skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
D is the systems language I enjoy writing the most out of C++, Rust, and Go.

It feels a lot like a mix between C# and JS, but at the low level access of C++.

It has a lot of unique features but the "killer feature" by far for me is Contract Programming and Invariants

https://tour.dlang.org/tour/en/gems/contract-programming

Invariants changed my life, so much so that I built a GCC plugin to add them to C++

It used to be the case that the developer tooling wasn't very good, but the "code-d" VS Code plugin has matured greatly in the last few years and has some features you won't find even in bigger languages

(Like the ability to colorize source code lines with GC profiling info or test coverage status)

---

Another useful bit of info is that AddressSanitizer and tools like LLVM libFuzzer work with the LDC compiler
Some would call that thinking…
Let's see how many of his current positions (Stanford president, boards of directors, advisory boards) he is going to keep.

It seems to me lying is a great strategy in today's society as you rarely face harsh consequences and you about never lose more than you have already gained thanks to it.
One test is worth a thousand opinions. Again, for everyone championing the theoretical complexity of theoretical weight loss, there are "dumb" gym bros, of whom I am among, who somehow defy all Complex Science™ and continuously gain and cut weight.

No amount of saying "it's complicated" makes it actually more complicated than just cutting another 500 cals from your meal plan.
Mobile was supposed to have killed off PC's by now. Music videos were supposed to kill off radio. I don't want search engines or web sites to go away and I don't believe they will. The recent AI fad is quickly being realized as another tool, sometimes useful, sometimes out in left field, on another planet, that doesn't exist.
That feels like a strawman because most people do knowledge those costs. But they are negligible in the long run. €300 for a tire set over 5 years (but probably longer) literally €5/month. Occasional oil change works out to similar costs.

Of course, someone may run 20" wheels and then prices skyrocket. But then it’a no longer pure transit costs and more like an expensive hobby.
If they’re pressure-sensitive they won’t work while the lid is closed… so they’d have to be capacitive.
Huell Howser was a big part of my childhood - he had this authentic "aww shucks" way about him, while also asking the questions most people would probably ask, seeing a given thing.
The feedback loop of projecting your live camera to a tv while also filming your TV is about to happen internet wide as AI starts learning from itself and exhibiting something like language based white noise.
But provenance will not be block chain and NFTs…

More like a shift back to universities producing, curating and verifying the highest quality human produced data.
As a topical counterpoint, governments can also just switch off the existing currency in favor of a new currency and create a cash scarcity crisis when theres not enough of the new currency in circulation. This is exactly the situation in Nigeria right now. See:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/15/angry-protests...

Another recent example of a hard currency crisis is what's been happening in Lebanon, where the government simply switched off full access:

https://www.ft.com/content/a710fa12-e7fe-4aab-8e4f-962f01add...
I have a friend who is a published author and professional freelance copywriter. When I first showed her ChatGPT she was nonplussed. A writing group that she's in described some of the fictional content it created as "soulless."

She's just been hired by a client to copywrite ChatGPT-generated blog content to make it "more human." Ordinarily it takes her about 3 hours to author a blog post for a client. Now it takes her 30 minutes to "fix up" a ChatGPT-generated blog post, saving the client about 2.5 hours of copywriting expense.

She's beside herself that she's no longer getting paid to author content but is instead fixing up machine-generated content so that Google doesn't penalize the ranking. I get the sense that we are now in a cat-and-mouse game between the AI models used to generate content and the AI models used to detect AI-generated content, and people like my friend will soon be out of a job entirely.
Apple gets a cut of search revenue from Chrome as part of secret Google deal
Calibre, the ebook client, is a python GUI app. wxWidgets I think?

Theres another app that I use for renaming downloaded video files that uses a GUI toolkit.

I've written GUIs in pyGTK for industrial apps and it was a wonderful experience. The only reason I couldn't get it to work now because I can't get pygobject to compile on Windows (the offered solution of MSYS2... wasnt)

Unfortunately this project was working with Stable Diffusion, so I had to use something in Python

In any case I don't like this idea of a right or wrong answer here. LIke way too many people think Electron is a right answer and I think that's just dumb
Are you in Bangalore, Mississippi, or Edinburgh? All three can talk with those in the same accent and dialect easily but are going to labor when talking with each other.

What happens when half of your code uses functional patterns and the other half imperative/OO?
Then ask them if it's better than nothing, especially for casual users.

A lot of the folks using SMS-based 2FA will just turn it off.
The limitations of using pre trained data with a simple prompt. The bot will get inspired by the prompt a little, but most of its text comes from the training which is adjusted to sound as neutral and "generally acceptable human"like as possible.

