unkulunkulu

I did not mean literal you neither. If “you” (the machine) are so smart, then you don’t need information exchange with “others”, so no need for “trust”

Then why would you need this information exchange at all?

I’m talking about using debuggers not even to debug, but to familiarize yourself with the codebase and gain general understanding.

Measure of progress for me is formulating and answering questions. Sometimes trying to answer a question leads to formulating sub questions.

Using the debugger to understand/read code is invaluable. Seeing live stacks is so powerful compared to static analysis.

> At this stage, it has nothing to do with xmin and xmax, but rather because other transactions cannot see uncommitted data

Am I missing something or this statement is incomplete? Also I find the visualization of commit weird, it “points to” the header of the table, but then xmax gets updated “behind the scenes”? Isnt xmax/xmin “the mechanism behind how the database knows what is committed/not committed”? Also, there could be subtransactions, which make this statement even more contradictory?

I enjoyed the visualizations and explanations otherwise, thanks!

Ok, this article inspired some positivity in my view. Here comes, of course a disclaimer that this is just "wishful thinking", but still.

So we are in the process of "adapting a technology". Welcome, keep calm, observe, don't be ashamed to feel emotions like fear, excitement, anger and all else.

While adapting, we learn how to use it better and better. At first, we try "do all the work for me", then "ok, that was bad, plan what you would do, good, adjust, ok do it like this" etc etc.

A couple of years into the future this knowledge is just "passed on". If productivity grew and we "figured out how to get more out of the universe", then no jobs had to be lost, just readapted. And "investors" get happy not by "replacing workers", but by "reaping win-win rewards" from the universe at large.

There are dangers of course, like "maybe this is truly a huge win-win, but some loses can be hidden, like ecology", but "I hope there are people really addressing these problems and this win-win will help them be more productive as well".

Now this is just Moscow in summer

I couple of years ago I would ask to collect your coworker’s garbage bin :)

Not as easy to find in my vicinity, at least good ones, which is of course true for any language and profession in general.

I have RoR on my resume and very fond of it.

For me the title is a bit of a contradiction: I always think about the library as “the final language”. So author’s example of RoR/Ruby is “RoR is a great web service language that uses Ruby as the base, they evolved together and arguably as RoR is the main source of clients for ruby, ruby was as well designed for RoR as RoR for ruby”

I think about programming/design as languages/translation in a lot of ways: its languages all the way down.

I believe a reasonable push back to this surveillance increase should be “incresing law precision”, like “fines for making a really dangerous maneuver vs driving fast on an empty road”

“really scaring someone on a bike vs driving on a sidewalk in general”

I wonder how this is the most straightforward way to know that?

Hey, community! Thank you for this opportunity to connect and feel closeness to the best parts and people in our industry.

Thank you for your open mindedness, smarts, stupid fun and lovable nerdiness.

I feel at home here.

One thing that makes me sad are dystopian fears. Not sure if this is warranted or not, but certainly get my dose of dread from HN. But thank you for being so sensitive and caring in this.

Happy thanksgiving.

The most fun on this site is solving a problem and then having your mind blown by solutions in Apl/j/k and trying to guess what they mean without knowing anything about those languages

You mean that they don’t have access to whole opponent behavior?

It would be hilaroius to allow table talk and see them trying to bluff and sway each other :D

thinking then, that requires the extra oxygen

can you provide more context for this claim? my intuition and experience tells me the opposite.

what is the definition here? are impulsive avoidance copings like playing a video game instead of doing the hard work of addressing the worries/planned hard activities not a “video game addiction”?

and if we are talking physical withdrawal, then how should we call the same aspect of nicotine/alcohol addiction mechanics?

there certainly is if you consider 50 moves rule.

And you can derive an easy upper bound from that as 50x8x8x2 (basically each 50 moves you make a pawn move)

if you only consider 3 moves repetition and not 50 move rule then this is harder and the number becomes one of those crazy combinatorical numbers.

in chess lingo the most common is “legal moves”

I thought “there is no chess problem that is both reachable from starting position and requires more than 218 moves to solve”

> The avoidance of the words in no way devalues the achievement.

You basically say that “there are no miracles, this is just an engineered system that we can reason about and study its parts”?

> If anything, I feel their use devalues the achievement, assigning progress to luck or providence.

Magic is not luck or providence, it is about pure appreciation of something that could have not existed, but here it is in your hands.

