geph2021

wow, that's terrible. I was a competitive swimmer in my youth, and we did similar competitions from time to time (very rarely). I've never seen or even heard of a swimmer passing out underwater.

A more common drill we would do in practice were called "hypoxic" sets, where we would do one length of the pool breathing every 3 strokes, then the next every 5 strokes, then 7, 9 etc.. until you were going across the whole length (25 meters) without breathing. Not everyone could do it towards the longer distances without breathing, and the coaches would look out for "cheaters", but never once did anyone pass out. Maybe most swimmers, by way of the typical training and exertion in the pool, just don't develop a very good suppression of the "breath signal". I also never remember seeing anyone purposely hyperventilate so that they can stay under water longer.

That's exactly the author's point:

  Most programming books suck.

Yet he has some recommendations:

   But I do have this call to arms: my top five programming books every working programmer should own – and read.

They are:

  Code Complete 2 [1]

  Don't Make Me Think [2]

  Peopleware [3]

  Pragmatic Programmer [4]

  Facts and Fallacies [5]

1 - https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735619670/codihorr-...

2 - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321965515/codihorr-2...

3 - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0932633439/codihorr-2...

4 - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/020161622X/codihorr-2...

5 - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321117425/codihorr-2...

I think this sort of technique is used in boxing and MMA: play a good defense, stay out of trouble, and let the aggressor exhaust themselves until later rounds when you feel you may have a fitness advantage. I think there were good examples of this in the early days of MMA, when there was much less, if any, specialized training, techniques and strategy. It's probably much less effective now, since a well trained aggressor will know how to pace themselves too.

   Our motor controller had a 100 page datasheet that was overwhelming and dense - but uploading it to Claude and then asking questions let us quickly resolve one of our issues!

That's interesting. I've tried exactly this with chatGPT (enterprise install), and it failed pretty miserably when asking it basic questions about configuration/control. Although, I do have to add that the datasheet in question was a lot more complicated than a motor controller, and included a Firmware API guide.

   There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years.

I think that's true of most large organizations.

People have been comparing and contrasting successive technology innovation cycles for a long time. OP mentions railroads, but that doesn't mean there's an "effort to hitch" AI to railroads. It's just a comparison, which may or may not be useful in understanding how the latest innovation cycle may impact the world.

When you think about the promise (or hype) of crypto/bitcoin/blockchain 10 years ago, in some sense it augured equally, if not more, transformative change/disruption than AI.

Crypto portended drastic and fundamental changes: programmable money, disintermediation, and the decentralization of the very foundations of our society (i.e. money, banking, commerce). Suffice to say that nothing close to this has happened, and probably will never happen.

So I can see how many people are equally skeptical that AI, as the next hyped transformative technology, will achieve anything near the many lofty predictions.

It depends on the counter offer and your situation. I would have agreed with you, but a couple years ago I told my employer that I had a job offer kind of land in my lap (I wasn't actively looking), that it was good and I was inclined to take it. I wasn't unhappy at my current job, but the change in title/seniority and compensation of the job offer was definitely worth it. They didn't want me to leave, so they countered with a very strong offer, which I decided to take and stay with the company. If you want to leave because you're unhappy with other aspects of your job, then I agree that accepting a counter offer doesn't seem like a great choice.

   governments should have been falling over themselves to buy or otherwise subsidise expensive solar PV, because the more we bought, the faster the price would fall

That's quite a stretch, especially considering that there are plenty of examples where government subsidies and intervention distorts markets and makes them less efficient and more dysfunctional. I don't disagree with the general premise of the article: more could have been done to transition to renewable energy sooner. But it's really simplistic to say there was a clear, easy answer to this, and it simply involved more government spending on solar energy.

I don't know a lot about these tools, but I've used QCAD[1] for home improvement projects, drawing schematics and layout diagrams, and been very happy with it. It seems quite powerful. It's also open source, although not browser based.

I'm just wondering why QCAD doesn't seem to get much if any mention on HN when CAD tools and open source comes up.

1 - https://www.qcad.org/

same :)

Recommendation for anyone wanting to get into the gory, shocking details of WWI:

The podcast, Dan Carlin's A blueprint for Armageddon[1].

Over 24 hours on the topic, and I was left absolutely devastated by the descriptions of the impact and events of WWI. I guess I just didn't have a great appreciation or knowledge of WWI. At least for me, my grade school education was mostly focused on WWII and other more recent conflicts.

1 - https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blu...

As far as I can tell, its optional dependency is Open MP, not CUDA. Doesn't seem directly dependent on CUDA.

Thanks for sharing! Very interesting.

"We call it the engine block because it somewhat resembles a three cylinder motorcycle engine"

(referring to the power distribution and cooling)

and cooling!

Imagine the heat sink on that thing. Would look like a cast-iron Dutch oven :)

original title is:

"4,000,000,000,000 Transistors, One Giant Chip (Cerebras WSE-3)"

So I guess they're trying to stay true to it.

very murdery! Never even seen coffee that color :)

I enjoyed the game! There was a whole lot of civilizational collapse due to food-borne illness. Maybe throw in a comet strike, or more varied geological changes (flipping magnetic poles, ice-ages, tsunami, sea-level rise, etc...).

It's incredible to think about how many cataclysms humanity has lived through, yet also how many we have been lucky to avoid (so far...)

Anyone know what is happening, or happened, with shakti db[1]?

It's been years since Arthur started this other k-variant.

1- https://shakti.com/

I'm thinking they automatically fed in bulk images, asking for product description/title, and put the result straight into their product descriptions/titles. Some of the images triggered the OpenAI guard rails.

I think you're missing how this technology works. The basis for these models is training data. And to train anything, you need to label the data. So prompt engineering is simply using the lexicon, terminology and language labeling choices that were in the training data labeling. I suppose the models can conflate different words and terms, but to some degree the more you do that, the less precise or specific you can be in your prompt, and the generated result.

   Looks like they are trying to drive people to their sites judging from the long list of URLs on their profile

I can't imagine that's very effective. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I rarely (i.e. < 1% of the time) look at a profile AND follow links found therein.

correct. It's generally not feasible to shade such a large area over water. But evaporation does take its toll on reservoir water. There was a proposal not long ago to shade the canal carrying water from Northern California to Southern California. Reducing evaporation was one of the touted benefits[1].

  A study by the University of California, Merced gives a boost to the idea, estimating that 63 billion gallons of 
  water could be saved by covering California’s 4,000 miles of canals with solar panels that could also generate 13 
  gigawatts of power. 

1 - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/solar-panels-built-over...

I do not have anything specific. I have read threads where someone, usually with snark, responds with a comment of the sort "are you a bot?", or "you sound like chatGPT". That's probably only been a couple times over a few months, and I'm on HN reading threads multiple times a day, so it's not very frequent. But it does make me wonder... That distinctive ChatGPT style will become less recognizable. IMHO, bot content in the HN comments should be fairly low, but non-zero. I don't think there's much, if any, incentive to invest much in an HN comment bot, but with all these hackers/coders some would do it just out of curiosity/challenge.

even here on HN, the percentage of AI generated comments has to be increasing day by day. I have to assume that some have created HN commenter bots, even just as a hobby/learning project.