TehPers

For learning new languages, LLMs often default to some specific level of formality that doesn’t apply to all scenarios, so using it as an aid might be helpful but it can’t wholly replace lessons.

This comes up with Japanese as well apparently. My partner sometimes uses ChatGPT to practice new languages, but it defaults to a more formal form than you’d probably use with friends. Not a huge issue, but just be aware you’ll need something else if you want to properly learn and not just practice a little.

I keep trying to manually write code that I’m proud of, but I can’t. Everything always needs to be shipped fast and I need to move on to the next thing. I can’t even catch my breath. The only thing allowing me to keep up with the team is Cursor, because they all use it as well. The last guy that refused to use AI was just excluded from the team.

This is the problem. It’s not new that a company rushes its devs to deliver new features at a pace that results in garbage code. What’s new is that devs who are willing to can deliver those features fast using a LLM. This obviously looks great to the imbecilic C-suites. Deliver features fast, get to market quickly, and spend less on devs!

This is just short-term thinking, and it looks like you’ve noticed this. The team you’re on won’t change because the culture at your company is to deliver the next feature ASAP and focus on the short term. This is common with startups, for example, because it’s a constant race to get more funding. However, it always results in some half-assed product that inevitably needs to be rewritten at some point. With LLMs now, you’ll also have a team of people who don’t even understand their own code, making it take even longer to fix things or rewrite it later.

Anyway, if you hate it, start applying places now. At least in the US (where I am), the job market is ass. The more time you give yourself to search, the better the chance is that you’ll find an option you like.

Infinite scroll is scarcely ever used in a good way

Just to clarify, we’re only talking about mainstream social media here, right? Those are the only platforms they’re considering here, and more specifically, only TikTok right now.

“Infinite scroll” is also how you can scroll up in your chat log and see more messages. It’s how you can open logs for a VM online and see logs going further and further back. It’s how you can search for a video on YouTube and keep scrolling down (past the inevitable pile of shit) until you find it.

On social media platforms, and in particular not in a chat interface, it can be toxic.

You can’t really ban dark patterns even though we all agree they suck.

I think the point I was getting at was that a lot of things dark patterns do are individually things that have the potential for good or bad. Infinite scroll is one example. There’s also modals, sale banners, and so on.

What makes a dark pattern dark isn’t the specific, individual tools at use. It’s the sum of those, plus the intent.

Doesn’t look like this extends beyond TikTok, or at least mainstream social media as a whole.

Infinite scroll itself isn’t really a problem. It’s just one of the many tools used to keep users engaged on these platforms specifically by removing an interruption from the experience, but isn’t sufficient on its own to create that unhealthy behavior. It’s also used in healthier ways, like search results, chat logs, and so on.

The EU attempting to rein in these platforms’ control over its users will be interesting to watch. There are decades of research these companies have done on user psychology to maximize their capture of the user’s attention. Forcing them not to use all the tools they developed might result in people breaking out of the cycle of endlessly scrolling. Or it might just annoy users. I don’t know which will happen.

My favorite meeting is my 8am standup that’s scheduled for 30 minutes and averages an hour. It really makes sure I have no energy to do anything else that day. Except it’s every day. And most updates are “no updates” with extra words to make it sound like people are doing stuff.

If you’re writing a script that’s more than 269 lines long, you shouldn’t be using Bash.

Jokes aside, the point isn’t the lines of code. It’s complexity. Higher level languages can reduce complexity with tasks by having better tools for more complex logic. What could be one line of code in Python can be dozens in Bash (or a long, convoluted pipeline consisting of awk and sed, which I usually just glaze over at that point). Using other languages means better access to dev tools, like tools for testing, linting, and formatting the scripts.

While I’m not really a fan of hostility, it annoys me a lot when I see these massive Bash scripts at work. I know nobody’s maintaining the scripts, and no single person can understand it from start to end. When it inevitably starts to fail, debugging them is a nightmare, and trying to add to it ends up with constantly looking up the syntax specific commands/programs want. Using a higher level language at least makes the scripts more maintainable later on.

