Yup this is the real world take IME. Code should be self documenting, really the only exception ever is “why” because code explains how, as you said.

Now there are sometimes less-than-ideal environments. Like at my last job we were doing Scala development, and that language is expressive enough to allow you to truly have self-documenting code. Python cannot match this, and so you need comments at times (in earlier versions of Python type annotations were specially formatted literal comments, now they’re glorified comments because they look like real annotations but actually do nothing).

Sadly defunding of the space program has rarely meant funding proper welfare. It’s not really an either or situation, or at least it hasn’t been yet.

Weird thing about this group of fascists is they’re particularly old. Most previous fascist revolutions have been from younger(ish) people, like 25-50, as opposed to the literally geriatric Trump supporters. Unless the fascists figure out how to capture the youth, this is just reactionaries getting loud before they finally die off.

Not all gamers are triple A gamers. I’d call myself an avid gamer (I used to put in easily 80 hour weeks gaming, now it’s almost always lower, but I’ll still go on gaming binges during long vacations or holidays).

The vast, vast majority of my time has been WoW and LoL. I have played other games throughout the years, but usually in the same genres (mmo/moba).

A lot of these games have entry fees of below $70. Right now most of my gaming time is cata classic, and that requires $15 a month. Over time that will obviously add up, but everything adds up overtime, and $15 a month is not prohibitively expensive for most people. Also it’s really only $15 for the first month, just by leveling in cata classic to max you make enough to buy a wow token, and can easily pay $0 a month every month by just using in game currency.

Any chance you have an nvidia card? Nvidia for a long time has been in a worse spot on Linux than AMD, which interestingly is the inverse of Windows. A lot of AMD users complain of driver issues on Windows and swap to Nvidia as a result, and the exact opposite happens on Linux.

Nvidia is getting much better on Linux though, and Wayland+explicit sync is coming down the pipeline. With NVK in a couple years it’s quite possible that nvidia/amd Linux experience will be very similar.

Glad someone said this, it bothers me even with human ages. Like there’s this perception that as you get older you simply gain knowledge, wisdom, world experience, etc. Not a lot of people account for biological limits for knowledge/memory, nor degradation from aging.

If some young intern decided to try to have sex with Biden, I think there’s genuinely a conversation to be had about if that’s statutory rape. I think you’d need a healthcare professional to rule on if Biden has the mental capacity to fully consent. Similar to a drunk person. They’re still obviously a person able to think/engage with the world, but they’re heavily impaired and unable to fully consent as a result. Age impairs cognition too.

“they can’t learn anything” is too reductive. Try feeding GPT4 a language specification for a language that didn’t exist at the time of its training, and then tell it to program in that language given a library that you give it.

It won’t do well, but neither would a junior developer in raw vim/nano without compiler/linter feedback. It will roughly construct something that looks like that new language you fed it that it wasn’t trained on. This is something that in theory LLMs can do well, so GPT5/6/etc. will do better, perhaps as well as any professional human programmer.

Their context windows have increased many times over. We’re no longer operating in the 4/8k range, but instead 128k->1024k range. That’s enough context to, from the perspective of an observer, learn an entirely new language, framework, and then write something almost usable in it. And 2024 isn’t the end for context window size.

With the right tools (e.g input compiler errors and have the LLM reflect on how to fix said compiler errors), you’d get even more reliability, with just modern day LLMs. Get something more reliable, and effectively it’ll do what we can do by learning.

So much work in programming isn’t novel. You’re not making something really new, but instead piecing together work other people did. Even when you make an entirely new library, it’s using a language someone else wrote, libraries other people wrote, in an editor someone else wrote, on an O.S someone else wrote. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants.

18 months ago, chatgpt didn’t exist. GPT3.5 wasn’t publicly available.

At that same point 18 months ago, iPhone 14 was available. Now we have the iPhone 15.

People are used to LLMs/AI developing much faster, but you really have to keep in perspective how different this tech was 18 months ago. Comparing LLM and smartphone plateaus is just silly at the moment.

