rerdavies

So much for the long tail! The rate of decline after the advent of AIs is sobering. From 181,000 questions a month at the absolute peak, to less than a thousand a month now!

You need to go deeper. The problem wasn't shitty moderation; it was shitty gamification.

I've seen that too. Not that common, but it certainly happened more than it should. You get a point for close-dup-ing whether you're right or not.

Ironically, in my experience, the alternatives were crap because the people giving the answers were point seekers. Microsoft Tech Support forums come to mind, particularly. No problem with the questions. But significant concerns about the skills of the people giving the answers. Not sure why that is, and why SO managed to get something right when it came to getting quality answers. For a while, anyway.

> We become masters, by moving through being juniors.

Yes this! I found it painful to watch abuse being heaped upon obviously junior programmers. Points should have beem award for mentoring those on the path, not gratuitously rejecting their questions.

Combined with the problem that more correct questions, that were likely to produce more correct answers were closed for further comments when they were incorrectly close-dup-ed. So often you would find the correct answer in the brief window between when the question was asked, and when a member of the self-appointed moderator class had incorrectly close-dup-ed the question. So frustrating!

My personal hate-on for SO: forcing all answers, INCLUDING the code to be licensed under an awkward CC license. Yes, you were "allowed" to dual-license the code in your answer under a more permissive license that doesn't require attribution.

I tried adding an explicit dual license to the code in my answers; but moderators would any answer that tried to do that.

Not so much that I care about the copyright of my code; but more a question of whether I would find a lawsuit from SO on my doorstep because I had neglected to credit SO for three lines of code that somebody ELSE had contributed to SO. A very real problem, given that SO management after the takeover had shown itself to be not really trustable.

It was trivially easy to close dup a question that looked like it was a dup from the title, but much harder to actually read the contents of the questions, and realize that they were not. And you got points even if you were completely wrong. SO would have been much better if there were no close dups at all.

And even if the questions were actually duplicates, far too often the answers would be so out of date that it would be better if the question (and the answers) were allowed to start again from scratch.

And I agree: the "opinion" close was toxic as well.

A tragic gamification failure, that contributed significantly to my drift away from SO.

I think you also need to distinguish between actual users and members of the gamified moderator class: an entire class of SO users whose primary involvement was gratuitously closing questions so that they could get more points, or picking up cheap points by re-formatting the one or two variables you missed in your answer. Often with no real evidence that they had anything but very modest technical skills. Those people. If you don't want to call them moderators, so be it. But I'm not sure what you would call them if not "moderator", whether they had some magical shield that nobody paid attention to or not.

Easy to spot. Just spend some time browsing through the activity of super users with astronomical point scores. It's pretty obvious that they were doing what they were doing to get points, rather than to make the site better or easier to use, many of whom had quite unimpressive technical skills.

The obvious toxic effects of gamification was a substantial contributor to my personal drift away from SO. But what really killed my interest: the toxic effects of close-dup, which produced rapidly accelerating content rot. It is true that, at some point, they started applying penalties to old answers; but that seemed to have no real effect on the toxic effects of "close-dup".

e.g. Questions raised against Android 14 being close-dup-ed against questions that were originally raised against Android 4.0, where the top thee answers, each of which had 1400 upvotes, was that "you can't do that", even though you absolutely could on Android 14.

That and the fact that I had discovered (as I think many others had) that you actually got much better answers if you appended "reddit" to the start of you google search queries, and skipped over the SO answers altogether.

My final point score on SO: somewhere around 8,000 I think. So not a casual user. I'm pretty sure that about 3,000 of those points were given for an answer that applied to Android 4.0, that stopped being accurate in Android 9.0, and I (shamefully) never got around to updating for modern Android tools.

That is indeed the myth that the 1% would have you believe. It is, however, probably good that you have realized that you must moderate your expectations.

I just finished reading a biography of Christopher Marlowe, which I would not otherwise recommend. However, one of the interesting issues it discusses is how English universities in late 16th century provided an illusion of upward mobility for scholarship students, while actually only providing a path to clergy positions in remote parishes that no sensible second son of an aristocrat would find remotely acceptable. Not unlike the "American Dream", in many ways: a false promise held out to keep the masses complacent.

Things like this are my secular cathedral: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Canada

It's not an accident that the architecture of the Canadian National Gallery explicitly references Christian church architecture.

Or the Smithsonian. Or the NASA museum at Cape Canaveral. Also cathedrals.

Walking the entire length of a Saturn V rocket laid on its side at the NASA museum at Cape Canaveral is as close to a holy moment as this old atheist has ever experienced.

Is it actually possible to find regexes that use PHP-specific features using grep alone?

