b3morales

As one who was interested by Nim and tried it out for some personal projects, I found that this was the biggest problem with the project. There's several options for any given need (including internal tools like LSP or installing the compiler) with very little clear way to choose between them. Each will have different (dis)advantages that you must discover primarily by digging through forum posts or GitHub issues.

In some ways it's the sign of a very strong language, like the curse of Lisp: someone can easily just write their own version of whatever they need. But as a user trying to navigate the ecosystem it is frustrating. I do keep meaning to try it out again though; the language itself is very pleasant to use.

The stakes of changing the way so many people work can't be seen in a short term. Could be good or bad. Probably it will be both, in different ways. Margarine instead of butter seemed like a good idea until we noticed that hydrogenation was worse (in some ways) than the cholesterol problem we were trying to fight.

AI company execs also pretty clearly have a politico-economic idea that they are advancing. The tools may stand on their own but what is the broader effect of supporting them?

Because it's rules for us and not for them. If I take Microsoft's code and "transform" it I get sued. If Microsoft takes everyone else's code and "transforms" it (and sells it back to us) well, that's just business, pal. Thomas's argument is completely missing this point.

EDIT to add, I said this more completely a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381996

You are probably thinking of this by Chris Lattner: https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr... (on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30416070) Swift has always been developed by a team of course, but he was the lead and probably the most public face.

There can be no clearer example than iTunes's downgrade into the awful Music and somehow even worse Podcasts. On the plus it has invogorated the 3rd party space.

> Perhaps biggest of all Swift doesn’t need a runtime like Obj-C

Swift most certainly has a runtime: https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/main/stdlib/public/runti... And most or all of it is written in C++, not Swift last I checked. Whenever you see a `_swift_fooBarBaz` symbol in a stack trace, that's the runtime.

That was almost seven years ago now. It has been the String API twice as long as it has not been the API.

> There's no reason to privilege any one of these, and Swift doesn't do this.

Strange thing to say: Swift String count property is the count of extended grapheme clusters. The documentation is explicit:

> A string is a collection of extended grapheme clusters, which approximate human-readable characters. [emphasis in original]

Without a source code license somewhere on site (I don't see any after looking around) you had better not copy-paste these into a next project. The default state if there's no explicit permission granted is that it's not usable: https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/

Also he's got to approaching retirement age at this point, and there is no backbench corps of other DTS who do what he does. Maybe another decade we'll have his help, then what?

I'm still not sure how I feel about the actual copyright issue, but this was a bad test case. Thaler is trying to have his cake and eat it too; his position is inconsistent (this similar to a previous comment I've made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783707).

He wants credit for creating the AI, and he wants to that AI to be recognized as autonomous and independent by getting the Copyright Office's imprimatur. But at the same time he wants to treat the art created by the AI as if it were his, or at least to act on behalf of the AI as if it were not autonomous.

Assuming that the linked post is accurate and that the "approval from senior leadership" to turn the dump back on does not come...then yes, I would say so. Actually there is already Codidact, although if I recall correctly they explicitly ruled out importing SE data when they started up. https://codidact.org

This was one of the promises originally of Stack Overflow: all the content is Creative Commons licensed so that if they "turned evil" (I believe it was Joel that put it this way) the community could, in a way, create a fork. https://web.archive.org/web/20230203170609/https://stackover...

Unfortunately the dumps themselves are not a legal requirement, just a gentleman's agreement, so realistically exercising this ability was still at the whim of the company.

Is it really necessary to defend your language preference by ridiculing the alternative and those who wish to use it?

A citation is needed for the number of iOS projects that have more than a minuscule amount of code at the application level that risks memory unsafety.¹ The value proposition becomes stronger for the system frameworks that the app consumes, of course. (Although even the stdlib dips more than once into memory-unsafe Swift for performance.) But this brings us to another of the points from the article: is it really best to use one language for both use cases?

¹And additionally for whether those project would eliminate such code if rewritten in Swift.

GP was most likely thinking not of large roundabouts that take the place of major intersections, but the smaller traffic-calming type where the center can be as minimal as a 3 foot wide concrete block. They can be fit into pretty much any intersection because their purpose is not to change the path so much as to, frankly, eat up whatever extra space is available, which forces cars to slow around them.