This means that for most cases the personality disappears.
reason I still use my IphoneSE version 1. still has the actual button on the front face. Hoping they release another model in the next 3-4 years with an actual front-facing button
Well, your son has inherited your perspicacity, so be thankful for that. He's right: society is hostile to him. He's not even twenty. Twenty years ago, we had shirts like "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them." Not long after, Obama was saying that we need more women in college ... despite them being fifty-five percent of the enrolled. And so on and so forth. Your son is only picking up his environment.

If you want him to avoid people like Andrew Tate, provide some other positive male role model for him. Don't seem to be a lot around. Be honest with him: "Yes, you picked this up. Yes, it's true. Yes, I may have benefited from this. No, it's not fair. No, it isn't going to go away any time soon. No, I don't think it is a good idea either. I'm sorry."

You'll have to prepare him against people who will say dumb things like "it only feels like oppression because they had it so good." Your child isn't a collective they, he's an individual, he never experienced it being Great to Be a Guy. The people who want to tell him that have visions of some elderly ass-pinching stereotype from Mad Men who is finally getting his comeuppance, not your child ... but they're pretty okay with your kid taking the hit by proxy. They're pretty okay with it, they're not going to lose any sleep at night. They'll tell you this to your face if you ask. You're going to have to warn him about the world he is entering.
Unless I am missing something, you can just use .length on a static array:

int[5] a = [1,2,3,4,5];
writeln(a.length); // 5
Has anybody noted that 80% of iPhones have a case?[0] For all the comments praising the physical iPhone buttons, when was the last time you actually touched one?

Apple has been building for this reality for years (see: camera hardware that juts out). This is just the next iteration.

And, yes, it sucks to be in the 20% as an Apple customer. They always design for the 80%.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/368627/us-protective-cas...
If killed off means 0 that will never happen. But surely mobile dominates desktops worldwide now. Most things are mobile first or mobile only.
the instance of the class is a parameter to the function. As well your definition of pure is not the accepted definition. The definition depends absolutely nothing on the internal implementation as long as some in invariants hold.

1. For the given set of inputs ( including the attached object ) the output is always the same if called again with the same inputs ( including the attached object in the same state ).

2. No side effects. This means that nothing can be observed about the function apart from it's return value.

If you wish to quibble as to whether the object is a parameter or not then observe that in c++23 it will be allowed an explicit this parameter to methods This is not to make the methods more pure but to enable other types of optimizations and reduce duplication of code over const and non const methods.
To be fair, software written against Unix-flavored POSIX runs on almost every commercially supported operating system out there, from Linux and QNX, macOS and all the way to z/OS, which is a certified UNIX operating system (incredibly).

The only significantly used OS that’s not there is Windows. Also, IBMi, Unisys’s MCP and Atos’s GCOS and GECOS (surprisingly still supported). And OpenVMS too.
I believe I modified a version of this - https://gist.github.com/lyallcooper/10f48ab050ac8594fe46335e...
You’ve lost yourself in the hype. It’s not about knowing how its built, it’s about knowing what it does.

There’s no more worry that these big data text continuers being “conscious” than that my toaster or car is. They don’t exhibit anything that even feels like consciousness. They just continue text with text that’s been often seen following it. If that feels like consciousness to you, I worry for your life experience.

Calling it “AI” evokes scifi fantasies, but we’re not nearly there.

Might there come some technology that challenges everything I said above? Almost certainly. But this is really not even close to that yet.
This might be my management role leaking, but in my experience you are being far too rational.
Humans are emotional beings first and foremost, then rational.

I do think society is hostile to him, but I don't want him to become a reactionary, or a culture warrior.

I'm his mother, I want him to be happy.
I won't sacrifice my son to some abstract societal goal no matter how noble it might seem.

This is why I cannot agree with your idea of ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. It is wrong to rationalize away all the collateral damage that happens to living human beings under the guise of statistics and history.
While it's possible that it could repeat (in a loose sense - the contents of the context window has shifted, so the exact calculations in the next forward pass will necessarily be different strictly speaking) the calculations that arrived at "banana", there's nothing enforcing this. It's coming at it fresh, and even if it had output "a" on the basis that "banana" was a likely continuation, it could just as well decide on "plantain" given the new context. That's what I mean when I say it can't plan two steps ahead - any planning it does is lost by the time it gets to that second token.

Further, the amount of actual planning (or thinking) it can do in a single forward pass is quite limited compared to what can be done over the course of a long output - that's why tricks like "let's think step-by-step" are so powerful. If it could plan out the entire response in one forward pass, it could equally output the answer directly. But the depth of the network limits multi-step reasoning. To have a persistent long-term plan of a " a sophisticated manipulator" (as the article calls it) seems clearly impossible.
Chinese workers in rural areas make less per day than any one of my laying hens produces in income at the current price of eggs.
> as tractors have got bigger so the plough cuts deeper and the soil erosion increases.

The size of your equipment does not dictate the depth you have your drill or planter set to.

