skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And yet writing pervades many jobs, and the more prestigious the job, the more writing it tends to require.

I would say that it's quite the opposite! The most prestigious the job, the more likely the person will have one or many assistants to help them write.

Think of presidents, governors and CEOs. They must *read* much more than they write. Their response can fit in a post-it attached to the paperwork.

The next level also reads more than they write. Instead of a post-it, they will probably come up with bullet points which will be fleshed out by people below them.

The people who *really* have to write stuff is the people at the *bottom* of the hierarchy.

Writing well could be a way to go up the ladder. But it is definitely not required at the top.

What will change, in the future, is that *everyone* will have assistants.
Would ion engines leave a trace in space signaling alien civilizations our location? We are risking being annihilated by a dark forest strike.

Ok, a bit sci-fi but I had to say it.
In my opinion the biggest problem with fandom is that it leads to an overly attached attitude towards some work and creates a sense of entitlement and audience capture. Fanservice is a very close cousin to fandom and for very obvious reason, a lot of media with huge fandoms end up being driven by serving people the same thing over and over again because creators lose the ability to actually challenge their audience. It's how you get the whole Marvel industrial complex.

I've always liked Nabokov's attitude towards reading:

"A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading."

Fandom is the opposite of this where people end up treating their favorite media the way K-Pop fans treat K-Pop idols and it's why fandom driven media just ends up lowbrow and bad.
Earlier this month I took a train Washington to New York, plenty of people on that.

I then went down to Miami, train was fairly full - not many stayed on the entire trip but I wouldn’t expect them to, they got off at various stations along the way. Everyone I head in the dining car was American.
UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good
Yes, most weight loss is indeed through respiration, believe it or not!

https://youtu.be/C8ialLlcdcw?si=Hz_PHtrFElw6jgtr
> From a business perspective the software though is a cheap part of the chain. And the least interesting part.

This is only because true most of the time businesses use a lot of publicly funded work without paying for it. If software development were entirely private, I'm sure businesses would find excuses that actually no it has to cost 100x what it would cost otherwise.

Everything you say about maintainability and stability is true. But writing software that can be operated as a service in the first place is substantially harder. It's just not as easy for a company to capture.
I did Seattle-Chicago about ten years ago. 48 hours expected duration, and it arrived several hours late.

As a European used to efficient train travel, it was kind of surreal that not only was the passenger train very slow (maybe 1/3 of the speed I’m used to), but it also made long stops to make way for cargo traffic.

It felt like a bit of Wild West time travel to spend days on a train in the amazing landscapes. The food in the dining car was surprisingly good, but got boring by the third day.
If it's any consolation for young you, this is a really hard problem, even with electrodes implanted in the brain. There's an amazing podcast by lex with the team from NeuralLink, and they go into depth on how even with good neuron signals, there's still a lot of work on the software side to "moving a cursor". The first recipient of their implant still has to do a 10-30min calibration run every morning to be able to move a cursor reliably on the screen. So all in all, don't beat yourself up, it's a really hard problem even with good data.
The Truth About "Toxic Fandoms" - The Critical Drinker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3FF_vBwftw

Why The "Toxic Fandom" Excuse Stopped Working - Critical Drinker After Hours

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=tQBnhFCVcl4

In summary, blaming “Toxic Fandoms” is a convenient way for Hollywood to divert blame for the garbage movies they roll out and demand the audiences love. “Oh you hate our movies? It’s definitely not our fault, it must be because you’re just a hater and a toxic fan.”
If it's operated by a mouse you're not sure where to click and hold, and how it will react when you move mouse in which direction.

I assume you're using it a lot and then it's intuitive. For novice it's not. If I click on bottom part will it operate in another direction compared with clicking on top part? Or what about if I click on left or right edge? Can I also move mouse up-down and left-right or is only one direction allowed? Is mouse-up turning knob up or down? Are these rules same in all software or knob behaves slightly different everywhere? I have no idea for any of that except if I try and see. And since I rarely use them it's always a source for frustration.

Especially compared to linear slider which is impossible to misunderstand and you can't operate in it wrong way.
He made a theory that Russia is not the bad guy. They invaded a country without a reason. They literally are the bad guy.
Some random percent of Russians believe that Putin is great? Of course they say that, otherwise they would be in prison.
He has a point about West sending trash to Ukraine. But saying it's somehow Anduril? You have to be quiet open minded to accept his associations.
The guy makes some good points but buries them in a ton of his opinions that it's hard to find the points he makes.
The people who like to write will still write no matter how many chatGPTs are there. New people will start writing because it enjoys them and because curiosity.

But there are a lot of others which never liked to write, they do not need this for their job and why should not use this GPT as a tool like the promised land of AI / robots.

