deostroll

Today's models are far from autonomous thinking machines. It is a cognitive bias among the masses that agree. It is just a giant calculator. It predicts "the most probable next word" from a sea of all combinations of next words.

Anybody out there who has tried to convert js to ast and back and got OOM?! (I tried @babel/parser). I pray this one doesn't disappoint.

Oh, and comments!!! My general observation is that one cannot capture the comments when code is generated from ast. Although esprima has something in the standard to this effect, implementations generally stuck with weird commenting styles and how to generate code from them...for e.g

var /* hello */ world, foo, /* bar */ s;

Did anyone do an analysis on what happens after the test? Like in nodejs if we keep the application running after the so called test and left it idle for 1 or more hours. Does the memory come down?

We are thinking of an alternate way to make loopback 3 faster. Not the way loopback 4 is today.

A raspberry-pi might do better than this calculator. Besides comparing different things, a calculator's main design goal should be to assist with calculations and last for a long time. Anything beyond that it is overkill. If your goal is to visualize-and-study, use a PC.

The language died because of Microsoft tried to woo java developers into using the .net ecosystem. So whenever the CLR got more features, C# started supporting them more readily.

VB originally wasn't thought of as an OOP language. But through vb.net when that paradigm was "imported" the language lost its charm.

Further more, web development took flight. No one was interested to build desktop applications anymore.

Also I wouldn't say the influx of java developers into the .net ecosystem was that considerable. (Or for that matter other platform developers like python, delphi). It was definitely slow during the 2002s. Because the java ecosystem had achieved code-once-and-run-any-where paradigm. You could write desktop applications developed on windows, on, linux machines. From a business POV why would application developers "want" a different ecosystem to achieve this?

All this sort of eventually killed classic VB.

Not sure if AutoHotKey is the tool for this, but, I am looking for a functionality such that, when I get a ping from MS Teams (say), I want some other system in my home network to notify me of it - perhaps a notification in my android phone?

Anyway we can achieve this?

Harari doesn't pose the question to the reader! Europe's obsessions with exploration and conquests were driven by the scientific revolution. He does say that China could have very well done they part in it, but the Chinese rulers had no such global ambitions. With all this, it is a little premature to conclude that we are what we are because of our history. Although that is apparent if you look at it with that kind of objectiveness. But it could have been very well the Chinese if fate wanted it to be.

It was a DIY pre-covid project. It was meant for me to locate my bike in an open-air parking lot meant for two-wheelers. The circuit wasn't perfect. Here are some videos/pics:

https://imgur.com/a/fv2oiZ7

Ps: it is a failed project, but enjoyable.

[Non-contributory commment] Who else thought the bear was an owl?

Is no one irked by some capitalistic policies/monopoly by giant corporations?

For e.g. you ask the voice assistant to play a song, it will deny that request saying that you need to buy their "premium" offering first.

Another fact is that voice integration to other apps which are not of the same vendor as that of the phone is virtually non-existent.

Well, I certainly hope that the Hacker News FM podcast on spotify doesn't come to an end. But as long as stuff is on the internet and accessible, I don't see the point of denying people visiting the webpage.

Restricting access helps a little.

But in the end the kingdom of humanity is all good and bad. Your life will only be worse if all you think or worry about is the bad.

PS: for reasons unrelated to the topic I do believe that podcast might curtain soon.

This paper covers only one aspect - estimating demand. But the cost of the EV batteries is another affair. Recently it has come to light several human rights violations involved with the lithium/cobalt mining industry. Both are necessary for making batteries and other electrical components that make up rechargeable batteries.

But today, at least for the short-term, the only solution to stop those inhuman practices is to provide humanitarian aid. The proliferation of violations are at such a scale that even if some major tech players come together and decide that they should provide this humanitarian aid to the "miners", the profit margins drop drastically.

Hence EV batteries may not become viable to the end-consumers.

The fun part is mainly dependent on the leaders and culture. If they are serious about agile then you finally fit/assimilate into that work style. But without opportunities to communicate, like for e.g. constructively discuss or debate, things will start to appear stale. That is where I think the excitement takes a plunge.

How does this code work?

primes = InfiniteAIArray()

Is the context determined from the variable name? If so is this through a kind of reflection?

Complexity is one end of the spectrum. Browser APIs for various stuff like animation, video, audio, webgl, etc is not that easy for developers to consume. Often most of these features have their own set of sub-complexities and concepts. For e.g. drawing/animation on the canvas is relatively simple, than doing stuff with 3d animation; the latter involves lighting, viewer perspectives, etc.

