ourob

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I’ve seen the comparison to pair programming with a junior programmer before, and it’s wild to me that such a comparison would be a point in favor of using AI for improving productivity.

I have never experienced a productivity boost by pairing with a junior. Which isn’t to say it’s not worth doing, but the productivity gains go entirely to the junior. The benefits I receive are mainly improving my communication and mentoring skills in the short term, and improving the team’s productivity in the long term by boosting the junior’s knowledge.

And it’s not like the AI works on the mundane stuff in parallel while I work on the more interesting, higher level stuff. I have to hold its hand through the process.

I feel like the efficiency gains of AI programming is almost entirely in improving your speed at wrestling a chatbot into producing something useful. Which may not be entirely useless going forward - knowing how to search well is an important skill, this may become something similar, but it just doesn’t seem worth the hassle to me.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 months ago

This article from last year compares LLMs to techniques used by “psychics” (cold reading, etc).

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

I think it’s a great analogy (and an interesting article).

[–] [email protected] 43 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I like that I can currently adjust the volume or silence a call on my phone in my pocket by feeling the physical buttons. I miss being able to deliberately unlock my phone with touch id as I’m picking it up without having to look at it square on.

Hell, I even miss the chin and bezel. I liked having neutral space to grab the phone without it registering a tap or swipe.

Maybe I’m getting old, but smartphone design largely peaked several years ago, and they insist on making changes to parts of the phone that are perfectly fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

They are under expansion chips.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

GPL can be used for commercial purposes, but it requires all software derived from it to also be open source and GPL compatible. So no one whose commercial business relies on selling software will use GPL because their customers can copy and distribute the code.

Neither Safari nor Chrome’s rendering engine is GPL. Safari’s engine is LGPL, which means the binary library can be linked into a closed source program, but modifications to the library’s code must remain open.

Chromium is BSD, which doesn’t even require modifications to remain open. So I can take chromium’s source, change it however I want for my own browser, and never distribute that code.

If Safari’s and Chrome’s engines were GPL, Safari and Chrome would be forced to be open source, and they very much are not.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

While I’m too much of an optimist to say that we’ll never figure out viable fusion power, I do think you’re more right than wrong.

Fission power is essentially us discharging a fusion battery, where the battery was charged by a supernova. We don’t get any free help with fusion, and we have to replicate input energies only seen in nature with stellar amounts of gravitational mass. It is (IMO) an important area of research, but I don’t expect it to power our cities in my lifetime.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

The eyes. Look for non-circular pupils or noticeably different-sized pupils.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Also, pupils are often not regular circles in AI images. The only one I got wrong was the real picture of the guy wearing dirty glasses.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (13 children)

Source? The Yale link above specifically mentions:

Nationally, women make up 57.3% of bachelor’s degree recipients but only 38.6% of STEM bachelor’s degree recipients.

Anecdotally, I was in a STEM-focused school and major over 20 years ago, and it was overwhelming male-dominated. One of my colleagues graduated less than 10 years ago, and her experience was not dissimilar. She had to deal with quite a bit of sexism too, unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Elon didn’t start hyper loop because he thought it would be successful. He started it to kill California’s high speed rail plans.

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1571628269555826688?lang=en

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