Same will happen with cooking: people who like to cook will cook traditionally even after our incoming household robots will be able to.
Look I can install TikTok with one push of a button on my phone.

That's how you get every 12 year old girl on the planet to use your app in the first place.
No secret club nonsense.
10+ years ago, a large corporation ran a smallish web-shop for their B2B segment with just about 20 articles. So one would expect the front-page of this shop, listing like 10 products, should be perfectly quick. OK, it wasn't. Reason was a strange policy that required this particular PHP based CMS/shop system to run on a Oracle database (for wich it definitely was not optimized). As moving to e.g. MySQL was denied, we needed to get creative.

In the end my "useless" program was curl or wget, executed by a cronjob to fetch that web-shop to render the front-page over and over again every few minutes to keep the caches of the application warm, resulting in "acceptable" load-times around 10s instead of 50 or more seconds.

Customer got a quick and rather cheap solution for his problem.

Fun fact: This cronjob was not just a hotfix for a few days but rather stayed in active duty for more than 5 years before the shop was finally replaced with a proper solution...
Linux took off AFTER PCs were finally able to run operating systems with virtual memory.

I was using VM systems running on PCS from 1989 (OS/2) Linux only started in 1991 and did not take off for say 10 years, by then Windows NT existed.

So VM was necessary for Linux but was not the reason for it taking off.

In my experience Linux came in for servers replacing other Unix servers. Windows NT servers continued for some time.

As for desktop you still need Excel and to a lesser extent Word and these are still best on Windows.
Oral culturals often had other physical representations of thoughts in stories. The physical objects that held the stories could be women cloth or carved wood.
It may not be actual writing as much as coherent cultural transfers through objects that PG is referring to.
Yes. The argument is that writing is different and I don't think the analogy holds. Calculators are not tools for mathematical thinking or communication. Writing is a form of processing thoughts and communication.

The "people are mostly fine" is true. People were mostly fine at the time when only the elites could write, but the society will not be the same. We are moving towards those old times.

Maybe you deal with intellectual elite from the best schools and haven't noticed[1], but adult literacy even among college educated has been on a downward trend for some time and we can see some results. Normal interactions in the corporate world are more difficult. People in middle-level management can't explain and articulate things as well as they used to. There is more communication, but it's not as efficient. One well-written report in every two weeks used to be enough. You need to be on a Zoom call 2-3 hours weekly for the same thing.

Mediocre or low quality writing is mentally taxing to read. If what you read is grammatically correct AI-slob it really kills all interest in reading and communicating in writing.

[1] Only about 10% of adults have PIAAC adult literacy level 4 or 5.
Is there a single example of multiple vendors selling support for the same open-source piece of software, where I can just hire a different vendor if I no longer like my current one, without changing anything major in my operations?

You could say that Canonical and IBM RedHat compete on offering Linux support, but the reality is that it's not that much harder to switch from RHEL to Ubuntu than switching to any other OS, so I don't think this counts.
Today (fairly near Greenwich) we are back on sensible time, with solar noon at clock noon near enough.
Writing done entirely by AIs is currently pretty awful, but I'm sure that it will get better over time. There was a prof on Twitter (can't find the tweet now) who assigned his class to generate and then critique an essay written by ChatGPT and it caused all of them to stop using it.
> In truth the license doesn't matter.

It only doesn't matter if you don't care at all about software supply chain risks.

This is not a sane position in 2024 to hold.
As long as they support dragging up and down as a way to make them rotate
How’s that in any way related to the topic?
I would reach out to Google Trends (analytics) in that case. The thing is, everybody thinks the same so I had to find another way to differentiate myself.
Don't get me wrong, but there are third world countries that have better train infrastructures
There are a few reasons.

1. They have been expanding their datacenter locations, particularly into the USA. Naturally, each new location adds a swathe of new potential customers.

2. They offer a genuinely good service for an affordable price. Comparable VPS/dedicated providers (DO, Linode, etc) are often more expensive. The more happy customers they have, the more recommendations you'll see.

3. We've passed the hype phase of putting everything into the cloud, and are collectively realizing that there are positives and negatives to cloud & on-prem. Dedicated hosting is popular again for workloads that benefit from it. It feels like there is growing fatigue with public cloud platforms.

4. People are looking to cut costs in the current economy. Anecdotally, there has been increasing awareness about the large markups that cloud companies put on compute, particularly with second-layer wrapper services like Vercel, that makes VPS providers like Hetzner attractive from an OpEx standpoint.
Why? You do realize their fork is open source?

The fix described in this post have been submitted as a patch to the official Git project. The fix is improving a legitimate inefficiency in Git, and does nothing towards "embracing", "extending", or "extinguishing" anything.
I came here to say this.
But also, for those who don't know. this is referring to "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir, author of "The Martian".

