WCSTombs

7 ms·

31.
by WCSTombs 26d ago
Yeah, I've been thinking this as well. I have some optimism, but not with high confidence. The exponentially increasing power of computing hardware up until this point is often cited as the reason performance optimization has been side
32.
by WCSTombs 27d ago
Sorry but this is pretty bogus. (-1)^x is only well defined when x is an integer. This is generally the case for r^x whenever r isn't a positive real number. For example, when x = 0.5, r has two distinct square roots. Sure, you can cho
33.
by WCSTombs 27d ago
You do in fact need the complex exponential to define this correctly because the function a^x for nonintegers x is only unambiguously defined when a is a positive real number. For example, your function could be either e^(pi i x) or e^(-pi
34.
by WCSTombs 28d ago
While I generally agree with what the author is trying to say, I have to point out that it's largely AI-generated, by the author's own admission. TBH it's pretty ironic given rule #1, and why limit "write in your own voi
35.
by WCSTombs 28d ago
I've used Taylor series in numerical optimization. A function we were implementing needed to be differentiable (for automatic differentiation), but its definition had a special case, so we used a couple terms of the Taylor series in th
36.
by WCSTombs 28d ago
I think I cautiously agree with this notion to some extent, but IMHO the real answer is that it's application-dependent, and if you're writing a low-level trig library and you have to pick one or the other, it really isn't cl
37.
by WCSTombs 1mo ago
I would love to read more stories like this. IMO this is an ideal use case for LLMs, where they actually help someone learn something rather than make them more AI-dependent. Unfortunately, I usually only hear about the latter.
38.
by WCSTombs 1mo ago
This article makes some reasonable points but a lot of bad ones, and ultimately even the "good" ones don't really support its conclusion. > But rejecting code not for technical reasons (of which there are often many for v
39.
by WCSTombs 1mo ago
The general version of a problem being NP-complete doesn't mean that cases of practical interest are all necessarily intractable. In the case of SAT, for instance, there are also ways for the humans to give the solver an easier problem
40.
by WCSTombs 1mo ago
People with autism are still people. You don't have to research them, you can go talk to them. And yes, they have emotions.
41.
by WCSTombs 1mo ago
When you're first starting out as a junior software developer, normally you do focus on just the job in front of you, i.e., the code, and the seniors have to deal with everything else. As you mature into your role, you gradually increa
42.
by WCSTombs 1mo ago
The other site gives a much more modest estimate of 6.3%, and there's no explanation given for the discrepancy.
43.
by WCSTombs 1mo ago
> That map makes it stupidly easy to tell a human from a machine. Someone who commits 50,000 lines in an afternoon did not type those by hand. Someone doing a couple hundred? Probably real. Simple. Uh, this isn't true, though? I squ
44.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
I do credit all contributors to my open-source projects, and I think this is the norm, but to be clear (and I did say this in my original comment), I'm only talking about cases where assigning credit is actually important. There are ma
45.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
I don't understand this rebuttal at all. There is a huge difference between having an idea and implementing it yourself, and handing your idea (plus suggestions and data structures or whatever) to other people to implement. In the latt
46.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
Taking credit for something you didn't do, whether it was done by another person or by an LLM, is dishonest and unethical. Prompting an LLM to create something is obviously not the same thing as creating it, and I feel this article is
47.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
> The barrier to entry for a creative person to benefit from AI is nothing. The barrier is low, but the benefit is negligible or even negative. You're outsourcing your creative process to some mega-corporation. What you get back fro
48.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
To make both addition and multiplication O(n), you can store numbers as their residues modulo a bunch of different primes and appeal to the Chinese Remainder Theorem. However, then size comparison becomes difficult.
49.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
I don't see it as a brag. I think they're saying that the specialness of the notebook starts becoming an obligation and a burden, and then the notebook loses its original purpose, because "messy" notes and "neat&quo
50.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
I think you're completely missing the point. The "messy" notebook isn't supposed to have any aesthetic value or qualities, it's just a tool for the user to record stuff in the moment. It also has nothing to do havin
51.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
There's nothing wrong with having a tidy notebook, but many of us also need messy notebooks.
52.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
Or simply: "While I may use AI for work, my website and all the content on it is entirely written by hand." I don't think the original syntax is incorrect exactly, but too many commas in a sentence can make it harder to parse
53.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
If you hire someone to create something for you (video, images, audio, text, etc.), and you then claim you made it yourself without crediting them, I think almost everyone would agree that it's plagiarism and deeply unethical. It doesn
54.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
But the thing is, in this analogy, we are the chef, surgeon, or builder. We're the ones other people look for when they can't do the thing by themselves (in this case, writing software). Neither my analogy or yours is exact, but
55.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
The problem with this analogy is an LLM isn't very much like a "tool" at all. - In cases of practical relevance, you pay a recurring fee to keep using it - not very tool-like. - Rather than doing a predictable action in respo
56.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
> I believe that writing something yourself helps you learn it better, but at the same time, if you did all the thinking and now just prompting for a fancy auto-complete, we could argue that the hardest part (the design) was already don
57.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
The C++20 version is still clearly inferior to the Python and Lua examples because you still have to manually increment the counter in the loop body. IMO the sibling comment by HarHarVeryFunny has a much better C++ equivalent for this idiom
58.
by WCSTombs 2mo ago
> The goal is to provide a public manifest and build log with every release. Using an open-source toolkit, a user should be able to independently compile the source code and generate a hash that matches the binary on their physical medi
59.
by WCSTombs 3mo ago
As far as I know, EFF has always championed privacy.
60.
by WCSTombs 3mo ago
In general old good stuff is easier to find than new good stuff, since over time the bad stuff becomes more irrelevant, but I feel there's also some truth to the over-optimization as you put it. However, while I mostly agree with the s

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