sfink

19 ms·

271.
by sfink 10mo ago
Hm, good thought. You could just do printf("%d is %s\n", n, last_binary_bit(n) == 0 ? "even" : "odd"); and the rest is trivial: int last_binary_bit(int n) { if (n == 0) return 0;
272.
by sfink 11mo ago
Heh, and rereading my comment, it comes across as more against the usage than I actually feel. It's not my personal style, and sometimes I find it annoying, but 80% of the time I think it's totally fine and expresses a nuance that
273.
by sfink 11mo ago
That was my immediate thought too, but I'm still in favor of banning it in order to make it a community norm. Right now, people generally seem to think that such comments are adding some sort of signal, and I don't think they&#x27
274.
by sfink 11mo ago
Yeah, I haven't used AIs enough to be that good at immediately spotting generated output, so I appreciate the chance to reconsider my assumption that something was human-written. I'm sure people who did NOT use an AI find it insul
275.
by sfink 11mo ago
It's not "off" unless you're simply reading it literally. If you do that, then it's a verbose way of saying "I agree". But the connotations are something like "I agree, strongly, and in particular am
276.
by sfink 11mo ago
> First, ignoring frail patients means your trial isn't representative of the wider population, so it shouldn't be accepted for general use - only on people who were well-represented in the trial. Sure, but including frail outl
277.
by sfink 11mo ago
Don't those 99 enjoy being alive despite all of the things that would have killed some of them had they not taken the vaccine? If "some" is at least 1%, that sounds like an individual benefit to me. If you take the vaccine, y
278.
by sfink 11mo ago
Same here. My logic is that my toothbrush is in the same room as a device for aerosolizing fecal bacteria, which is kinda gross but also not that different from a lot of other surfaces and environments, and that it's going to collect s
279.
by sfink 11mo ago
It turns out that with enough effort, "chess" can be lumped in with "arithmetic". The machines are just better at it. We're continually finding new things in that category, including things we never would have guess
280.
by sfink 11mo ago
Having an actual human who is a "brilliant private tutor" is an enormous privilege. A chatbot is not a brilliant private tutor. It is a private tutor, yes, but if it were human it would be guilty of malpractice. It hands out ans
281.
by sfink 11mo ago
Fallibility isn't the problem. It's probably a net benefit for learning. Promoting dependency is the problem. Replacing effort is the problem. Making self-discipline be a thing only for suckers is the problem.
282.
by sfink 11mo ago
I fully agree, but to be fair these chatbots hack our reward systems. They present a cost/benefit ratio where for much less effort than doing it ourselves we get a much better result than doing it ourselves (assuming this is a skill no
283.
by sfink 11mo ago
Yes, they do. In fact, imperfect teachers can sometimes induce more learning than more perfect ones. And that's what is insidious about learning from AI. It looks like something we've seen before, something where we know how to ma
284.
by sfink 11mo ago
> Technological advancement is what has pulled billions of people out of poverty. I agree with this. Perhaps that's what is driving the current billionaire class to say "never again!" and making sure that they capture all
285.
by sfink 11mo ago
From someone who ships software that runs on hundreds of millions of computers: please consider running a memory tester once in a while, particularly if you have any unexplained crashes. The days of being able to assume "it's not
286.
by sfink 11mo ago
Right, though the LD? and ST? instructions were kind of exceptions. You could only do arithmetic and stack and bitwise ops (and, or, eor, shift, rotate) with A, never X nor Y. Increment and decrement were X/Y only. You couldn't ev
287.
by sfink 11mo ago
Right, that's what I was thinking in my 2nd paragraph. No real reason not to, I suspect it just conflicted with the mindset of cleverness that you had to have for other reasons. Macros for >1 instruction would be fine, macros for 1
288.
by sfink 11mo ago
Strangely, the only difference on the flags is that AF (auxiliary carry) is undefined for `xor eax, eax` but guaranteed to be zeroed for `sub eax, eax`. I don't know what that means in practice, though I'm guessing that at the ver
289.
by sfink 11mo ago
I don't know, but one reason might be that with 8-bit opcodes you only have 256 instructions to play with, and many of those encode registers, so ZEROAX is burning a meaningful percentage of your total opcode space. And if you're
290.
by sfink 11mo ago
What is this "LD A, 0" syntax? Is it a z80 thing? One of the random things burned into my memory for 6502 assembly is that LDA is $A9. I never separated the instruction from the register; it's not like they were general purpo
291.
by sfink 11mo ago
You don't need to, Jujutsu[1] gives you most of mercurial with some additional stuff. And relevant for this subthread, Tangled appears to work with it[2]. [1] https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/ [2] https:/&#x2F
292.
by sfink 11mo ago
> From the perspective of the organization that pays you to do it, it is? I agree. I'm just saying that if you limit yourself to explanations from that perspective, you will miss some of the explanations and be unable to describe re
293.
by sfink 11mo ago
> Well, I don't know that we can separate external forces from why people might dislike bad code... I'm not denying the validity of the reasons stemming from external forces. I'm just enumerating a bunch of additional reas
294.
by sfink 11mo ago
n0o
295.
by sfink 11mo ago
I didn't know that at some point, then I knew that and found it obvious, and now I don't know it again. Strings are very very not sequences of bytes. Strings are a semantic thing. There may be a sequence of bytes in some represent
296.
by sfink 11mo ago
Hm, those are all valid, but they're also from the perspective of only caring about external forces. It's as if the work itself is only relevant insofar as we get something out of it. I got into this career because I like mucking
297.
by sfink 11mo ago
So it's called the Icarus bug, right? Please tell me they're calling it the Icarus bug.
298.
by sfink 11mo ago
> Specific facts and procedures are explicitly NOT protected by copyright. No argument there, and I'm grateful for the limits of copyright. That part was only for describing what LLM weights store -- just because the literal text is
299.
by sfink 11mo ago
Not the way I see it. The argument that GPL code is a tiny minority of what's in the model makes no sense to me. (To be clear, you're not making this argument.) One book is a tiny minority of an entire library, but that doesn&#x27
300.
by sfink 11mo ago
The line is somewhere between running wc on the entire input and running gzip on the entire input. The fact that a slippery slope is slippery doesn't make it not a slope.

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