kerblang
kerblang on Hacker News
For the record, psychology research has demonstrated that humans do not think in language. This was a popular myth started by someone in the 1930's or so, I think, leading to authoritarian ideas about thought control via language control. People still won't give up on it...
I have found that databases are the exception where documentation is critical, in that knowledge of what we do to the data (described in program logic) is completely different from knowledge of what the data means. Reverse-engineering that meaning often takes me longer than anything else.
Beyond that, however, English is a horribly ambiguous, contradictory and complicated programming language. It's a literal anarchy. Had it not been for primitive 1950's hardware, I suspect people would have refused to invent programming languages and insisted on AI-processed English anyhow. For now I guess we'll work as computational attorneys...
Go talk to an artist, and they'll tell you art is a form of engineering, and it requires the artist to understand what works, what doesn't, and why, in practical & scientific terms. The corporate world is dogmatic, self-destructive, FOMO-obsessed and then some. It considers _doing work that matters_ to be a special privilege, and that you should be happy and thankful for meaningless work instead. The corporate world is practically anti-capitalist and anti-real.
If anything, that corporate world fulfills the popular perception of art - impractical, pointless gesturing and posing - rather than what real art intends to do, which is to gain a deeper understanding of the real world and show it to others. Art critics tend to hate it when an artist explains how art is made, preferring an explanation of magical genius; but that's their problem, not art's problem.
As I understand it, the chirality problem is one of the big ones in abiogenesis - the beginning of life. How does some initial series of inorganic "accidents" lead to life? The necessary chemistry has to give the right chirality.
But maybe someone better informed can explain... I've only heard James Tour ranting about it
Text headers, mind you! Ah, text text text
Don't ask me what my point is
What, no mention of our old friend, ASCII-armored Base64? For shame! Everything can be text with Base64, including things that have absolutely no business being text! Best of all, in light of popular widespread abuse of every available resource, Base64 is comparatively efficient! Bring on the petabytes! Yay and I'm not being completely sarcastic
Nobody is actually trying to do that, because it's too hard, they don't know enough about how the brain works, and/or they can't compete on efficiency; pick whichever reasons you like, or add more, but don't pretend that AI researchers have figured out how to simulate a brain.
I think it's been pretty well demonstrated by neuroscientists that the brain is not a binary computer. That doesn't mean that those scientists erred on behalf of supernatural religion or anything like that.
You can certainly reduce unnecessary complexity and esp. dependencies
> Application programs were really considered software until at least the 1970s
Did you mean "were not"?
Has the engineering enhancement been beneficial in your work?
Author begins by describing the complexity crisis that folks tried to address at 1968 NATO SEC but then talks about engineering as a problem-solving effort involving calculations and caches.
Is it a surprise the complexity crisis continues? Dependencies rage out of control in modern systems, creating all sorts of havoc, including security issues. The academy seems to have little interest in this.
Sandwich Appreciation is not a value judgement. It is about understanding the sandwich and recognizing it as it truly is. We should hold off on value judgements until we understand what that sandwich is really all about. Sometimes a sandwich is perfectly disgusting and needs to be thrown away immediately; but developing our skills in sandwich appreciation helps us better recognize such a situation and more readily avoid a sandwich that is just going to taste horrible and make us throw up. Also, we have to decide, each of us as individuals, how much we should care about sandwiches, because some of us will grow up to be great sandwich artists revered by all, and some of us just need to eat well and get on with other things, such as cleaning the bathroom, which is a thing to appreciate in itself...
An interesting article, but I'm still not sure what "The Machine" was. Are we talking about all sorts of things, or the tape machine?
Especially interesting was the claim of using vocals as percussion. Had not thought of it that way.
Various congresspersons are already making a huge stink about so-called AI safety. This is a way for Trump administration to appease them, and it's really just advising that laws will be enforced for AI companies as much as anyone else.
Unless you think AI companies should be excused even from obeying the law, because that slows them down too much, which is kind of ridiculous
I think there does need to be some notification from the US Justice Dept to AI companies to the effect of, "If your robot hacks into other organizations, you will be held liable for its actions." That will "slow down" things as much as they need to be slowed.
Would like to emphasize: Software is intangible. It fails to meet most standards of "what is real", because it exists entirely in the realm of symbols. You're at the edge of reality. To human instincts it seems like an unreal world without rules, so it unconsciously triggers all sorts of weird things, including a good bit of amoral behavior. Nasty things locked away in one's psyche come out to play.
Yes the modern toolchain is
super-massive. There is no pushback. Remember when deployment was trivial?
My expectation is that the toolchain will expand by another order of magnitude because LLM's, not just because of what they can produce, but because we are lowering the ceiling with LLM assistance when it comes to just understanding the toolchain. That creates a vacuum that people can fill up with more stuff.
The "insanity" that makes people do this is hard to explain. It's certainly irrational and seemingly unconscious.
I would not move authorization into AWS unless you want to spend hours debugging YAML & JSON blobs & templates, struggle with verification, and worse yet, transfer application superuser work onto devs & admins. (Edit: also forgot about core feature lock-in that has to be redone if you switch clouds)
Having a user interface where trusted users can assign privileges to lower-level folks is massively advantageous if you build it right, by comparison. You do need to make fine-grained control possible, to be able to roll up permission sets into predefined roles, and - a simple matter that evades many - assign multiple roles to a given user. Users frequently "wear multiple hats", as they say, and you need to account for that.
I wonder if it would help to revoke patents that help google maintain its monopoly, assuming that's the case and it's doable by a judge/congress/someone?
What exactly is the nature of its monopoly that moots competition? I was of understanding that it's more than just ads on google search results, isn't it?
Why are the toilets (and other things) melted? Is this some artifact of the photography?
Are corporate profits actually at a peak, or just their percentage share of national profit (per the article)? Not in denial about the wealth gap, just wondering where profit growth is coming from.
Not guaranteed but easy, because Windows has mnemonics, where you can associate arbitrarily nested menus with actions, and each menu can have its own mnemonic key, so that you press ALT, then, say, "k", then, maybe "m" and so on, following along with the menus as they drop down.
This way it becomes easy to memorize key sequences; start by navigating with arrow keys, then eventually speed up as you memorize each menu item's mnemonic key, and if you ever forget, just look at the menu.
It was the keyboard-friendliest idea ever, without requiring any sort of terminal. I'd even say friendlier than MacOS (heresy!!) or, yes, VIM (burn the witch!!!)
You'll need to go back another 1000 years or so for Jeremiah and friends, but they were masters of the oh-now-this-time-you're-really-gonna-get-it-just-you-wait-and-see polemic. These modern-day doomers are weak
PageRank is really the beginning of popularity as proxy for authentic/truthful/accurate/etc.
Then we move on to upvotes, retweets, likes, listens, views, please-please-please-subscribe-to-my-channel, reviews etc. Thus the continuum of the "social" internet.
We tried really hard to make truth into a capitalist endeavor.
Using the kids' own artwork is a cool idea.
Why can't postgres move to thread-per-connection like MySQL? Most of us use connection pools with mysql but it's nice to have super-fast connectivity and know that load surges are handled that much better.
Some people are unable to become motivated unless there is pervasive sense of emergency. They will delay their own work to the last possible minute and pull all-nighters just for the excitement. When those people get promoted to management they can be hell to work for, having concluded that the only way to motivate themselves holds for everyone else as well.
I find that easier to read than giant graph of node thingies with lines (cue ancient debates about UML...).
Have wondered whether attorneys would find it easier to work in a programming language than english, once they'd learned the former? Do any have strong opinions on this?
