cjfd

7 ms·

1.
by cjfd 3d ago
The question in the title is basically a non-question. AI is quite good at achieving some sorts of stated goals. The easiest way is by exerting the least amount of effort. The least amount of effort ignores ethical concerns. The training ar
2.
by cjfd 12d ago
Well, who knows? The trajectory has been set in and it is downwards. After Nero and the year of the four emperors the Roman Empire still had ways to go. So, I would say also the US can potentially recover. On the other hand the saying &#x27
3.
by cjfd 1mo ago
As a patrician with only a desktop I was able to use this website.
4.
by cjfd 1mo ago
Sure, it is quite easy to install python from source. Usually I am doing it because I need older version for work projects. Of course, the other thing that one needs in that kind of situations is virtual environments. This makes it also qui
5.
by cjfd 2mo ago
Yes, this sound like it is true. But is it good? I mean, if I accept this idea, I start feeling more like a pet living in the house that is my platform then as a human who creates things. Also, it can be inefficient in that the same program
6.
by cjfd 2mo ago
Right. Because If I want feature A and it is available in configuration among features A through Z I will always perfectly pick the right letter of the alphabet and I will not at all be irritated by having 26 options that I have no idea abo
7.
by cjfd 2mo ago
I kept my old laptop (bought in 2007) alive for quite a while too. But last year I finally retired it. I also used archlinux 32 which worked fine for a while. But at some point the breakages really got too bad. I was using xfce4. For a whil
8.
by cjfd 2mo ago
Well, Joel is not saying not to refactor anything. In fact he is advocating improving the code quality in small steps. What is missing there is that in practice improving code quality in small steps requires automated tests . But I guess he
9.
by cjfd 3mo ago
You can talk about UBI if you want to appear nice but people on UBI are also rather useless. Of course the real solution to the problem will be the change of carbon based life into silicon based life and the extermination of the former kind
10.
by cjfd 3mo ago
100% agree. 'Code duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction' is a very good candidate for the worst programming article ever.
11.
by cjfd 3mo ago
No. The duplication is seldomly that clean. It has started to diverge in subtle ways where the question becomes whether that was the intention or not. In the worst possible cases it has resulted in 8000-line functions full of duplication. &
12.
by cjfd 3mo ago
There are words. The word I am thinking of is 'parasite'. The billionaire class largely consists of parasites.
13.
by cjfd 3mo ago
By the way, I am old enough to remember that world. When I was young, people had fat books with maps of most large and medium size places in the country.
14.
by cjfd 3mo ago
I am not so sure. The world of printing out driving directions or emailing photos sounds a lot more calm. Also, simply quite enjoyable. The current world is cramming too many events in too little time, it seems. Stress is quite bad for heal
15.
by cjfd 3mo ago
So what would be a good architecture? How would I recognize it if I stumbled against it? My own inclinations here are that it would be good to have as few different technologies as possible. To run things on as few different machines as pos
16.
by cjfd 4mo ago
I am not sure about the goose feather and the vellum but you do have a point about proving consistency. Fortunately, I also have a coq/rocq project for that kind of stuff so maybe one day I can be a not-so-very-weak programmer.
17.
by cjfd 4mo ago
pacman -S git vim gcc make gtest That is about it. No stinkin' config files needed. Initial Makefile is about 15 lines long, I can type it myself or copy something from another project.
18.
by cjfd 4mo ago
How about not? If an LLM is needed to get set up either the language or the documentation is garbage. Probably both.
19.
by cjfd 4mo ago
Well, the short summary of it all is that the US is the very curious case of a superpower attempting to become a third world country.
20.
by cjfd 4mo ago
"assuming you have a real engineering job" does a lot of work there. You could also do a lot of work the other way by stating "assuming you are getting a real education". I studied physics when I was young and that field
21.
by cjfd 4mo ago
On the other hand, if you store a small integer in a float it is generally reliable to compare to it. E.g., setting a float to zero and comparing whether the float is zero.
22.
by cjfd 5mo ago
This sounds all true to me, but I think there is more. It is not just decisions by management, it is also the wider economic context. Low interest rates and, for the US, having the world reserve currency as your own currency both seem to ma
23.
by cjfd 5mo ago
From the quotes in the article it sounds pretty simple. These are words that everyone can understand. Of course, the fascist right is attempting to 'inform' the public at a level where even two-syllable words are a bit too complic
24.
by cjfd 5mo ago
All kinds of worries are possible. (1) It turns out that all this AI generated stuff is full of bugs and we go back to traditional software development, creating a giant disinvestment and economic downturn. (2) sofware quality going way dow
25.
by cjfd 6mo ago
When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I
26.
by cjfd 6mo ago
Well, if you do not need to care about performance everything can be extremely simple indeed. Let me show you some data structure in coq/rocq while switching off notations and diplaying low level content. Require Import String. Definit
27.
by cjfd 6mo ago
There are also some funny humorous pieces on this site.
28.
by cjfd 6mo ago
The short summary of it being that these people are beyond terrible at giving names to things.
29.
by cjfd 7mo ago
Well, I think there is something to it. Computers were at some point newly invented so research in algorithms suddenly became much more applicable. This opened up a gold mine of research opportunities. But like real life mines at some point
30.
by cjfd 7mo ago
There are some services where it makes sense. E.g., submitting taxes with the government, logging into the banking website. Apart from that kind of service, yes I don't think I would want my identity or age verified on more or less any

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