(Caution, many spoilers in the Wikipedia article)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary
How to generate a QR code with Stable Diffusion
It's a consequence of voting systems and one that First Past the Post systems (such as the UK House of Commons) are prone to.

People who are (say) Left-ish but not full blown supportes of BigLeftParty have the choice of voting for the major Left Party or an alternative left faction .. which is a wasted vote in a tight FPtP contest.

Worse a not BigLeftParty vote is one that effectively supports the major Right Party as it lowers the count for BigLeft.

Preference systems, Ranked Systems (there are variations) allow for direct first preference votes for a variationLeft Party with secondary fallback BigLeft preferences.

The direct support for not the main platform shows and causes deals to be made, the votes that fail to elect a variation still fall through and support the LeftWing while allowing the growth of alternative views.

Ranked voting fosters a healthy ecosystem of alternative smaller parties which can then grow, take seats, and help better represent the population at large with a diverse range of views, not just the BigTwo which end up as slightly variations of things not many support.
There are also first world countries that have shittier trains than the ones here. I'm saying this from first hand experience.
It probably got kicked out of it's host galaxy during a merger.
Looking over the Odin docs, it seems to me that a short summary might be: Nim provides almost all the same sorts of things as Odin, but with more Python-y syntax, more meta-programming, automatic memory management with opt-out, and less (no) built-in support for multi-dimensional arrays {EDIT: though, of course, Nim has multiple external impls like ArrayMancer, etc. and having flexible syntax makes this mostly a rendezvous-on-one-thing problem}.

I also like the way Nim with its command calls and so on is even more compact and "to the point" than Python is. Whenever I go back to Python from Nim, I think to myself "Why all this clutter?" :-)
Hello, and thank you.
Even when started reading I still didn't know what it was about. When DJs were mentioned I thought it was something related to turntables, as they are the rotary thing? Vinyl was mentioned in few places so it must be it? Then audiophiles were mentioned which is super strange since audiophiles don't use mixers at all. You're not mixing anything when you listen to music.

Turned out it's just about rotary vs linear potentiometers. Or I misunderstood everything.
The point was that it was difficult to get into such a position without having learnt to write. I doubt that people in such positions, having already learnt to write, just start dictating to staff and having them completely rewrite it. They would still use those writing skills to communicate with the staff and directly with other correspondents.
USA is a rather big country, coast to coast travel is going to take a good amount of time compared to travel times between major European cities
The European cultures of Spanish/French were equally early (and earlier) to California. The author touches on them but dismisses them a bit.

I get the sense that this analysis is just based on the author’s knowledge of English cultures of the period? I think Spanish/French culture had influence too, it’s just that the author didn’t do enough research on them to be able to include them in their model.
Can LLM/AI have the opposite effect?

People would start writing more and getting better at it with the help of LLM. This would create a positive feedback loop that would encourage them to write more and better. LLM should be used a tool improve productivity and quality of output. Like we use a computer interface to write faster, move and edit text, instead of using a pencil and an eraser, today you can use a LLM to improve your writing. This will help people to get better at organizing their thoughts and think more clearly instead of replacing the thinking.
What about long distance bus travel? Is is possible to go coast to coast on a bus?
Yes I don't think it should be allowed in Europe, yet the outrage I see, also from, Americans, as if this is some new never seen before level of danger on the road is unreasonable.
Some countries in Europe (even Poland) definitely offer faster Internet and for cheaper than the US, and without most of the privacy issues that US ISPs have.
The US has actually pretty good train infrastructure, it's just almost entirely dedicated to freight. The US moves far more goods by rail, farther and cheaper than just about any other country in the world.
Thank you! :) It's still in the early stages; the vendor landscape changes continuously, and I have to invest significant time to improve this.
> chemicals and tons of calories

If you mean ultra processed food then, yes.
Yeah, people in “Friends” never took the subway which is just weird.

Of course it’s because these shows are shot in LA, and they have Manhattan street sets built and ready in Hollywood studio lot, but no subway set.
The point is that anyone who's distracted by the arcanity of Web Assembly Text Format obviously doesn't understand the first thing about WASM or its potential use cases. The poster could just have easily have used a regular programming language and compiled that down to a WASM binary. However, for the purposes of a minimal example to be pasted in a text box, this might have led to a much larger Uint8Array.
Declaring it as a new definition was what annoyed me...

Which I found incredibly silly once I leaned about negative exponentiation and could now deduce the pattern.

Similarly, 0/0 became much more tractable to me once I learned L'Hôpital's rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'H%C3%B4pital's_rule
They are missing something major here and getting bogged down in some technicalities. Open source has no alternative to big tech because big tech commoditised stuff that's useful whereas open source commoditised stuff that is interesting to the developers.