This idea ("make a stronger license") has come up in previous discussions of Copilot as well[0].

The problem is that the Copilot project doesn't claim to be abiding by the license(s) of the ingested code. The reply to licensing concerns was that licensing doesn't apply to their use. So unfortunately they would just claim they could ignore your hypothetical Free³ license as well.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277352

Some core designers of Swift, at least Doug Gregor, John McCall, Dave Abrahams, were very much part of the C++ world. Abrahams mentions Gregor's proposals for C++ here: https://youtu.be/6JYAXADQmNQ?t=1157

You do have to remember to use it, but the thing to keep in mind is that you can pipe a list of ANYTHING into it. Any list of text items you can search through with a text query is fair game.

   git log --oneline | fzf

for example is one of my favorite tricks. Instead of scanning by eye or repeatedly grepping to find something, it's a live fuzzy filter. And depending on how deep you want to go you can then add key bindings to check out the selected commit, or preview the full message, or anything really.

> monitoring that many cameras is impractical

Regardless of how many there are, I believe the point is not to monitor them live but to have recordings if the store wants to bring charges for something.

Plagiarism and copyright infringement have some overlap but they're distinct. You can be guilty of plagiarism by taking something in the public domain and presenting it as your own work.

Why would you expect the AI to not be a paid service like a human tutor is? ChatGPT has a $0 tier, but it's also in a publicity phase, and they already have a "pro" subscription tier. Microsoft/GitHub likewise are charging for extended access to Copilot, and so is Stability with their Dream Studio application.

No, the goalposts are different according to the task. For example, Microsoft themselves set the goalposts for Bing at "helpfully responds to web search queries".

I think you're mixing up concerns from different contexts. AI as a generalized goal, where there are entities that we recognize as "like us" in quality of experience, yes, we would expect them to have something like our emotions. AI as a tool, like this Bing search, we want it to just do its job.

Really, though, this is the same standard that we apply to fellow humans. An acquaintance who expresses no emotion is "robotic" and maybe even "inhuman". But the person at the ticket counter going on about their feelings instead of answering your queries would also (rightly) be criticized.

It's all the same thing: choosing appropriate behavior for the circumstance is the expectation for a mature intelligent being.

The point of that one, to me, isn't that it was wrong about a fact, not even that the fact was so basic. It's that it doubled and tripled down on being wrong, as parent said, trying to gaslight the user. Imagine if the topic wasn't such a basic fact that's easy to verify elsewhere.

Yes, they aren't different; they have exactly the same problem, which is why StableDiffusion is also the subject of a lawsuit, like Copilot.

Thaler's assertion seems very short-sighted. If the program/system owns the copyright, who administers that? Is his software capable of granting licenses to allow the art to be published? How did he get permission from it to reproduce the work(s)? How does he even know that it wanted him to register the copyright with the Copyright Office? Perhaps it would prefer that the work was CCO/public domain.

I'm not just being snarky -- I think these are real questions that follow from saying that the system holds the copyright (and I am dubious that he has consistent answers to them).

In theory at least your tarpit won't be prevalent enough to have much effect. Since you're making it all up, no one else will have written about the same ideas (as they might if you were writing true things), and your mischief will be lost in the sea of all the other input.

> Because the logic of the philosophy is sound, the model cannot ignore the findings

This isn't how the LLMs like ChatGPT work: they have no novel or abstract reasoning power. They cannot distinguish truth from fiction, or logic from illogic, except to the extent that truth and logic are represented more than their opposites in the inputs. ChatGPT is a very large and complex "database" of sorts containing statistics of word sequences.

(Of course there's a longstanding question in AI research about when/if such a thing can become large and complex enough to cross the threshold to "actually" reasoning. But I don't think there's much debate that we're not there yet.)

That's how it should work, but it's not how it does work. I'm willing to give up my copyright on my stuff as soon as Microsoft, Google, MGM, Atlantic, etc. give up theirs. Until then, nope: I get the same rights and protections.