jerf

49 ms·

811.
by jerf 11mo ago
I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one. "XSLT is currently the only way to make feeds into s
812.
by jerf 11mo ago
This has been chewed on ad nauseum on HN already, to the point I won't even try to make a list of the articles but just link a search result: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
813.
by jerf 1y ago
In my first post, the example I really wanted to use was people picking Go for their top-end, competitive-with-anything-in-the-market database. I choose Python just because anyone who would argue that is a good choice is clearly not som
814.
by jerf 1y ago
Absolutely agree. People made the bad decisions. But the bad choices existed. People who don't understand the bad choices are bad choices, or worse, think that there is no possible way there is a bad choice, are far more likely to end
815.
by jerf 1y ago
The great team would not have written the Amazon clone in Fortran. There is no engineering justification for such a choice, and "we are swaggeringly awesome engineers who can conquer anything" is not even remotely an engineering j
816.
by jerf 1y ago
"I cannot agree that programming language choice is a primary driver in a product's success or failure" I've seen it. There are definitely incorrect language choices for certain projects. It would be fair to say that the
817.
by jerf 1y ago
The modern meaning of "geometry" may not change, but cutting and gluing space definitely break Euclidean geometry, as in, specifically the one defined by Euclid. You can't break a mathematical system much harder than to kill
818.
by jerf 1y ago
It is non-Euclidean. 4 out of 5, if not 5 out of 5, of the postulates that define Euclidean space fail. It can't fail any harder. This isn't a matter of emotion or feeling like "oh, gee, I don't want to, like, demote the
819.
by jerf 1y ago
If you define "a line" as "blocked by another line (standing in for a wall)", it would be non-Euclidean, by virtue of breaking the axiom that says a line can be infinite extended, so that's not a particularly compel
820.
by jerf 1y ago
"Why was everything always good, peaceful and stable in "indigenous environments" until "the colonizers " show up?" One thing that may help resolve this in your head is that invasive species taking over is the
821.
by jerf 1y ago
This is one of the things I've mentioned before, I think it's just hidden a bit and hard to see, but this is basically the LLM doing style transfer, which they're really good at. There was a specification for the code (which
822.
by jerf 1y ago
If your geometry has portals, the parallel line postulate will no longer hold. If your portals can have different angles between the entrance and the exit you can straight up cross "parallel" lines, and even if you require them to
823.
by jerf 1y ago
No one needs Curtis Yarvin, or any other commentator of any political stripe, to tell them that they'd like more money and power, and that they'd like to get it before someone else locks it in. We should be so lucky as to only hav
824.
by jerf 1y ago
This is a myth, from the old days when BEAM was the only thing that could juggle thousands of "processes" without losing performance, and even back then, people routinely missed that while BEAM could juggle those thousands of proc
825.
by jerf 1y ago
"not sure if it’s mathematically correct," There isn't always "a" correct extension into higher dimensions. There may be many, there may be none, and either way something "close enough" may well be interes
826.
by jerf 1y ago
For the same reason you don't modify autogenerated files in your source code base. It's easy to get an LLM to just regen the page but once someone tries to edit it you're even farther down the road of what an LLM can't
827.
by jerf 1y ago
Erlang/Elixir and Go "solve" this problem by basically not giving you the rope to hang yourself in this particular way in the first place. This is a perfectly valid and sensible solution... but it is not the only solution.
828.
by jerf 1y ago
Yes, yes, you're an invincible winter god upon whom the temperature means nothing. Let us all acknowledge that and bow before you. Now tell me everyone is doing that, all the time. I also live fairly north, which is part of why I&#x2
829.
by jerf 1y ago
"Ultimately I found that visualizing large graphs is rarely helpful in practice; they can certainly look nice for some well defined graphs, but I rarely saw well defined graphs in the wild." Yes, I'm with you: https:/&#
830.
by jerf 1y ago
"Winnipeg, Manitoba" ... "only need 15 minutes of sunshine per day to get your recommended dose of Vitamin D" That doesn't apply to you most of the time, unfortunately. Vitamin D is the result of UVB exposure. For s
831.
by jerf 1y ago
Every pathological case you can imagine is something someone somewhere has done. Sticking data into the keys is definitely a thing I've seen. One I've done personally is dump large portions of a Redis DB into a JSON object. I coul
832.
by jerf 1y ago
Even not dripping directly on to the goods, there's not a lot of stuff that you would be interested in getting out of a safe, but you will still be interested in even after being exposed to thermite. The list is basically "preciou
833.
by jerf 1y ago
"But how to they fully grasp natural language to be able to perform tasks worded unexpectedly, which would be easy to parse, if they understood natural language?" A Large Language Model. Pardon me for spelling out the full acronym
834.
by jerf 1y ago
I'm not sure if you think you're agreeing with me or not, but that is my point. Compared to the nominal account of computational power our brains have, we are staggeringly bad at logical manipulation. We extremely expensively and
835.
by jerf 1y ago
It's four stories in the complete set: https://a.co/d/gEdBkYR Wright also has an extended paen to the mentioned Voyage to Arcturus: https://a.co/d/hubUM05 which neither I, nor the author, rec
836.
by jerf 1y ago
There's equivocation in that statement, though, whether you meant there to be or not. There is clearly a difference in how we manipulate English words for normal human activities and the symbolic manipulation with very strict rules we
837.
by jerf 1y ago
This is a gut impression and I don't deny it, but LLMs are Large Language Models, and in my own brain, my Language Model isn't doing large-scale multiplication. I have a language-based intuition for the sigle-digit multiplicatio
838.
by jerf 1y ago
It's nearly solved now. "ChatGPT, I had a database here but it seems to have gone missing. It had a table with "User", "Email", and "Amount Paid"; can you reconstruct it for me?" ... "I dunn
839.
by jerf 1y ago
"It's used all the time in logging." Which I would consider one of the code smells in question, because logging should be structured anyhow. I understand there are a lot of code bases in the world that already exist that lack
840.
by jerf 1y ago
The problem is such systems are also CPU heavy, with extensive hashing, encryption, and really quite a lot of general paperwork, and as such, a system that can efficiently use multiple CPUs is really important. I guarantee that plenty of Tw

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