skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with your premise but differ in the conclusion I reach.

The model I have is closer to “how many people can program using Excel vs how many can program in a ‘traditional ‘ language?” The difficulty in specifying exactly what you want is still there in Excel, but there’s far more people who can get started and they can make changes when they see it’s not doing what they want.

It doesn’t have to one shot “hey, implement these 59 Jira tickets for me” to be disruptive (in a good way). It’s extremely rare for something to get much cheaper and for there to be less demand for it. If you’re the top half of a field that’s in a lot of (and growing) demand, I think you’ll do fine.
It's not that unusual. The JVM ecosystem works the same way.
People could stop using it, because as opposed to Anki, Duolingo is far from real language learning. At least I tried it a couple of years ago and that was my experience.
> Carmack has a point, we should focus on the problem we're solving and the value we're delivering.

When I was younger every programming job was supposedly about to be outsourced. I did exactly what Carmack suggested, and it worked out well for me. I think it’s a great general strategy for working for a long time, but not ideal for someone who wanted to pass leetcode style interviews at a top tech company.

For example, would anyone at my google tech interview care that I’m comfortable with a companies financials, managing P&Ls, margins, etc? No, just how fast I can write a sort or whatever.
For practical purposes they've had benchmark interest rates at 0% for a decade. They have a fig leaf over that because they made it to 2% in the late 2010s before they folded and went back to 0%.

Anyone who thinks 0% made sense for that long just thinks 0% makes sense. They probably aren't capable of spotting a situation where positive interest rates are sensible.
Zig is low level programming language with explicit allocation controls.

This allocator is useful to write extremely efficient algorithms in certain scenarios.

If you wanted to throw on double free, you'd have to track what was freed and this tracking doesn't come for free.

Documentation has section on choosing allocator [0].

[0] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Choosing-an-Alloca...
There's a whole range of techniques! Many of them are language dependent, and won't be applicable elsewhere.

A blunt instrument is running your code in 32-bit mode, which halves pointer sizes. The downside is it also limits your maximum data size, and blocks the use of the 64-bit instruction sets that generally speed up data processing.

Java has an interesting hybrid mode where it uses 32-bit pointers but runs in 64-bit mode.

Not storing the entire decoded document all at once is usually the recommended approach, via "streaming" parsers that give you one element at a time. This then lets you immediately throw away data that you're done with processing.

The downside is that it makes certain common idioms impossible or difficult. For example, MVC web architectures generally assume that the controller produces a "complete" model object that then gets passed to the view.

Unfortunately, language-level support for efficient data processing is generally lacking. Rust and C++ are okay, but have annoying gaps in their capabilities.

A common trick with something like parsing is to keep the original encoded string to be decoded "as-is", and then simply reference into it using integer indexes. I.e.: don't copy the strings out individually, instead just use "slices" into the original document string.

Most commonly, unique strings are detected using a hash table and not stored separately. This works better with garbage-collecting languages like C#, Java, and JavaScript. With Rust or C++ you have to use reference counting or other tricks.
> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away?

Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? You’re kind of assuming that systems will be generated from a one-shot prompt, but it seems more likely that an interactive AI will identify the gaps in requirements and ask for clarification.

Alternatively, if the prompt-generate-evaluate loop is short enough the user can simply play with the running system and provide feedback to alter it.

This is essentially what developers do when they present a “weekly build” or whatever in an agile environment.

The process of solidifying requirements, stating them clearly and translating them into machine-executable formats are all language tasks and these models are really fucking good at those.

I’ve noticed in discussions like this that many software folks are assuming that AI capabilities will plateau soon, or will merely be extensions of what we already have (a better autocomplete, etc). I submit that we may reach a point where the AI is so compelling that we’ll reorganize teams/systems/businesses around it.
I did not claim that I could make it happen. I claimed that it was possible.

Note that Deng changed PRC from personalist dictatorship to an autocracy that had much more decentralization. He wanted one party rule but not all power in the hands of one person. His liberalization of the Chinese economy lifted millions out of poverty. China ignored Western economist advice and did much better than former Soviet republics as a result.

The mass killings and terror stopped with Deng. They are back with Xi who has re-established a personalist dictatorship. Instead of a blanket knee-jerk reaction to the word “communism” one should analyze each situation on its merits. There is nuance at play. Tito was no Stalin, for instance.
I never would have expected these kinds of words from Carmack.

Product skills, delivered value, help accomplish something for people. All sound like consulting/coaching. Carmack to me was a true hacker’s hacker.

I guess it either gets to most of us eventually or programming as I knew it is truly over.
Making such tool is trivial. Someone would have done it already, all you need is to point people's attention at the issue.
Ironically that is exactly the same approach they had with C, so at least they are consistent.

