nz

4 ms·

1.
by nz 6d ago
I believe this is called learned helplessness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
2.
by nz 6d ago
Tried to share and explain that paper to a colleague a few months ago (in relation to discussions about agentic coding and whether you should read the code), and they did not really get why the analogy was relevant outside of compiler-desig
3.
by nz 7d ago
Many languages can compile a subset of their code to FPGA HDLs. Back in the 80s Harel's group had statecharts that were compilable to C, C++, and FPGA HDLs. Not sure that LLMs brings anything substantially new to this.
4.
by nz 8d ago
Someone once told me, any illegal thing can become legal if you add extra steps. This is not _legally_ true, but it is _practically_ true. Evading a tariff is illegal, until you start using a proxy-country. Firing an employee, and not givin
5.
by nz 8d ago
People were always able to "instantly use it at the drop of a hat" (paraphrased). What people are objecting to, is instant use without any acknowledgement or attribution (the minimum courtesy). They also object to being mistreated
6.
by nz 8d ago
Funny how, when Aaron Swartz did the exact same thing (in a much narrower and more focused way), he was driven to suicide by the US government, but when Sam and Dario do it, people argue about whether (or not) "IP is real". Note t
7.
by nz 8d ago
This site actually reminds of the TUIs that one uses to install an OS from the text-console. It's not so bad. The prose itself is irritating. The site itself also has some bugs (text overlapping with UI borders for no reason). The lime
8.
by nz 23d ago
I am not calling it GP. I am pointing out that AI-coding systems tend to resemble GP systems in terms of both broad architecture, and in terms of how the code/genome is generated. Also, I already mentioned domain specific languages, in
9.
by nz 28d ago
The various advances in LLM technology tend to rhyme with the advances in computer programming in general. For example, the stunts that involved getting LLMs to create compilers and browsers are really just extremely expensive[0] versions o
10.
by nz 29d ago
This is a lesser-of-two-evils situation. Before acquisitions became the new "meta" in Silicon Valley, the old meta was that gigantic quasi-monopolies, like Microsoft, burn money and man-years embracing, extending, and extinguishin
11.
by nz 1mo ago
A friend of mine was once tasked with writing a kind of simulation that simulates millions of scenarios per session/run, and searches for a best-so-far solution while doing so. He proposed writing it in Rust (justifying it as: fast, lo
12.
The Future of Computing: Logic or Biology (2003) [pdf](microsoft.com)
1 points by nz 1mo ago|0 comments
13.
by nz 1mo ago
Back in college (around 15 years ago), I read a few books on eminence by Dean Kieth Simonton. One thing that I remember, and that has always been in the back of my mind, is that certain studies found that (in the USA), children who grow up
14.
by nz 2mo ago
So, I know I am late to this discussion by a week (the coding rarely stops, and I often miss big developments), but, I was at Joyent when it was acquired by Samsung, and their interest was very similar to most Joyent customers: to find a wa
15.
by nz 2mo ago
The worst part of this, is that projects that present themselves like this, poison the pool for everyone else. I imagine that many people are now disinclined to ever publish a hand-coded project in this genre (retro-computing), because peop
16.
by nz 2mo ago
I've heard someone say that this has been going on since 2012, because that is the year that 60% of all Americans (and probably most industrialized countries), owned a smartphone. This is qualitatively different from 60% of all America
17.
by nz 2mo ago
This feels very much like a distinction between letter of the law and spirit of the law. I knew a guy who once forked a very popular browser extension (you've definitely heard of it), that was copyleft-licensed. When I asked him where
18.
by nz 2mo ago
A project can probably use the EUPL instead of the AGPL (EUPL is to AGPL, as MPLv2[0] is to GPL). Basically, EUPL is file-based, not project based, and so it is not aggressively viral. You can use the EUPL code any way you want, as long as
19.
by nz 2mo ago
My understanding is that they used c2rust, and then told the LLM/Agents to make the code more idiomatic rust, while also using the PG test suite as a feedback mechanism. This is almost certainly a derived work (and thus a fork, and sho
20.
by nz 2mo ago
Yeah, attacking the problem at the root, is even better than treating the symptoms.
21.
by nz 2mo ago
This is similar to the arms-race between spammers and spam-filters, just much more capital intensive. The funny thing about the battle between spammer and spammee, is that we already had a very good solution to it: web-of-trust. We also kno
22.
by nz 2mo ago
In a way, LLMs have made it much more difficult to be believed. On the one hand, my inner paranoiac feels vindicated -- preparing for the worst case, over a lifetime, feels more prescient than it should. On the other hand, making decisions,
23.
by nz 2mo ago
This is just the rationalist-empiricist[0] tension, from philosophy. Most empiricists (usually people who are _not_ from continental European cultures), take a position that knowledge and creativity come from observation and imitation, whil
24.
by nz 2mo ago
I mean, my point is that we would all be better off without any of the KPIs, and stack-ranking, and so on, in large part because they are not reliable metrics, and making them reliable is itself a difficult problem to solve. You need engine
25.
by nz 2mo ago
Unreliable software is also expensive. Rather, building reliable software is incompatible with a management policy that rewards and punishes people based on KPIs (basically leading indicators). The concept of KPIs is fine, but they should (
26.
by nz 2mo ago
The argument is not just "theft", and to the extent that "theft" is a part of it, it is not the most important part, not by large margin. The reason that "theft" is not a solid argument, is because people creat
27.
The Internet of Snails: Escargotic commotion and the wood-wide web (2015)(cabinetmagazine.org)
3 points by nz 2mo ago|0 comments
28.
by nz 2mo ago
With the exception of _one_ company that I worked at, pretty much every[0] company was a struggle between engineering and management. Engineering wants to get the software correct, and management wants to fire-hose features into the market.
29.
by nz 3mo ago
Owners and developers. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Years ago, maybe in the late 2000s, when startups were becoming culturally significant, and "Tech" became an "Industry", two books were written and
30.
The Second Life of Sanskrit(openthemagazine.com)
3 points by nz 3mo ago|0 comments

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