Maybe try enrolling on your phone instead of your desktop. I had a mighty battle with AppleTV recently trying to sign up for Apple TV (which I would guess uses the same payment system). I suspect the root issue for me was that my copy of Windows boots off a non-encrypted drive, and was being considered as a non-secure connection. (I'm dual-booting with an older version of Ubuntu).

Anyway. Paying on my phone worked the first time.

Javascript uses UTF-16, not UCS-2. An tragic historical mistake. I imagine they would use UTF-8 if they got a chance to do it all over again.

Ok. lol. THAT's the dumbest thing I've read on HN.

If you really must blame anyone, Japan bears significantly more blame. (Tongue-out Smiley Face Emoji). Plus the original Unicode Consortium for being insufficiently sensitive to requirements for Asian scripts in the first place.

A summary of a fascinating rabbit hole. Here are the scripts that are included in the UTF Supplementary Multilingual Plane, which cannot be encoded in UCS-2, excluding scripts of primarily historical and archeological interest. Obviously, they can all be encoded in UTF-16.

Deseret - The Mormon Alphabet, designed by Joseph Smith to remove corruption in English when written in the Latin alphabet. Used briefly in the 19th century, but no longer actively used, except by a small community of hobbyists and scholars.

Shavian - A phonetic alphabet for English, whose development was funded by George Bernard Shaw. Currently only used by hobbyists.

Osmanya - One of several competing alphabets for the Somali language. Officially superseded by the Somali Latin alphabet in 1972. "Material written in the script is 'almost non-existent'" -- Wikipedia

Adlam - Use to write the Fuldani language. Spoken by about 36m people. The Adlam script is currently taught in Fuldani schools, and is used widely.

Hanifi Rohingya - One of three scripts currently actively used to write Rohingya, the others being Rohingya Arabic, and Rohingya Latin. Rohingya is spoken by 1.5m people. There are at least two newspapers published in Hanifi Rohingya. It is often used in the Rohingya diaspora, and widely taught in Rohingya refugee camps.

Osage - Currently, the official alphabet of the Osage language. Invented in 2006. Osage is spoken by about 50,000 people, and children are taught to use the Osage alphabet in schools.

Medefaidrin - a constructed script and language created as a Christian sacred language by an Ibibio congregation in 1930s Nigeria. It has its roots in glossolalia ('speaking in tongues').

<meta> is the feature people really care about.

To create even better and bolder and more beautiful things.

Shouldn't take you more than a month or two with decent tools for a moderately large program. But yes, if there is ever a Next Time, I will be using AI tools.

That does indeed make the page readable. Thanks for the tip.

Out of curiosity, what exactly is the constituency that's being address by not using css to format page content at all? It seems like a deliberate attempt to not use CSS at all; but then it does. Just not for actually formatting the page. Is this virtue signaling of some kind? And if so, what virtue is it signalling? Most curious.

If only you invested a tiny fraction of the effort it took to write this to make it easier for us to read. It's a serious discourtesy.

```

.reading-container {

  /\* Automatically caps the container at 65 characters on desktop, 

     but scales to 100% minus a 2rem padding buffer on mobile devices \*/

  width: min(65ch, 100% - 2rem);

  margin-inline: auto;

} ```

I think you're misunderstanding where in the process that prompt got made.

Thanks for that. I had definitely noticed that the .NET JIT wasn't doing loop hoisting. And that you could get close to C/C++ performance if you did loop hoisting manually. It's useful to get some insight on .NET's actual optimization philosophy.

Are large gaussian blurs not used for modern glass effects? Worth pointing out that doing so really requires use of FFT convolutions -- an optimization that has not been implemented in the benchmarks.

Not really the question that this study is addressing though.

A chilling early experience with AIs that seriously affected my thinking on AIs:

I was working on a ground-up implementation of a SPICE circuit simulator that would generate code to do realtime simulation of electrical circuits. Much of the work was derived from complex mathematics in a couple of papers that I was using as a guide, and from The Spice Manual (3rd edition) which serves as a guide/standard to the Spice language, including detailed mathematical formulae, expressed in standard mathematical notion (but no code) for most of the simulation operations.

When transcribing formulae into code by hand, I had gotten in the habit of providing references to page numbers and equation numbers in comments in the code, and "footnote" comments that provided URLs to the original material.

Imagine my surprise when Claude also provided correct comment references to pages and equation numbers when I asked it to write code to implement diode models.

Worth mentioning: Sometimes we choose initial abstractions that don't survive well and need to be adjusted as the project evolves. Claude is extremely good at performing large rewrites that are needed if you need to adjust an abstraction on the fly.

Also worth mentioning that Claude is extremely good at accepting constructive criticism.

In passing, just to make things even more fun, ARM32 overshifting produces zero; ARM64 uses MODULO overshifting. :-P

Does Holmes even have a center? I think the film asks you to consider that question directly.

True, that the film does not draw that conclusion explicitly. But it is a film that asks you to draw your own conclusions.