful to you to realize this for other re
492.
by jerf 5mo ago
Unfortunately, it's not the Rust stdlib, it's nearly every stdlib, if not every one. I remember being disappointed when Go came out that it didn't base the os module on openat and friends, and that was how many years ago now?
493.
by jerf 6mo ago
Possibly even more directly, the etymological fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy
494.
by jerf 6mo ago
A lot of people are referencing meditation. Ultimately that's not a terribly well-defined word. It may match some broad ones, but there's a lot of narrow ones that it wouldn't. If staring at a wall helps then don't let m
495.
by jerf 6mo ago
It seems to me that there's some overheated rhetoric that reminds me of the tech-specific spin on the Appeal to Novelty fallacy [1], where people think a new tech is going to uniformly improve on an old tech, that if it isn't an i
496.
by jerf 6mo ago
And you appear to have read my post way too hastily to get to the point you wanted to make, because I can't even correlate what you're saying to what I actually said, particular the argument that I'm "stuck" on as
497.
by jerf 6mo ago
See my other post about the point. If you "just" turn an async back into a sync call by completely blocking the async scheduler, yes, you've turned the async call back into a sync call, but you've done that by completely
498.
by jerf 6mo ago
If you have something in a specific language that does not result in having to change the entire call stack to match something about it, then you do not have a color. Sync/async isn't a "color" in all languages. After al
499.
by jerf 6mo ago
Function coloring does not mean that functions take parameters and have return values. Result<T,E> is not a color. You can call a function that returns a Result from any other function. Errors as return values do not color a functio
500.
by jerf 6mo ago
I will make this argument in favor of casinos, which is that at least we have coevolved with them. They've been around for centuries. We collectively recognize the dangers. We are not collectively blindsided by them. Individually, yeah
501.
by jerf 6mo ago
That's the part that bothers me, definitely.
502.
by jerf 6mo ago
The libertarian argument for prediction markets is really beautiful. It's just a pity it basically depends on all participants in the prediction market being basically unaware that they are participating in a prediction market, and bei
503.
by jerf 6mo ago
You shouldn't model it as incredible hard to fake. It isn't. It's harder that typing a password you've stolen into a web site, but if you set out to do it, it's not that much harder. This is the primary reason I&#
504.
by jerf 6mo ago
"Do you want my number? It's inside this list:" You might find it interesting to learn a bit about information theory. The entire purpose of your specific number is precisely to identify which number in that list is yours.
505.
by jerf 6mo ago
I have suspicions but there's fewer signals on HN available to the general public so it's harder to tell. Well... to be more precise... I'm abundantly positive there are bots and shills here in a general sense. But when it co
506.
by jerf 6mo ago
AI has been awful on Reddit. I've acquired a sense for at least some of the bots. There's this set of bots that post a high-engagement post about once a day to an implausibly large range of subreddits, with implausible regularity.
507.
by jerf 6mo ago
Enormous latency is all relative. A network drive on a local network holding a swap file would still outperform some number of computers I've owned that put their swap on much, much slower hard drives of their time. Of course, nobody w
508.
by jerf 6mo ago
It runs Linux with Windows underneath it, hence Windows is the sub system being sub ordinate (in the most literal sense where it simply means "order" with no further implications) to Linux. Per wongarsu's post, something li
509.
by jerf 6mo ago
This is in the class of things where even if the specific text doesn't trace to a true story, it has certainly happened somewhere, many times over. In the math space it's not even quite as silly as it sounds. Something can be both
510.
by jerf 6mo ago
The problem is people want to use 2026 tools to write their code but they want to be judged by 2016 standards. In 2016, if I saw 10,000 lines of code, that carried a certain proof-of-work with it. They probably couldn't help but give t

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