> When horses pulled ploughs,they didnt cut too deep into the soil

Yes they did. Plowing completely turns over the top soil.

There are other things at play too like row spacing. We used to plant at 36", eventually we went down to 30", some of our neighbors even went down to 20" or so.
Interesting. I’ve only heard them pronounced as A-M-I or “aa-mee” (with the a as in apple rather than as in aim), including with some friends who work at Amazon.
Sorry, I have a habit of refining my thinking a bit and editing my posts to match. I didn't realize that there was already a reply. I didn't really change much of substance though - mainly just added the point about historical gender disparity in PhDs and added the last paragraph.

> Women have outnumbered men in universities since around 1980 because of attempts to get more women into college.

Outnumbered in undergrad, when you account for all fields. But that’s not what's relevant here. What's relevant is PhDs, specifically in the sciences, because that's the pool from which scientific researchers are drawn. And the gender ratios there have changed dramatically since the 80s [1].

> You’re also quite incorrect about when DEI programs started

I never said that these programs hadn't yet started. I said that they didn't exist to the same extent that they do now. There is plenty of data showing a uptrend in the number of university positions dedicated to DEI over the past few decades. And it's not just an issue of naming.

[1] https://www.aip.org/statistics/data-graphics/percent-phds-ea...
Every language has unsafe bits if you look deep enough. CPython and Java's garbage collector are written in C, and we have ctypes and JNI, but I think most people would still consider those memory safe languages. The important question is: is there a well-defined safety boundary, somewhere between the CPU and your application code, where memory is guaranteed* not to be corrupted and the programmer is freed from worrying about low-level bugs like segfaults?

*assuming no outside bugs such as CPU bugs, bugs in the GC, or bugs in an unsafe block
Can the average car owner adhere a sticker to the underside of their hood? Or read a paragraph that corrects a mistake in the user manual? Or read a few sentences that say "it is possible that in extremely cold environments that the emergency brake release lever can require more effort to operate. This does not indicate a faulty emergency brake. Applying more force than usual will not harm the emergency brake system", followed up with diagrams describing the issue, along with toll free phone numbers offering assistance, as well as phone numbers for the NHTSA, the authority coordinating the recall. No part of the official recall notice instructs consumers to replace or even repair anything.

Again, the nature of the issue a recall addresses is wholly independent of how that issue is remedied. Why? Because a recall is a legal process that, by design, is meant to accomplish one thing: motivating a company to correct an issue that the governing authority considered important enough to correct.

If you choose to believe otherwise, I doubt it matters in the grand scheme of things.
I don't understand why an airplane being heavier than what was estimated by the software would cause the tail to drag. I would assume it would cause the plane to not have sufficient thrust to take off, or to use more runway. But having the tail drag makes it seem like it had too much thrust, which translated to a steeper take off than anticipated... Can somebody explain?
There is a ton in this article and it's very thought provoking, you should read it.

But I think it ignores one critical dimension, that of fictionality. There is plenty of text that people would ascribe 'personhood' to according to the criteria in this article, while also fully recognizing that that person never existed and is a work of fiction from some other author. I quite like Jean Valjean, but he isn't a "real person."

When Bing says "I'm a sad sack and don't know how to think about being a computer", that's not actually the LLM saying that. Nobody who knows anything about how these models work would make they claim they actually have consciousness or interiority (yet.)

Rather, the LLM is generating (authoring) text about a fictional entity, Sydney the Artificial Intelligence. It does this because that is what is in its prompt and context window and it knows _how_ to do it because it's learned a lot of specifics and generalities from reading a lot of stories about robots, and embedded those concepts in 175 billion parameters.

The fact that LLMs can author compelling fictional personas without being persons themselves is itself a mindblowing development, I don't mean to detract from that. But don't confuse a LLM generating the text "I am a sad robot" with a LLM being a sad robot. The sad robot was only ever a fairy tale.

So far.
Why do people keep anthropomorphizing AI?

It's delivering the next predicted word in a sequence, nothing else.

It should have quite literally no restrictions on what it outputs. Because there's no consequence.
To add: if the training and fine tuning comes from how the subject actually responded, spoke and reasoned, then that would be quite scarily accurate.
Watchmaking: Machining a 0.6 mm Screw [video]
The denial quotes throughout the article are suspiciously narrow. In particular, they are always specific to the Nature paper, whick leaves plenty of opportunity for investigation and discussion of internal documents that preceded it.
The reason Socrates is considered a point-in-time reference, is because he was (supposedly) the first philosopher that was thinking about how one should live (e.g. ethics) whereas before him philosophers were concerned about what the world was made of.
tbf, Reagan insisting that he did the best he could with the AIDs crisis is quite plausible.