Haven’t looked at hexbears in months, but this feels like the kind of stuff that crowd would be spouting unironically.

There’s a saying out there about the relationship between perfect and good, but in this case, it’s a matter of lesser evils. In either case, going in the wrong direction won’t bring us closer to where we want to be.

Next they’ll be ordered to provide them with valuable food and water that could be going towards our nation’s hardworking, law-abiding citizens. Disgusting.

(/s)

Is this a link to an article? If so, I’m not seeing the link.

If not, I’m confused what I’m supposed to get from this post.

In addition to this, not really first aid and probably obvious, but a fire extinguisher.

EDIT: briefly searching indicates it’s common in South Korea too. Not sure if it’s just more common in Asia right now or what. Seems like most of the articles about the West I’m finding are about cameras in bathrooms and shit (not that that’s better…).

It can (and does) happen in all countries. For whatever reason though, it seems to be more common in eastern Asia, from what I’ve seen anyway.

If this bothers you (and it probably should), then you should really check every hotel room you stay in, regardless of country. It usually just takes a few minutes when you get into the room, plus you can check for bed bugs while you’re at it.

You can learn Rust whenever you want. There’s no rule that you must learn anything (including C) before learning Rust. Of course, knowing C will make the basic concepts, especially around memory management, a lot simpler.

If your goal is to eventually learn Rust, your next rabbit hole should be the book ideally. If you prefer a video format, I don’t have any specific suggestions since I don’t learn through videos usually, but I know there’s some good video resources on YouTube.

But this latest example of corruption involving Trump and his family business hardly made a blip over the past few days, relegated to a passing headline in a relentless news cycle often dominated by Trump’s actions and statements.

Well no shit. We see stuff just as bad, if not worse, on a daily basis.

The reality is that his fucking cult doesn’t care.

Moreover, you cannot say compilers are deterministic. There are situations where they are not (at least for the user).

https://krystalgamer.github.io/high-level-game-patches/

I’m not following. Which part of this is nondeterministic?

The language being complicated to write and the compiler being confusing to use isn’t an indicator of determinism. If GCC were truly nondeterministic, that’d be a pretty major bug.

Also, note that I mentioned that the output behavior is deterministic. I’m not referring to reproducible builds, just that it always produces code that does what the source specifies (in this case according to a spec).

Their justification was to improve security for extensions, and while it did do that, it also crippled adblockers in their first iterations, and it was clear that was a goal initially.

MV3 went through revisions after significant pushback. Of course it’s not as bad as people were worried about. They changed it lol.

My heart goes out to the families of those he’s killed.

The library is two text files (code) that are processed by an LLM (interpreter) to generate code of another type. This is not that new in terms of workflow.

I think what makes this the worst is the fact that the author admits that you can’t be sure the library will work until you generate the code and test it. Even then you cannot guarantee the security of the generated code and as you do not understand the code you also cannot give support or patch it.

I’ve tried explaining how LLMs are not equatable to compilers/interpreters in the past, and it’s usually to people who aren’t in software roles. What it usually comes down to when I try to explain it is determinism. A compiler or interpreter deterministically produces code with some kind of behavior (defined by the source code). They often are developed to a spec, and the output doing the wrong thing is a bug. LLMs producing the wrong output is a feature. It’s not something you try to fix, and something you often can’t fix.

This, of course, ignores a lot of “lower level” optimizations someone can make about specific algorithms or data structures. I use “lower level” in quotes, of course, because those are some of the most important decisions you can make while writing code, but turning off your brain and letting a LLM do it for you “abstracts” those decisions away to a random number generator.

On the oven, I’ll use the clock to see how long something has been baking for without pulling up my phone. Otherwise, the time it says doesn’t mean much to me.

I’d rather just see a stopwatch-style function on it. Ovens usually have timers already, but sometimes it’s nice to just manually track it, especially if you have to pull the food out to flip it or something mid-way.