Yes they’ve been refining the GPT4 model for about a year now, but we’ve also got major competitors in the space that didn’t exist 12 months ago. We got multimodality that didn’t exist 12 months ago. Sora is mind bogglingly realistic; didn’t exist 12 months ago.

GPT5 is just a few months away. If 4->5 is anything like 3->4, my career as a programmer will be over in the next 5 years. GPT4 already consistently outperforms college students that I help, and can often match junior developers in terms of reliability (though with far more confidence, which is problematic obviously). I don’t think people realize how big of a deal that is.

Are you making a descriptive or normative claim in your first paragraph?

825,000 chickens per year in the U.S are accidentally boiled alive or drowned before their intended slaughter. https://animalclock.org/ this isn’t prevented because prevention mechanisms cost money, as in they eat into profits.

It’s standard practice for male pigs to have their tails and testicles ripped out without pain relief https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23817808/pig-farm-investigation-feedback-immunity-feces-intestines this link also showcases how people abuse pigs for fun. Objectifying animals you kill is a coping mechanism for humans, engaging in that much killing is unnatural and unhealthy for humans, it also leads to vastly higher rates of domestic violence and crime, as it normalizes violence as a solution.

It’s normal for foxes to have their skin ripped off while they’re alive. Animals have their beaks ripped off so they can’t kill each other in distress, as they go literally insane, abandon normal social hierarchies, and start simply trying to kill each other given the lack of space. http://www.nationearth.com/

I understand ignorance of how horrible the conditions are is a normal part of how humans justify our atrocities. However what always baffles me is people who appear genuinely concerned about animal welfare can be so absurdly uninformed on the practices that they directly support with their purchases, while criticizing practices that you have absolutely no influence over in a place on the other side of the planet.

What’s the cat abuse situation over there? Is it worse than our pig/cow/chicken abuse situation?

You know 1969 was 55 years ago? While that is technically “over 2 decades” that’s an interesting way to describe 55 years lol

Depends on what you’re looking for. I had a high paying tech job (layoffs op), and I wanted a fun car that accelerates fast but also is a good daily driver. I was in the ~60k price range, so I was looking at things like the Corvette Stingray, but there are too many compromises for that car in terms of daily driving.

The Model 3 accelerates faster 0-30, and the same speed 0-60. Off the line it feels way snappier and responsive because it’s electric, and the battery makes its center of gravity lower, so it’s remarkably good at cornering for a sedan, being more comparable to a sports car in terms of cornering capabilities than a sedan.

Those aren’t normally considerations for people trying to find a good value commuter car, so you would literally just ignore all those advantages. Yet people don’t criticize Corvette owners for not choosing a Hyundai lol

On the daily driving front, Tesla wins out massively over other high performance cars in that price range. Being able to charge up at home, never going to a gas station, best in class driving automation/assistance software, simple interior with good control panel software, one pedal driving with regen breaking.

If you’re in the 40k price range for a daily commuter, your criteria will be totally different, and I am not well versed enough in the normal considerations of that price tier and category to speak confidently to what’s the best value. Tesla does however, at the very least, have a niche in the high performance sedan market.

Like sure fuck Elon, but why do you think FSD is unsafe? They publish the accident rate, it’s lower than the national average.

There are times where it will fuck up, I’ve experienced this. However there are times where it sees something I physically can’t because of either blindspots or pillars in the car.

Having the car drive and you intervene is statistically safer than the national average. You could argue the inverse is better (you drive and the car intervenes), but I’d argue that system would be far worse, as you’d be relinquishing final say to the computer and we don’t have a legal system setup for that, regardless of how good the software is (e.g you’re still responsible as the driver).

You can call it a marketing term, but in reality it can and does successfully drive point to point with no interventions normally. The places it does fuckup are consistent fuckups (e.g bad road markings that convey the wrong thing, and you only know because you’ve been on that road thousands of times). It’s not human, but it’s far more consistent than a human, in both the ways it succeeds and fails. If you learn these patterns you can spend more time paying attention to what other drivers are doing and novel things that might be dangerous (people, animals, etc ) and less time on trivial things like mechanically staying inside of two lines or adjusting your speed. Looking in your blindspot or to the side isn’t nearly as dangerous for example, so you can get more information.