"Although we entertained occasional thoughts about implementing one of the major languages of the time like Fortran, PL/I, or Algol 68, such a project seemed hopelessly large for our resources: much simpler and smaller tools were called for. All these languages influenced our work, but it was more fun to do things on our own."

-- https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
The number of implementations was not considered a criterion for Chrome, or at least they didn't mention it. For WebP, they didn't seem to care much about it. I agree that it's a good criterion, as it is a good way to ensure that a spec is solid and interoperability actually works. So I am happy that there are currently three alternative jxl implementations.

The main thing you want to have though, is a standard that cannot be unilaterally changed in arbitrary ways by a single party. However flawed it may be, ISO does have a long history of standardization, and it has procedures in place to ensure that changes are scrutinized and can only be applied when approved by the national standardization bodies.
Scratch the surface in the USA and you'll see it in all major regulatory bodies: FDA, FCC, EPA, FAA just as top of mind examples.

I don't understand why more people don't regard the US as a country riddled with corruption. They literally won't let Boeing or AT&T or Comcast or Dow or ADM fail no matter how criminal they become.
I did and I regret it.
Plans to repopulate Hawaii’s forests with its crows have been upended
That's a great analogy, and it makes me wonder just how closely did Carmack himself follow this advice early in his career. I suspect that he wouldn't have got where he is without an unusually deep interest in the nuts and bolts.
I have no idea why the lump of labour fallacy is still so ingrained in people. AI which is not AGI or whatever sci-fi panic people have on twitter, is a slightly fancier autocomplete, and thus it's a productivity tool.

Nobody has been replaced by their debugger or their intellisense, even if it makes coding 10x or 100x easier. It just means software development gets faster and cheaper. On net if anything that'll likely mean programming jobs expand, as software is still incredibly absent from many sectors of the economy.

If tomorrow mom and pop stores start using AI to build themselves simple websites and come online and enter the online economy that'll likely vastly mean more customers for the software industry overall. I wouldn't be surprised if we have 10x as many indie game developers in a few years because these tools enable them to enter the market, which is good for virtually everyone working in the industry.
Forests also have the potential to create their own micro-climates, with clouds and precipitation. (That's why deforestation in the Amazon will possibly lead to desertification in the region.)

Afforestation is far better than cloud-seeding to produce short-term rain. It's self-sustaining, takes carbon from the atmosphere, and creates new ecosystems (or rather, revives old ecosystems, hopefully with native wildlife).

Perhaps Australia - not just a country, but an entire continent! - doesn't have to be so arid.
No, this is not an article. This is from the “ask column” and is a genuine question from someone eating dark chocolate every day including when she was pregnant and then breastfeeding.

The answer given is actually yes, probably, you should if you are pregnant or breastfeeding and limiting consumption the rest of the time would be wise.
In what way is Anki less developer friendly? They participated in Google Summer of Code last year!
The anarchist cookbook...

I remember downloading it and putting it on a floppy disk, I'm not sure I ever even look at it :D
The specification for Audio CDs is the "Red Book". The Internet Archive has a copy [1]. There should be similar standards for DVD and Blu-ray, but they should be based and enhancements of the Red Book since they have to be backward compatible with Audio CDs.

For a slightly higher level look, try "Understanding and Servicing CD Players" by Ken Clements [2], which goes into some details on how CD players work to read data from CDs.

[1] https://archive.org/details/RedBookAudioRecordingCompactDisc...

[2] https://archive.org/details/understandingandservicingcdplaye...
Huh? Gmail was a spa and that dates from 2004. I don't think a VC writing a blog post says much about how tech had changed. Smartphones existed before the iPhone and Android, they just weren't as popular.
Any ML derived language.
Quite an unfortunate name. It sounds like the operating system is built using React.js, to which any sane person will go “nope”.
Perhaps coding will become a hobby, while professionals use AI tools.
Migrating from ts-node to Bun
Chatting and Cheating. Ensuring academic integrity in the era of ChatGPT
Mutilated Chessboard Problem
> poor heuristic

Fair enough, though I was more speaking in the academic context.

Anyway, a much better example of what I am referring to would be the very long slow decline of Red Delicious apples. What started as as a very tasty fruit was optimized for retail sales until it became unpalatable. Year to year it’s not obvious at any specific point that the product is worse, but over longer stretches of time say 1970 to 2010 it became so.

This related to shrinkflation, just harder to quantify because so many different things can be adjusted. However, if you’re measuring inflation over longer stretches to validate BLS calculations you find this kind of systematic bias more obvious.
In the wake of the first IT job disrupting AI wave, who do you think will make up the core workforce in the creation of software, and why: The (today so-called) designers or the programmers? I have a strong sense that one is going to be much more effected than the others, but, interestingly, I have no clue which.
Since execution squads, and genocide have occurred in economic systems that aren’t self described as communist it’s worthwhile to inquire about what is typical about such occurrences. Generally, it is too much power in too few hands. This oversimplification is much more accurate and useful than, “communism leads to genocide or mass murder”.
What got us by surprise, however, is that AI is better at soft skills (language, art) than at math.
Well if you have a source of vocab you can do it.

