aldousd666

Digital meet cute right here!

Oh man, what a fun thing to do! I may have to replace what used to be my fascination with programming languages and compilers with virtualization or containerization now.

The trolley problem is a non-sequitur. Ask any humans what they would do and why. You get a zillion different answers from people. Little wonder that bots have questionable means. This is my whole beef with people saying "AI is really not ready to handle real world decisions" because it doesn't have a lean-ready proof for why it makes choices. Newsflash, people don't either.

That's another thing, I make programming languages for fun. And implementing the AST nodes is absolute drudgery. Now I just have to construct the grammar and play. I do still make games and play with making apps (Air guitar that detects my hands and stuff) I have even taught coding as an adjunct professor, and done weekend long code competitions, so I've been all over it. I still enjoy the hobby, BECAUSE it's no strings. I don't feel "special" and I'm ok with it.

I've been programming for 30 years professionally, and I did it for a hobby as a kid. I love it still, but I am having more fun than I ever did before because none of the drudgery that goes along with it is required anymore. I love the AI and I wouldn't be sad if I never had to write another line by hand. But it's been my job, and the thing I've always hated about the job is that I didn't just get to leave it at work. My mind is always on it even when other people have shut down for a weekend or a weeklong vacation. I always have to worry about that next project that still isn't done, or isn't making an much progress while I'm away. Not as much now, because I just have to check in on Claude when I think of something I missed or need to do for some upcoming thing. It really takes away a lot of my stress because I can use it to extract action items from meetings, it help sketch designs, and write all the damned unit tests for me. Life is better now.

Copyright doesn't cover the results of code, nor the methods used in the code, techniques and algorithms aren't covered by copyright. Period. Copyright applies to 'the work'. If you don't copy the source code, it's not covered.

They aren't 10x gains. They're more like 3.5x gains. But still worth it. By a lot.

you are never going to get away from reading the code every time. at least I haven't seen how you could possibly. That being said, it is considerably less work to read and check the code than it is to have to build it all, even if you know what you're doing and have done it before.

Parsing is the front end to a compiler. Can't get semantics without first recognizing syntax. I have a hard time thinking about programming languages without seeing them as a parsing exercise first, every time.

I learned from the Dragon Book, decades ago. I already knew a lot of programming at that point, but I think most people writing compilers do. I'm curious if there really is an audience of people whose first introduction to programming is writing a compiler... I would think not, actually.

And they say you can't learn anything about computers from these bots... I had to learn this lesson from giving a shell account to one of my compatriots. I worked with him on group projects so I trusted him. He installed a fork bomb in his user's cron tab that went off at 3:00 a.m. everyday and I had to wonder why my hand compiled DRI driven screensaver went to a crawl. I did learn the lesson and I did forgive him. But it didn't cost me a couple Grand in API fees.

To be clear, I mean AI is going to be the downfall of ad supported content. But let's face it. We have link farms and spam factories as a result of the ad supported content market. I think this is going to eventually do justice for users because it puts a premium on content quality that someone will want to pay a direct licensing fee to scrape for your AI bots as opposed to tricking somebody into clicking on a link and looking at an impression for something they won't buy.

This is ultimately just going to give them training material for how to avoid this crap. They'll have to up their game to get good code. The arms race just took another step, and if you're spending money creating or hosting this kind of content, it's not going to make up for the money you're losing by your other content getting scraped. The bottom has always been threatening to fall out of the ads paid for eyeballs, And nobody could anticipate the trigger for the downfall. Looks like we found it.

It's super expensive for them to run this hardware. And they need the compute for other things. Everyone who's cursed open AI for going down in the middle of the day whenever they're using it to write code or do some other thing, will breathe a little easier now that there's some compute available. Wise decision, in my opinion.

Some advice I follow, and give to others: Refuse notifications by default. Only enable them when you're getting paid to see them. (slack and work email, for example count as getting paid to see them)

I could do that, but then I'd have to maintain it. I used to hostfile hack my devices. but the vpn is just easier.

Transaction costs make it inefficient. Costs more to effect the transfer than they would be able to charge for the articles.

The web is the enemy. I have an ad blocking VPN and I use GroundNews to filter out sites that have paywalls. Between those two things, I lead a relatively sane life. But I tried looking at some of the same places on an unflitered device and man, I can't even imagine living like that. It now costs me $100/year in ad blocking/circumvention just so I don't want to kill the browser.

Hypercard is really kind of like the first implementation of HTML5. With applescript instead of javascript.

I don't disagree, but neither does the article. It's just talking about the fact that we previously considered anything that can't be easily and tersely written down as nearly or entirely intractable. But, as we have seen, the three body problem is not really a hum-dinger as far as the universe goes, it's not even table stakes. We need to be able to do the same kind of energy arbitrage on n-body problems that we do on 2. And now we have the beginnings of a place to toy with more complicated ideas -- since these won't fit on a blackboard.

Word and wordpad are terrible for editing code snippets tho, markdown solves this problem.

This would be a huge bonus for me if I ever had to use windows for anything.

I'm 46 but same. I'm not quite as melancholy about it, but I do feel a lot of this.

I never saw Atari software for sale in the same magazines, but I'm sure it was available somewhere.

In the 1980's, computer software was sold in catalogs and magazines. Users had either of three platforms: A Macintosh, a PC-Compatible (probably x86), or a Commodore/Amiga. So these are the three categories were there to help you order the correct version of oregon trail. They were really a name for the operating systems, not the specifics of the hardware, at least back then they were.

fun thing about this page: i have gemini in the browser and when I asked it 'why is the entire Wall Family naming these things?' it said it couldn't engage. Turns out 'goatse' is a forbidden word to Gemini.

I recently read about 'in thread' ads, like on Twitter, as being not as effective unless they are 'brand recognition' ads. Like, they will help you decide which one to pick when you are staring at two fungible brands on the shelf, but they will not convince you to buy something you have never heard about before, especially not from a direct click through. So while Ads work is true, in many ways, they don't in many others. The brand damage you can get from having those in-thread ads is also real: Ads target the user, not the thread, but by showing up, users associate advertisers with the thread. If you were in some argument about dictators taking over, and suddenly a product pops up, you may assign the negative energy you have toward dictators to that brand as well.

AdGuard as a local VPN also bans unskippable Ads without the pesky legal enforcement baggage.

seems like blaming the users is the appropriate thing to do. just like blaming users for how they misuse guns and or photoshop.

it was a PR stunt. I think it was probably largely well-received except by a few like this.