jerf

37 ms·

571.
by jerf 6mo ago
I've been waiting for the article talking about how AI is affecting COBOL. Preferably with quotes from actual COBOL programmers since I can already theorize as well as the next guy but I'm interested in the reports from the field.
572.
by jerf 6mo ago
Nominally, Common Law, the system of law that to a first approximation is used in countries descended from the UK, has a lot of protections of that sort. You can't put "unconscionable" terms in a contract, e.g., it is simply
573.
by jerf 6mo ago
I think this is a fundamental LLM issue. I recall a paper a ways back about trying to get the LLMs to be too succinct, and the problem is, with the way they are implemented, the only way they can "think" is to emit a token. IIRC
574.
by jerf 7mo ago
The people spamming curl did step one, "write me a vulnerability report on X" but skipped step two, "verify for me that it's actually exploitable". Tack on a step three where a reasonably educated user in the field
575.
by jerf 7mo ago
If you want to understand a fairly non-trivial amount of the brokenness of the world, pondering the implications of "Hey, what if we thought about what our incentives will actually do instead of what we want them to do, and made pl
576.
by jerf 7mo ago
You sound like you're citing the general Internet understanding of "fair use", which seems to amount to "I can do whatever I like to any copyrighted content as long as maybe I mutilate it enough and shout 'FAIR USE!
577.
by jerf 7mo ago
Yes, absolutely. I'm not trying to claim it's some sort of unbiased sample, but more get across the idea that modelling AI as a person, a singular person, in your head is inaccurate. That singular person would have a stereotypic
578.
by jerf 7mo ago
I am polite when using AI, not because I mistake it for a human, but because I'm deliberately keeping it in the "professional colleague" persona. Tell it to push back, and then thank it for something it finds in your error.
579.
by jerf 7mo ago
Are you paying for the dial up service? If not, gosh, you seem to be out of luck. (Fresh out of college while the dot-com crash was still in effect, I briefly took a job for a local phone company. Their primary income was from people who we
580.
by jerf 7mo ago
"Suddenly" in this case does not mean tomorrow. It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly&quo
581.
by jerf 7mo ago
The story may be posted today but there's no reason it has to be a recent story. Even the most backward government post in 2026 should have a fax-to-document service that integrates with their document tracker. But there was definitely
582.
by jerf 7mo ago
I don't have a word for this, but this falls under the class of things where even if the author who wrote this is did not personally do this and is making it up, it has absolutely 100% happened somewhere, many times over. For example,
583.
by jerf 7mo ago
In this scenario, that would be the people paying for the assassination. The people who want it to happen bet that it won't. The people who want to do it bet that it will. The net result is that if one of the people who bet on it happe
584.
by jerf 7mo ago
"I've gone back and forth internally about whether this is healthy or not for him. I truly don't know." On a psychological level, I don't know either. I have opinions but they haven't aged long enough for me to
585.
by jerf 7mo ago
Go's net/http Client is built for functionality and complete support of the protocol, including even such corner cases as support for trailer headers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTT
586.
by jerf 7mo ago
"Building datacenters will reduce the cost because increasing supply would reduce the cost." That's great for us users but I'm talking from the point of view of the people trying to make money on the data centers. "
587.
by jerf 7mo ago
I'm at a loss as to how some of these projects got funded in the first place. Anyone funding these should have had the perspective to see that there isn't enough power for them. Anyone funding them should have had the perspective
588.
by jerf 7mo ago
Now is probably a pretty good time to start a capabilities-based language if someone is able to do that. I wish I had the time.
589.
by jerf 7mo ago
The primary alternatives are: One, you don't need this. The vast majority of people working on the web are now so thoroughly overserved by their frameworks, especially the way that benchmarks like this measured only the minimal overhea
590.
by jerf 7mo ago
There's a very wide band between "2G" and "unlimited" to explore. Cell phone systems already have some tiering built in, at least based on the fine print I've read about my plans. Once I run out of "offici
591.
by jerf 7mo ago
All call centers are actually located in Lake Wobegon, where all the call wait times are above average. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#Recurring_monolog... , for the probably many people who don't kn
592.
by jerf 7mo ago
Any non-trivial program that has never had an optimizer run on it has a minimal-effort 50+% speedup in it.
593.
by jerf 7mo ago
As feedback to the author, I made the same mistake initially. It was only around halfway through when I realized the voters in question didn't necessarily care what they were voting for in the usual preferential or political sense, onl
594.
by jerf 7mo ago
One language in the same category to another in the same category , yes. "Category" here being something roughly like "scripting, compiled imperative, functional". However my experience is that if you want to translat
595.
by jerf 7mo ago
Reacting to the story itself, I've been on the same thought line but came to the opposite conclusion. Precisely because the generation of the code is unreliable, one of the metrics we will be using in the future to determine the valu
596.
by jerf 7mo ago
The answer to a lot of "wow, how did the 8-bit machine pull that off? it seems like that would eat a lot of RAM" is that the framebuffer is the data storage. You were literally looking at the primary data store itself, because w
597.
by jerf 7mo ago
In probably another year or two I expect the metrics will show that it is a positive turn off. Unfortunately we're on the cutting edge of this particular movement and there's still a lot more "value" to be "extracte
598.
by jerf 7mo ago
I think you're thinking marginal costs. Only charging for marginal costs will put you out of business almost immediately. There are plenty of non-marginal costs that need to be covered, which will make it "not close to $0". I
599.
by jerf 7mo ago
As I'm sure more and more people are using AI to document old systems, even just to get a foothold in them personally if they don't intend to share it, here's a hint related to that: By default, if you fire an AI at a program
600.
by jerf 7mo ago
"However, I'm starting to think that maintainability and readability aren't relevant in this context. We should treat the output like compiled code." I would like to put my marker out here as vigorously disagreeing wit

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