nz

13 ms·

91.
by nz 8mo ago
I know what will blow your socks off: package managers. They are kind of like magical wizards that can make fully operational software appear on your machine. Want a scheme compiler? Just `nix-shell -p racket`. Want common lisp? `nix-shell
92.
by nz 8mo ago
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about florid and elaborate writing (e.g. Faulkner, Lispector, Mieville, Mossman, Joyce, Austen, etc)?
93.
by nz 8mo ago
Even the linkedin profile has a studio-ghibli-style avatar. People are going to assume that he is just an "analog interface" to an LLM. Which is sad, because he might be a good programmer. In fact, I tend to see a lot of english-a
94.
Novelist interview-Chuck Palahniuk [video] (2024)(youtube.com)
2 points by nz 8mo ago|0 comments
95.
by nz 8mo ago
Thank you, I will check these out!
96.
by nz 8mo ago
The vast majority of workplaces have never cared about code quality (with the exception being the actual engineers that write the code). Everyone else has no clue what programmers do, other than, "they write arcane symbols, and our pro
97.
by nz 8mo ago
Just FYI, Chomsky, answering "Is Iran a Threat?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdxxVxtHK2M
98.
by nz 8mo ago
Yes, I wrote this, and you can find an intro/context to the _UNFINISHED_[1] essay here ( https://www.galacticbeyond.com/a-bridge-to-everywhere/ ), with a link to the PDF at the bottom. [1]: what you see is the first
99.
by nz 8mo ago
Most of these "class traitors" live in high cost of living areas, and for them, the choice is "become unemployed within two weeks for not complying", or "become unemployed within a few years for complying". The
100.
by nz 8mo ago
An interesting economic fact: Karl Marx observed that if factories keep getting more efficient, eventually, they will require fewer workers because the population is not growing quickly enough to match the increasing rate of production. Thi
101.
by nz 8mo ago
In some sense, programming is about figuring out which algorithms are a fitting metaphor for business problems. By programming, you are building a model of the business problem and a model of its solution. Most of the non-programmers who ar
102.
by nz 8mo ago
Quasi-relevant excerpt from an odd essay (footnotes and references omitted). ``` My own eyes spent countless nights observing, with curiosity and wonder and delight, the responses of a computer, as I commanded it with code, like a sorcerer
103.
by nz 8mo ago
Even though I understand your sentiment, and think it is sincere, I think this is intellectually dishonest. Even though I have been programming since I was 16 (20 years), I still program like a child playing with Duplo blocks, when using a
104.
by nz 8mo ago
Great writer. For people who want to get a taste of Simmons without committing to an entire book, I would recommend this (very) short story: The River Styx Runs Upstream[1]. [1]: https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/
105.
by nz 8mo ago
It depends a lot on what counts as "observation" or "measurement". For example, nobody with a telescope (of any magnification and resolution) would postulate the existence of dark matter. But, one person (Zwicky, 1933),
106.
by nz 8mo ago
Not an insider, so feel free to ignore, but here is my interpretation anyway. Safety is poorly defined, but can be interpreted to mean "arbitrary constraint" on the capability of the model. In other words a "safe" model
107.
by nz 8mo ago
I think you will get a better response to a slightly different analogy. In genetic programming (and in machine learning), we have a concept of "overfitting". Overfitting can be understood as a program memorizing too much of its te
108.
by nz 8mo ago
How does he solve the Fruit of the Poison Tree problem? For all he know, his LLMs included a bunch copyrighted or patented code throughout the codebase. How is he going to convince serious people that this port is not just a transformation
109.
by nz 8mo ago
Hate to tell you this, but it's cults all the way down. Plato understood this, and his disdain for caves and wall-shadows, is really a disdain for cults. The thing is, over the last 2300 years, we have gotten really good at making our
110.
by nz 8mo ago
The irony is that if we had been writing literate programs instead of "normal" programs, from 1984 to 2026, then LLMs may actually have been much better at programming in 2026, than they turned out to be. Literate programs entwine
111.
by nz 8mo ago
Originally posted this comment here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073581 ), but relevant to this subthread too. The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is
112.
by nz 8mo ago
The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is that property theft is perfectly fine. Which is a _goofy_ position to have, if you are a billionaire, or even a millionaire. Like, if prop
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by nz 8mo ago
This is not really a contradiction. When the world became bipolar, there was a lot of alpha in arbitrage. The most valuable Yugoslav (state owned) company was Genex, which was an import/export company -- it would import from one bloc a
114.
by nz 8mo ago
Not only that, but in Russian, the equivalent word for verb "work" (as in "go work" or "do work"), is "rabotay", which is derived from the word "rab" which is the word "slave". So
115.
by nz 8mo ago
I mean the productivity paradox was only temporarily remedied. Around 2005 we entered a second version of the paradox and it persists to this day. I'll note that 2005 was when the internet became dominated by walled-gardens and social-
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by nz 8mo ago
So you are telling me that the cloud is not actually made of water-vapor?
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What a Programmer Does (1967) [pdf](archive.computerhistory.org)
100 points by nz 9mo ago|16 comments
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Web Du Bois on the beauty of sorrow songs (1903)(laphamsquarterly.org)
1 points by nz 9mo ago|0 comments
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by nz 9mo ago
Just to add to this. Open source for money has been a dead end for a long time, except for the (increasingly rare) situations where people accidentally convert their open source _contributions_ into employment (I accidentally did this back
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by nz 9mo ago
A little hungover, but some foggy thoughts: If a company can differentiate itself by loving its customers, then that is an indictment of the rest of the entire industry. Loving one's customers should be the standard. But alas, the peop

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