When I sit down at my mac, I have a working and very polished calendar, mail client, todo list, contacts, note taking app, music player, browser, photo editing and library management tools, video call and conferencing software etc. And all of it syncs with my phone and my tablet out of the box.

When I sit down at a Linux machine, I have a calendar that breaks every 5 minutes and I can't share anything with anyone without futzing with iCal feeds and hiring another provider, a mail client that is ugly as sin and doesn't integrate with the calendaring or contact management stuff at all, a job and a half to find a note taking app that actually works properly, a todo list app that syncs with nothing, a spreadsheet package that crashes whenever I try and print something and oh hell I give up by then. And the answer to this? Roll out nextcloud on a VPS. Kill me, with a spoon. This is not freedom, it's just slavery of another kind.

I just want to get shit done. Big tech covers that. Please take this as a recommendation to tidy up all this hell and just help people to get shit done and then it will be an alternative to big tech.
LLMs are not suitable for mutation testing. Mutation testing needs to be fast to be useful (because you need to generate and test a lot of mutated versions); an LLM-based mutator would be extremely slow as well as error-prone.
Thank you to the AI that summarised the article. ;-)
> they'd rather spend hours writing their own half-arsed solution than paying someone else $5/month

Paying someone else to solve your problems can also carry huge risks of all sorts. Sometimes investing 1000 dollars into a risk-free solution is better than 5 dollars a month with gigantic strings attached.
Sorry, while I have a lot of the Graham essays, hopefully all them, now also including this one, here I nearly fully disagree with Graham:

(1) Due to computer-based word processing and spelling and grammar correction, writing, and good writing, are much easier now than before personal computers (PC). Indeed, a quip is that the typewriters killed off the ink pens, and the PCs killed off the typewriters; writing got easier and likely better, not less common. People got a lot more practice.

(2) Email, Internet blog posts, and other communications generate more writing. Can we find some data on total US email volume and compare that with old USPS mail volume, letters to the editor of newspapers, etc.?

(3) Now there is a lot of competition for good writing: At Hacker News, bad writing, especially from bad thinking, gets down voted. On Web sites using Disqus, part of getting voted up is clear, short, maybe just one sentence, maybe sarcastic, clever, and humorous, say, succinct, on the point, and maybe fun, and that means in some respects better writing. Maybe Disqus could tell us how Internet blog post writing volume has increased? A lot?

(4) For the media, via the Internet and Web sites, that is now much cheaper to produce than old newspapers, magazines, TV news, and I'd guess that the total of media as writing or as oral reading of what was written is much greater than before. For the future, I anticipate many more words per day, i.e., more writing. Uh, the writing at Hacker News has been going down, up, or staying the same? There is Facebook, X, Reddit, Wikipedia. There are sites for narrow interests. Sounds like a lot more writing.

(5) People have smart phones with them nearly all the time; net, that can mean more communications, and writing is less intrusive on the receiver than in-person voice. From good STEM field communications or just mature socialization, to avoid being misunderstood or offensive, good writing is important.

(6) Sure, now some Google searches result in AI answers, and for some simple questions the AI answers can be a little okay. But, I don't take the AI answers seriously, and the old Google search facility works fine and, also, of high importance, gives the URLs for the search results.

(7) Looking back at my writing, from personal letters to academics, on-line political discussions, etc., I see no way AI could help -- the AI writing is worse, not better.

(8) Since supposedly Taylor Swift is now worth $1.6 billion, there can be increased interest in guitar playing and the claim that such music is based almost entirely on the four chords I, IV, V, and VI. So, my niece wanted to know, and I wrote her an essay, 6,200 words with several YouTube URLs with pictures and sound. For some music with a lot of chords included URL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZsqnHhyub0

Sorry, but for my niece I found nothing nearly as good as what I wrote and believe that AI would be a poor substitute.

(9) The world is changing, especially related to writing, at likely a uniquely high rate, and no AI training data can report today what is new tomorrow and needs good writing.
The comfort of bus travel is way inferior to train travel!
Effective bandwidth can be influenced by roundtrip time. Fewer IP4 numbers means more NAT with more delay and yet another point where occasionally something can go wrong. Last but not least there are some areas in the EU like the Canary Islands where the internet feels like going over a sat.
The company I work for has done this trip a few times. Most recently this year.

wefunder.com/train

It’s a great experience, and something I wish more people tried. The cross country train that is, coworkers optional :)
there is also option D.

wait for a framework that implements option A.

if option A works, why aren't there any frameworks yet that implement it?

maybe all the framework devs are waiting for C?

but why?

you could be right about A but at present the majority view seems to be that C is the right option. which is what pushes me into going with B because i have no interest in developing my own framework.

if a framework appears that implements option A i'll gladly consider it. (just as long as it isn't tightly coupled with a backend)