setsubyou

I started learning when I was 9. I think to some extent it was easier back then in the 80ies because computers were relatively simple machines. On the other hand I also had to learn English at the same time to be able to read manuals and programming books etc. So I think it must be possible because even if I saw the word “syntax” I doubt I had a full grasp of what it means.

Tbf the company doesn’t seem to spell out jialichuang or printed circuit board on their web site either, so maybe the author didn’t know.

Reminds me of Of Mice and Sand

On Mac:

If you want an icon you can double click on your desktop, you can put you command in a file with the extension “.command” and mark it as executable. Double clicking it will run the content as a shell script in Terminal.

If you want something that can be put into the Dock, use the Script Editor application that comes with macOS to create a new AppleScript script. Type do shell script "<firefox command here>" then find Export in the menu. Instead of Script, choose export to Application and check Run Only. This will give you an application you can put in the Dock.

If you want to use Shortcuts, you can use the Run Shell Script action in Shortcuts too.

Finally, if you want something that opens multiple firefoxes at once, chain multiple firefox invocations together on one line separated by an ampersand. There is an option you have to use (–new-instance I think?) to make Firefox actually start a complete new instance.

That’s funny because I grew up with math teachers constantly telling us that we shouldn’t trust them.

Normal calculators that don’t have arbitrary precision have all the same problems you get when you use floating point types in a programming language. E.g. 0.1+0.2==0.3 evaluates to false in many languages. Or how adding very small numbers to very large numbers might result in the larger number as is.

If you’ve only used CAS calculators or similar you might not have seen these too since those often do arbitrary precision arithmetics, but the vast majority of calculators is not like that. They might have more precision than a 32 bit float though.

I mean, most calculators are wrong quite often

What bothers me the most is the amount of tech debt it adds by using outdated approaches.

For example, recently I used AI to create some python scripts that use polars and altair to parse some data and draw charts. It kept insisting to bring in pandas so it could convert the polars dataframes to pandas dataframes just for passing them to altair. When I told if that altair can use polars dataframes directly, that helped, but two or three prompts later it would try to solve problems by adding the conversion again.

This makes sense too, because the training material, on average, is probably older than the change that enabled altair to use polars dataframes directly. And a lot of code out there just only uses pandas in the first place.

The result is that in all these cases, someone who doesn’t know this would probably be impressed that the scripts worked, and just not notice the extra tech debt from that unnecessary dependency on pandas.

It sounds like it’s not a big deal, but these things add up and eventually, our AI enhanced code bases will be full of additional dependencies, deprecated APIs, unnecessarily verbose or complicated code, etc.

I feel like this is one aspect that gets overlooked a bit when we talk about productivity gains. We don’t necessarily immediately realize how much of that extra LoC/time goes into outdated code and old fashioned verbosity. But it will eventually come back to bite us.

I have to do a bunch of relatively unsurmountable steps to do what should’ve taken half a minute. Like screenshot the profile and scrape the text with iOS Photos text recognition.

The iOS workaround isn’t quite as unsurmountable as you don’t have to go through the Photos app at all. You can enter text selection mode directly from the screenshot without even saving it or leaving the app you’re in. And since iOS will look up any word you can select in the system dictionary and also translate any text you can select, you can do these things right there too.

That said I did once make a shortcut that lets me triple tap the back of my phone to pop up a text version of everything on screen that the iOS OCR detects. Not sure what I did that for though, I don’t really use it.

Well it’s not improving my productivity, and it does mostly slow me down, but it’s kind of entertaining to watch sometimes. Just can’t waste time on trying to make it do anything complicated because that never goes well.

Tbh I’m mostly trying to use the AI tools my employer allows because it’s not actually necessary for me to believe that they’re helping. It’s good enough if the management thinks I’m more productive. They don’t understand what I’m doing anyway but if this gives them a warm fuzzy feeling because they think they’re getting more out of my salary, why not play along a little.

What gets me is that even the traditional business models for LLMs are not great. Like translation, grammar checking, etc. Those existed before the boom really started. DeepL has been around for almost a decade and their services are working reasonably well and they’re still not profitable.

As someone who sometimes makes demos of our own AI products at work for internal use, you have no idea how much time I spend on finding demo cases where LLM output isn’t immediately recognizable as bad or wrong…

To be fair it’s pretty much only the LLM features that are like this. We have some more traditional AI features that work pretty well. I think they just tagged on LLM because that’s what’s popular right now.

I played it on Steam Deck and it was fine. And the Switch 2 is more powerful than that, although it also has a much higher display resolution.

Sometimes mandatory web proxies still allow direct connections to port 443 so as to not break https, which in return means as long as your connection is to port 443, that proxy will pass it through without interfering.

I used to run sshd on port 443 for this reason back when I regularly had to work from client networks.

I played MIDI Maze on Atari ST as a kid, that was long before Quake…

Later in high school we played Doom over IPX.

I mostly use the cli, but also Sublime Merge. It makes some things really convenient (like committing only some lines in a changed file), and looking at diffs is snappy too.

Problem is they’ve been smoking whatever Google AI recommends for too long now

EasyMesh exists. But not many companies implement it.

The article says it started on a Friday morning in Minnesota. It’s clear that that’s when the attack started and not a case of the first guy starting work that day discovering that it happened, because the article also says that they tried to contain it as it was going on, but ultimately failed.

Minnesota is at UTC-5 and China is at UTC+8, meaning when it’s morning in Minnesota, it’s already 13 hours later in China, i.e. middle of the night.

HFS has this limitation but isn’t the default file system anymore since several years ago.

32-bit systems could only handle 4 GB of RAM

I don’t understand why people always say that. Pentium Pro could handle 64 GB even though it was a 32 bit CPU. It had a 36 bit address bus. Later models are the same.