And developers don't need all of these browser features every time; much less for the same project. But from a framework POV those features need to be there. Because, as a framework developer you cater to a relatively wide developer profiles.

So far we've talked about browser APIs and how a framework seems to lend support to them. Building web apps are a whole different affair. When concepts such as optimization, and, page-load speed kick in you'd definitely think of tools that abstract away the common chore of such optimizations. Again these optimizations have their own set of options, and, hence complexity.

So today the whole affair may seem complex. But really its not artificial. There was a need and hence a solution. To anyone relatively new to web development all this might seem complex. And at some level, even we humans also unjustly decide we need to have some features because "others are also doing it". This also increases complexity in maintaining those solutions.

Bottom line is, it is a relative illusion, and, it just echoes the state of modern browsers, and, modern web development trying to be vogue.

Amazing. No comments so far. This is not the first time a topic of this nature was posted on HN. (Or perhaps my search skills are poor).

Anyway, what speaker suggests for now is that companies take a collective small-action that improves the welfare of these workers.

But on a side note I would say we need more sustainable stuff that goes into our technology. It might take a few decades for cobalt mining to stop due to depletion. Then what?

But bottom line is I am appalled that it still happens in our civilization.

Suppose a GoI website is geo-blocked such that only the citizens of India can access it.

Now that a global vpn company has removed its servers out of India, does it mean its customers (while using that vpn service) is blocked from accessing the said website?

Or is there some other implication here?

Curious to know.

On a lighter note, I think someone I know might have resorted to this programming technique way back in my engineering college days...albeit without results (or shall I say "requirement marks for the exam question").

The program was to compute a factorial in C. It had to be written on the answer paper. The first few lines where the usual headers, then the main block. Inside the main block was a "novel" on how to accomplish the computation. (That was not even in comments).

Makes me smile thinking about this even today...

The crux of the issue is really what we call the "kingdom of humanity". The earlier the population learn about this hard truth, the better.

I couldn't get out of that website by hitting the browser back button... :/

I have recently used it to simulate a network breakdown between application and the database server to study what the application does. There are various clients you can use with toxiproxy via which you can set "toxics" (i.e. a delay in the network traffic, etc), but I found the cli more suited to my needs. The other clients, (for e.g. nodejs) can help you write unit tests which are meant to test the resiliency.

The other fact that caught my interest was the concept of "gamedays". It really about introducing "problems" in the production system randomly and keeping the support staff that manage application incidents on it toes. (More about in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTfWpHuCJXk)

I had been experimenting with web crawling with a lot of technologies. (Python based and others).

What most (uninitiated) developers do not realize is that web crawling is not for mere mortals.

1. We are at the mercy of the webpage authors.

HTML is a great lanuage to encode information. But most developers (usually webpage authors) see it as a kind of tool for presentation only. Infomation can go anywhere in the document. And they are prone to changes.

2. The internet society frowns on web crawling

You look into any site's TnC, you might come across a clause which prevents you from crawling. The specific word may not be in the legalese, however, it implies any kind of crawling is denied. There is good reason for this - it is mostly done to encourage fair use of the service.

3. No body designs services to be crawlable.

Most big name companies do have some alternative. Like Facebook had "graphs". (Now obsolete). They allowed end users to extract data using simple queries - like " list friends of X who live in city Y, and who is not your friend". But "graphs" feature came a lot later after Facebook launch. Not at beginning.

Usually at the beginning stages of any services we are at the mercy of #1 and #2

For #1 no one ever designs page to have have information always at a standard location. It changes.

4. The tech isn't ripe yet.

This is my personal view. I had been experimenting with puppeteer and selenium behind a corporate environment. I wasn't that happy with the "net" developer experience. I found things like taking a screenshot or pdf buggy. For e.g. to get the latter I have to run my browser in non-headless mode. In headless mode my laptop system policy disabled some extensions important for the webpage to load correctly.

It's not an Amazon-only issue. Many services, even Google playstore, is replete with this kind of _infestation_. There are many perspectives here.

(1) One can hope to combat this with technology and processes. But the number of people consuming the service versus the actual number of people and systems employed to safe guard customer trust is quite high.

(2) Understand the kingdom of humanity. There are always good/bad actors. The line that divides good/bad is also quite fickle. But we need more "good". We need to discuss this more.