picafrost

6 ms·

31.
by picafrost 10mo ago
Excellent. I hope to see more of it. Another social issue on GitHub: you cannot use the "good first issue" tag on a public repository without being subjected to low quality drive-by PRs or AI slop automatically submitted by someon
32.
by picafrost 11mo ago
Every industry building at scale makes the same tradeoffs. Manufacturers that create physical products use thinner metal, cheaper fasteners, and not-top-quality plastics. That's not because their engineers are bad but because good enou
33.
by picafrost 11mo ago
That's a weird take-away from the post, where the only time ICE is mentioned is > Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE, and the rest of the article provides technical reasons.
34.
by picafrost 11mo ago
Cool. This concept is useful for adult language learners also. Depending on the language you are learning it can be very difficult to find reading material in the age 5 - 10 range to practice with.
35.
by picafrost 1y ago
> So I urge that community, at COP30 and beyond, to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare. Like addressing the exponential growth of income inequality? Unsurprisingly not mentioned a
36.
by picafrost 1y ago
Excellent way to stay busy producing revised editions over the next few years. I really enjoy writing Zig and I think it's going to be an important language in the future. I do not enjoy porting my code between versions of the language
37.
by picafrost 1y ago
My experience adding types to un-typed Python code has convinced me that static typing should be required for anything more complicated than a single purpose script. Even in old and battle tested code bases so many tiny bugs and false assum
38.
by picafrost 1y ago
I fully agree the narrative is nonsense, the ways, means, and timing of the story is suspect, but I don't buy the "don't trust those experts, trust me, I'm the expert" vibe of this article. Criminal enterprises and
39.
by picafrost 1y ago
Designing tools is designing behavior. It shouldn't be surprising that the behavior of a society changes when the primary form of discourse shifts from communication among peers to maximizing the engagement of strangers due to the fina
40.
by picafrost 1y ago
There is something so fundamentally gross about Microsoft's vision of what role an operating system should serve. That there is an aftermarket of software that attempts to disable (but cannot remove!) the invasive dark patterns is alar
41.
by picafrost 1y ago
I tell new employees that I will not praise them for working extra hours because I don't want them to. I do not have hard data, but anecdotally, when I see teams adopt this mentality productivity seems to increase. My guess is that it&
42.
by picafrost 1y ago
We didn't need to discover every mathematical truth to discover that there are limits to what we can mathematically prove. Nor did we need to discover every algorithm to know that we can't determine if a program will halt. Both of
43.
by picafrost 1y ago
I didn't claim they are profitable. There are endless articles about how it is not and may never be. But compared to the burn of OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Google, etc, it is burning billions less and focusing on a niche with demonstrated use
44.
by picafrost 1y ago
I agree that owning a gTLD is not the same as registering a trademark, but I'm claiming that to a company it's the same as protecting their trademark. For the same reason that companies register their names on every new social net
45.
by picafrost 1y ago
I think this is a great point. It's not a robust counter-point, but Gödel's incompleteness theorems come to mind. We do know there are limitations to formal systems, we think there may be limitations to computational complexity. M
46.
by picafrost 1y ago
I admire the human belief that the improvement of technology and our living standards will be infinite. It will be a bitter moment if we finally realize the plateau we've been stuck on is not temporary and all future gains will be ma
47.
by picafrost 1y ago
I wouldn't say it's for nothing. Brands with trademarks have a legal incentive under trademark law to acquire their trademarked name everywhere. Not doing so immediately risks a future legal and bad PR battle if some smaller compa
48.
by picafrost 1y ago
The AI fever dream of unbounded training and inference is ending and reality is settling in. Anthropic has had the most reasonable business model of the AI players with their focus on code, as far as I can tell, but it still won't be e
49.
by picafrost 1y ago
I think anyone who chooses to undergo the first few trials of a new operation like this, and is informed about the risks, is very brave. I do not know much of anything about medical science, but my impression is that we are still very, very
50.
by picafrost 1y ago
The further into this corporatized "vision" of technology we go, the more I relate the elves in LoTR who basically said "our time is over" and then just leave Middle Earth. There is no turning back. Generations of develo
51.
by picafrost 1y ago
This chart shows that nuclear produced >900 TWh in the EU in the early 2000s and the latest data point is 619 TWh (2023). That's a >30% reduction with a clear trend. I did not claim that every nuclear reactor in Europe was turned
52.
by picafrost 1y ago
It is more representative of the situation over the past 30 years to say that France is not Europe. But even they had plans to cut nuclear energy to 50%. [0] [0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023&
53.
by picafrost 1y ago
I don't understand your post. Europe absolutely spent many years phasing out nuclear energy while rationalizing that increased gas imports from Russia was good because trade will make us friends [0]. The data supports this (though obvi
54.
by picafrost 1y ago
We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad) while doubling down on Russian gas dependency (because trade = peace). Clearly this has gone poorly
55.
by picafrost 1y ago
Internet denizens love opening a locked box. This phenomenon has been weaponized by the gaming industry in the form of loot boxes.
56.
by picafrost 1y ago
Physically written materials are such a huge part of our archaeological understanding of the human past. In my mind digital materials are always dangerously close to non-existence, even if cloud redundancy and our apparent inability to ful
57.
by picafrost 1y ago
The gold rush metaphor loves to highlight the shovel sellers, but the actually valuable commodity (gold) still needs a broker. I cannot see any other hardware vendor being better positioned than Apple for consumer facing AI.
58.
by picafrost 1y ago
Another way to frame this is that even though the FFmpeg repository clearly indicates it's a mirror repository and has had a single open pull request titled "WARNING: PULL REQUESTS ON THIS REPOSITORY ARE IGNORED" [0] sitting
59.
by picafrost 1y ago
It's cool to see such an impactful project choose sovereignty. I hope more projects follow their example. If you're a backbone-of-the-internet project like FFmpeg is, living on GitHub seems horrible. You will be subjected to thous
60.
by picafrost 1y ago
That's a fair point - but most of these threads focus on comparing systems rather than discussing whether they are necessary in the first place. I can see how folks with ADHD or similar challenges would benefit from a TODO app (or simi

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