Honestly CSV import is the way to go. That leaves you with how to get cards in. That depends largely on how you are working with stuff.

Some bespoke options include:

- The Kindle dictionary lookup history is an SQLite file on the kindle. Scrape that and pull it out

- Write a CLI command to lookup words in some dictionary website and stick that somewhere

- Just have a text file open somewhere where you paste words, and then you do the lookup later.

I think there's a lot of ways to make things easier, especially if you're working with another language with an open source dictionary. You need to do some one-time elbow grease to get it in, cuz what people want is different.

Another thing you can do if you like just going wild: just download somebody else's card deck. You can set things up to show you (for example) 10 or 5 or even 2 new cards a day. You will end up being shown a bunch of new words. You can just absorb those over time and see how that helps.
As awe-inspiring as the imagery from the JWST is, along with what we stand to gain in understanding about the universe, I don’t see that causing any fundamental shift in human philosophical perspectives. We’ve had our “pale blue dot” moment several times, beginning with the Apollo missions. Then practically every subsequent probe has turned around and photographed Earth from increasing distances. Yet here we are, still largely consumed by trivial matters. Any meaningful effects that I think the author is touching on would require the sort collective shift in perspectives that I’m not sure the species is capable of. But perhaps I’m reading it wrong; I’m impatient with this sort of circumlocution.
That's why he did it, he's not claiming it's a novel technique; what's not common is it being accessible to the hobbyist. Of course, it doesn't really matter, as he says at the end there's nothing really to be done with this information, but it is cool.

Clough42 is one of my favourite channels, always look forward to his reliably weekly video. Great mix of machining (metal), 3D printing, and electronics - CAD too which many don't show (and at just the right speed IMO, doesn't belabour it, but his narration of key presses basically taught me Fusion360, always in my head when I use it myself).
Could you explain why that might not be a good thing to do, siva7?
I currently expect that near-future version of the current type of language model — no major new breakthroughs — will be able to do just that.

I also expect, as you say, for this to create a lot of competition and increase the minimum quality that customers demand such that… heh, just realised, "Make Uber for bicycles" is basically going to be the next generation's pre-interview coding challenge to screen people that can't use AI effectively.
Spoiler (but not really): academic paper on ChatGPT written by ChatGPT.

See, for example: AI makes plagiarism harder to detect, argue academics – in paper written by chatbot - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/19/ai-makes-...
Yes, but Opensource's not born for capitalistic reasons, and if it has to be "insignificant in the real world" then let it be. "Success" is not something necessary. "At odds with reality" just means that you don't understand it. But there still are things in life money can't buy.
https://archive.is/RWzP5
There will be an effectively endless demand for anyone who can create 10x the value while only demanding 3x the pay of the typical worker.

I don’t see AI changing that principle.

Most everyone who is “good at programming” today will be totally fine (and maybe even better off).
No-code and no-specification is confused all the time.
You can't extrapolate from an arbitrary selection of technologies...

I'm not. I'm saying it's true for every technology. Everything gets better with time.

As for self driving cars, compare a DARPA challenge car from 2013 to a Waymo car today. It's massively better.
Of course what John says is true, it is important (and will always be) to understand how to build a good product, but the discussion about the future of work should also include a discussion about tax and redistribution, because we cannot let a few corporation take the riches from the rest of the world
Managing people is going to be one of the last jobs to go away. The managers might go from managing 150k/year developers to managing 50k/year prompt "engineers", but someone is still going to be there to hire, fire and ask people to do things until AI enables truly full-stack companies-of-one as a majority case.
Sniffnet v1.1.2
As an example, if you're learning a langauge and studying vocab, you could discard any cards that have over 90 days interval. After all, you're going to meet that word while reading a book or watching something in the target language in the next 90 days, and if not - you shouldn't have memorized that word anyway.
Besides that, Active Oberon already supports generics in a way similar to Modula-3.
I really like the design. At the bottom of the page is a button or label with the text ‘test mode’. What does that come from?
I don’t know if that’s how much they spent on it or was that how much they “spent” on it.

But the cumulative cost of Reality Labs was apparently indeed $36B over 3 years.
In my (small) experience I've seen that only once, a perfect specimen who fits your description. Unfortunately this person was acting-CTO of a startup. They decided that for a consumer product very close to what a smartphone can do, they didn't need an OS. So they started writing their build system with make only, then an OS, an IP stack, then a GUI, then added support for multithreading,... Of course Android existed, that was the end of the 2010s. The retail price of a cheap (and faster!) Android phone was even lower than our BOM.
4 years and 20M later, the company went bankrupt without having delivered the product it promised, but they had fun writing their "superior" software.