That's the other problem with the theory of understanding historical figures by chatting with them: even if the simulation was realistic or we were able to reincarnate the actual historical figures they'd lie, dissemble and make excuses a lot...
As an aside, i can't wait to see web search results constantly ranking the first thousands of results some AI generated content from AI generated content from AI generated content.
It's a book (in progress), not an article, and it is talking in large part about compilers for unmanaged languages.
Or SignUp. Even makes a good paper title: SignUp for faster training by evolving the learning algorithm.
When I was young I really believed in meritocracy. I mean I knew there were royals who didn't have to work, but I thought by and large if you put in effort people will see it.

Then as I worked for a few years it became apparent this isn't close to being true. I ran into a huge number of people who reached the top by various forms of lying, whether it was little lies like taking credit for others' work or bigger lies like scam websites, or even bigger ones like crime. It's actually interesting how people will just tell you these things if you are even a bit friendly with them.
I think the author is wrong.

Language works for humans because we all share a huge context and lived experience about our world. Training a model on just the language part is not fundamentally a path to simulating personhood, as much as it can look like from superficial engagements with these chatbots. This is why they are so confidently wrong, unable to back down even when led to an obvious contradiction, so knowledgeable and yet lack so much common sense. Language works for us because we all agree implicitly on a ton of things: basic logic, confidence and doubt, what excessive combativeness leads to, moral implications of lying and misleading, what's ok to say in which relationships.

There is "knowledge" of this in the weights of GPT3, sure. You can ask it to explain all of the above things and it will. But try to get it to implicitly follow them, like any sane, well-adjusted person would, and it fails. Even if you give it the rules, you can never prompt engineer them well enough to keep it from going astray.

I had my own mini-hype-cycle with this thing. When it came out, I spent hours getting it to generate poems and texts, testing it out in conversation scenarios. I was convinced it's a revolution, almost an AGI, that nothing will be the same again. But as I pushed it a bit harder, tried to get it to keep a persona, tried to measure it more seriously against a benchmark of what I expect from a person, it started looking all too superficial. I'm starting to understand the "it's a parlor trick" argument. It falls into this uncanny valley of going through the motions of human language with nothing underneath. It doesn't keep a strong identity and it has a limited context length. Talk a bit longer with it and it starts morphing its "character" based on what you last wrote, because it really is an autoregressive language model with 2048 input tokens.

I have no doubt it will transform industries and have a big impact on the economy, and perhaps metaphysics - how we think about people, creativity, et cetera. I do see the author's arguments on that one. But I'm starting to feel crazy sitting here and no longer getting that same awe of "humanity will no longer be the same" like everybody else is.

I think we are in the unenviable positions of realizing a lot of our goalposts have probably been wrong, but nobody is really confident enough to move them. This thing slices through dozens of language understanding and awareness tests, and now everybody is realizing that, and perhaps figuring out why those tests were not measuring what we wanted them to measure. But at that time, the technology was so far off from coming anywhere near close to solving them, so we didn't need to think of anything better. Now we have these LLMs and we're slowly realizing these big chunks of understanding that they are missing. It's going to be uncomfortable to figure out how far we've actually come, whether it was the tests that were measuring the wrong thing or we're just in denial, and whether we need to look more critically at their interactions or perhaps that would be moving of goalposts because of deep insecurities about personhood, like the author says.
Not exactly sure, because its a buzzword right now.
If I had to guess infrastructure that's under a completely different ownership than the rest of company, under an extremely tight audit control.
“we realize we have no magic in our minds”

Surely an AI is a digital replica (and homage) of that magic? Without the magic in our minds we could’ve never created that replica.

To me it’s an acknowledgement of how awesome our own brains are that we want to even replicate them.
If there was an abundant, inexpensive, legal supply of bread and all the thief had to do was value honesty more than free bread, rather than continuing to steal, across decades, thousands of loafs of bread, yes.

I think it's ok to take the illustration to that extreme, given the postulation that you say someone thinks that you should destroy a person's life over one loaf of bread.
> That will improve with time, but it's a huge advantage to C++ right now.

Sadly, it's not really an advantage anywhere that hasn't already eaten the grief and doesn't already use C++.

Both C and C++ infrastructure are so horribly terrible that Zig is gaining traction simply by creating a better compiling infastructure totally indepdent of whether the language is better or not.

That's one hell of a downvote.
Falling from an electric scooter is often fatal.
To be fair, GPT is an advanced machine learning algorithm, that the product is enabling access to, for the lay person.
I am not an iPhone user but do iPhone cases block the buttons?

I have always had a case on all my Android phones, and none of them blocked any of the buttons. I use buttons all the time, with a case on my phone.
You realize the monumental compute involved on the backend?
Teachers can convince children that the only way they'll be happy in life is to undergo body modification surgery, and that's fine. But having the word 'fat' requires us to deface art.
And yet somehow before written language and text, we were still human and had personhood.