Battle.net games have been some of the most reliable non-steam games you’ll find. You’ll have trouble in the Riot Games space (League on Linux, Windows 7, and 8 are all dead in the next month due to Vanguard), and some Epic Games (Fortnite), but if you’re a Battle.net/Steam gamer Linux is ready for you.

If you’re not a vegan this is a super weird take. Hell, as a vegan myself, I don’t have a massive issue with trading pig lives for human lives. Yes it’d be ideal if we did it in other ways, but there’s an actually decent argument that it’s permissible and even good to save humans by killing animals.

Killing pigs because “mmm bacon” though? Yeah that’s a bad reason. Pleasure doesn’t permit suffering, most humans understand that unlees it’s their own pleasure they’re talking about.

No way could this clusterfuck of IP (owning thoughts), the worry of AI “taking jobs” (e.g doing work that would otherwise be done by humans), and selling of the work on a marketplace at all be tied to the idea of capitalism.

In other economic systems, having work automated would be a good thing, not an existential threat to the functioning of our entire global economy. I’m blown away that people don’t understand that.

I’m glad you brought this up, because yeah we’re all selling our bodies and time. I wouldn’t say this means we consent, though. We don’t need to change what consent means to make capitalism sound better than it is.

If you’re “incentivized” (e.g will be starved and punished otherwise) by a system to do something you hate, you can’t call that consent.

If you had a system where women were raised and then presented with the option of either having sex with you & being allowed to participate in modern society, or being discarded in the wilderness, not being allowed to even build anywhere/make it on your own because all the land is owned by either private individuals or the government, then those women aren’t free.

As we agree, just by changing the demand from “have sex” to “do manual labor” or “rent out your mind so someone else can own the product of your thoughts (IP)” doesn’t change whether or not it’s consensual.

What’s actually being punished? Would she have been sentenced to 8.5 years in prison if she pushed an 87 year old who was slightly less frail and instead of dying sustained major injuries? Would she have been sentenced if she pushed an extraordinarily healthy 87 year old who knew how to gracefully fall and sustained no serious injuries?

It seems that the act of pushing alone isn’t enough to sentence a person to nearly a decade in prison. There was likely no intention to kill, though that was the outcome. What if she sneezed on the 87 year old, and in a fit of panic the 87 year old fell over and died? Again, no intention to kill, though that would still be the outcome.

I think it’s clear this should be punished more intensely than sneezing, pushing an old person would very commonly result in serious injury, so this is definitely assault.

Most people aren’t practicing teachers, so it makes sense that not all explanations are the best. Trying to get an intuitional understanding of passing by reference or passing by value in imperative languages is arguably more important than understanding how map works, and yet I’d argue it’s also harder to do.

If you understand map (not just lists, but futures, IOs, Options, Maybes, etc.) then you understand Functors. Yes there are laws, but mathematical laws here are just encoding our intuition. Something like Iterator in Java may not have laws, but you would expect that calling .next() doesn’t modify an SQL database, though it wouldn’t be a technically invalid implementation if it did. The same is not true for Functors. If you map over a List and the act of mapping each int to its double modified a database then you wouldn’t have a lawful functor. But that should make sense intuitionally without knowing the laws.

People in OO land are more happy to say they “understand” something if they generally get what the abstraction is going for. Do you know all the methods for Iterator/Iterable in Java? Even if you didn’t, you’d likely say you get the “point” of an Iterable. The bar for understanding things in the FP community is usually higher than just understanding the point of something.

This doesn’t mean FP is more complicated. Actually it kind of means it’s simpler, because it’s not unreasonable for people to totally understand what Functors are for all languages that implement them. The same is not true of Iterable/Iterator. There’s no way you’d have more than just an intuition about what Iterable is in a language you don’t know. I don’t program in Agda or Idris, but I know Functor in those languages are the same as Functor in Scala and Haskell. Same with Monad, Monoids, etc.