As long as people are in charge, we'll have plenty willing to pay technical workers who see themselves as artists.
I'm waiting for Layer 2s to fully decentralize, and get battle-tested for a longer time in a live environment to ensure their smart contracts are safe, before I foray into them in a big way.
A Resume on the Lakehouse Hype
Wouldn't most of those people look towards early retirement? We've failed as a society if 60 year olds end their career in one of the highest paying professions and they cant cover rent and food.
I believe in the concept of crowdsourced recommendation engines, but I am afraid Twitter might fail at that.

A great recommendation engine is tuned to what people like. However, that would be subjective, and solving the problem in an abstract fashion seems difficult.

So with crowdsourcing you could sidestep some layers of abstraction. For example, you can crowdsource how you label and group tweets, and use that for the machine learning.

But, for example, if you use crowdsourcing for removing manual tagging of data (embarrassing?) then you might make things worse.
Superficially they're similar in the "they both have 4 wheels and an engine" sense, but you could examine literally any part of a car today compared to one from the 1950s and find huge improvements. The efficiency, safety, comfort, tech, manufacturing... Everything is better.
As the other responder said, don't use Anki for memorization, only for reviewing what you already remember. I recommend using mnemonics for memorizing words. For katakana hiragana, refer to https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
As a car replacement Urban Arrow could work it is availoable and I have seen it. cargocycles.com.au lists most commonly available e-cargo bikes. I now remember that volitionebike.com is the closest thing to an AU company doing e-bikes but they are not rally cargo carriers any more than a standard bike. One could also if lucky find a Surly Trucker or a Kona Ute - but these always sell out and would have to be ordered in for next year.
For me, the Urban Arrow is a beast, about $10k and around 50kg. I'd go for something like the Yuba Spicy Curry long tail rather than a bakfiet such as the Arrow. With the long tial you can hop up on curbs and be nimble. Unlike Amsterdam, Aussie cities are not made for bikes. You would pretty much have to run the Arrow on the roads against cars, which when limited to our 250w/25kmh limits on e-bikes might not be so fun.
It’s interesting how these things can be “healthy” and “unsafe” at the same time. Or maybe it’s because some of these health effects are often quite far-fetched (“may improve X”, “contains compounds which has, in other contexts, been known to be important for Y” whereas e.g. lead is very strongly correlated with negative effects.

Makes me wonder on an “absolute scale” what we’re really talking about here: “-100 for heavy metals, +5 for polyphenols”. If that’s the case, some things are clearly very bad, even if evil white bread comes in at -80.
Reminds me of patio11's classic "don't call yourself a programmer": https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
My fear is that people that are not competent enough to judge ai generated content will use it, intentionally or unintentionally as a sort of denial of service attack on expertise. Middle management churning out some half baked code solution in 5 mins of copy pasting from the spec which will take you hours of investigating for finding the pitfalls and 5 meetings to get the manager to conceed how she did not provide 95% of 'the solution' while dodging a barrage of slight adaptations 'that should solve your remarks' and being deriled for 'negativity'.

I love GPT4, but I hate what it will do in business environments
> invariant

There is absolutely no such invariant here that allocations must be freed in the reverse order that they were allocated in. This was never a part of the contract.

> this particular one's API has quite the footgun

Agreed, however.
Etymology of Anki is the Japanese word which means memorization :)
How Elon Musk Knocked Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ Off Course
Yes, the code is linked in the paper: https://github.com/ot/semi_index
The content here is that they’ve:

- Done the built-in tutorial;

- Picked up somebody else’s Emacs and a few packages.

That’s two hours, maybe, if you go slow and have a few beers in the meantime. I wonder what they did for the rest of the year.
Musician is not only performing an instrument. The analogy is more like telling instruments players that only care about virtuosity the larger point is making music for people to enjoy, from being “a guitarist” to making music. The musical piece is the product in the professional context, and AI in that context is maybe recording, DAWs and realistic synths and sounds banks.
Neurodiversity in marketing: How my dyslexia helps me as a CMO
I too believed that a software engineer's job is to identify and enforce rigorous specification of the abstract high level requirement. And I too was not taking AI advancements seriously but then I took a closer took at what AI tools do today.

Here's my concern:

1. AI assistance thrive on structured data

2. Computer programs are some of the most structured data. And it's available abundantly out in the open.

3. Yes, you can't generate an Uber for bycycles with a single prompt, but you can fire half your development team and increase the productivity of the rest of your dev team with an OpenAI subscription.
It has no way of discerning what is factual and what is not. It's fundamental to LLMs. It only corrects itself when prompted by the user, and even then might get it wrong still.