Yes, thanks to the effort and creativity of a lot of people, but without the “appreciating like a kid”, only dissecting the thing to “parts” might miss something. That was my point

The whole possibility of it.

If you put yourself in a position “one foot from success”, then you will be able to devalue any achievement this way.

If you see from the point of “empty universe”, you will see magic everywhere. This is the real magic.

I view this process like this: code review is a communication tool: you can discuss concrete decisions vs hand waving and explaining in the conceptual space, which of course has its place, but is limited.

But writing the whole working code just to discuss some APIs is too much and will require extra work to change if problems are surfaced on review.

So a design document is something in the middle: it should draw a line where the picture of the planned change is as clear as possible and can be communicated with shareholders.

Other possible middle grounds include PRs that don’t pass all tests or that don’t even build at all. You just have to choose the most appropriate sequence of communication tools to come to agreements in the team and come to a point where the team is on the same page on all the decisions and how the final picture looks.

Well, Oscar Wilde argues in “The Decay of Lying” that there were no stars before an artist could describe them and draw people’s attention to the night sky.

The basic assumption he attacks is that “there is a world we discover” vs “there is a world we create”.

It is hard paradigm shift, but there is certainly reality in “shared picture of the world” and convincing people of a new point of view has real implications in how the world appears in our minds for us and what we consider “reality”

But what I dont unserstand then is the spike at the end that goes away with “direct summation”, I expected there be no spike for larger files because of the prefetching.

The only explanation I see it the OS implementation then, i.e. cpu does perfect job of prefetching ram into cache, but OS does not perfect job of prefetching ssd to ram?

Wow! You probably just opened my eyes to the “spring productivity boost” pattern clearly observed in my life :)

> But yeah, if 'work' is the highest principle one has, these are just excuses for procrastination.

exactly! And even rhyming some other thread here, this might happen if “work” is procrastination for the life itself. I honestly feel myself here now: work figured out as process, but life… oh my I better go write some code.

It’s like you’re cornered: you’re like deer in the headlights concerned with “work”, if you’re not “productive”, you devalue yourself completely. It could happen if you chose work as your primary value long before you realized that the same patterns will lead you into the corner inside work itself.

It’s like running away from one world to another to another until there is no further escape. Then hopefully, you start to find the way back, because you have the Ariadne’s thread in your hands.

Good luck to us all :)

Haha, nice! My head as a programmer explodes while reading this list, because I feel like these are all reasonable assumptions and I feel how they are painfully discovered late into the implementation.

Also, feeling myself stupid very quickly. Very nice summary, bravo!

There is a lot of truth in what you’re saying I believe. At least, in the “cadence of work”. They say in the article about consistent productivity for example. But lets think about consistency and quantitative productivity (ie amount of work per day).

of course we are pressured to be “consistently highly productive”. But is it healthy and sustainable for everyone? Probably not. So I would start with “consistently bare minimum productive” and not demand more from myself. If I demand more, the “procrastination” kicks in, because my body knows that it needs rest and relaxation.

we are not robots: work for us and not we for work.

++ for the “lowest bar” and constantly negotiate with oneself on if every line is still valuable and brings profit and not despair.

Like “brush teeth”, “do nothing at all for half an hour after work” “remove trash photos for the day in the phone”, “finish working” (here I have a detailed sublist ending with “close computer lid”) “move todos I did not have time for today to tomorrow”

another cool habit is “I did list”: add items that you did that were not planned, because we sometimes forget why we did not do something “planned”, because we actually did something else important that we are just blind to when “planning”. for example, “meal”, “took some rest that I actually need”, “took out trash”, “told someone irritating to fuck off” etc etc

I came to comments to ask a question, but considering that it is two days old already, I will try to ask you in this thread.

What you think about his argument about “not being able to distinguish possible language from impossible”?

And why is it inherent in ML design?

Does he assume that there could be such an instrument/algorithm that could do that with a certainty level higher than LLM/some ml model?

I mean, certainly they can be used to make a prediction/answer to this question, but he argues that this answer has no credibility? I mean, LLM is literally a model, ie probability distribution over what is language and what is not, what gives?

Current models are probably tuned more “strictly” to follow existing languages closely, ie that will say “no-no” to some yet-unknown language, but isn’t this improvable in theory?

Or is he arguing precisely that this “exterior” is not directly correlated with “internal processes and faculties” and cannot make such predictions in principle?