Comment Re:AI (Score 1) 109
Here's some example code of a "wrong" program that is 100% valid:
int sum_two_numbers(int a, int b)
{
return a-b;
}
Here's some example code of a "wrong" program that is 100% valid:
int sum_two_numbers(int a, int b)
{
return a-b;
}
That's why you keep the field small. Handle one kind of error at a time. Have it debug every change and look again for more errors. Loop this until it can't find any. Get it to report exactly what it did in words and confirm it looks reasonable to you. Loop again if it isn't reasonable. That is way faster than doing it manually.
Is it faster? It sounds really tedious and error-prone to me. If someone were to suggest I quit writing code and instead spend the rest of my career supervising the intern as he writes code for me to review and correct, I'd feel the same way about that.
Sometimes I wake up and start doing new science. But usually I just roll over and go back to sleep.
pay for access to insider(outsider?) trading info?
He's creating a "middle class" - they will get the info after the regular insiders, but before hoi polloi.
He should have thought of selling multiple levels of higher tiers.
The whole effort of design of software systems is ultimately the effective management of complexity. Complexity of features that provide real world value is the developers problem to manage. If "technical debt just keeps compounding" it is probably best to find a better developer.
I love scapegoating individual developers as much as the next guy, but if you take a look at the Win32 API, you'll find loads of fun "features" such as:
- Every single function that takes a string has two implementations: one that ends with the letter A (and takes its strings as ASCII) and one that ends with the letter W (and takes its strings as UCS-16). And then it has a preprocessor-define (with no suffix) that gets expanded to either one implementation or the other, based on your compiler settings.
- windows.h defines preprocessor-tokens for min() and max(), which means any C++ program that ever calls std::min() or std::max() will error out with a very strange compile-time error, if it included windows.h first; the work-around is to define NOMINMAX first to prevent windows.h from polluting the namespace.
- Modern windows is perfectly capable of arbitrary-length file-paths, but ships by default with a 260-character filepath limit anyway, "to preserve backwards compatibility with older software that expects that limitation to be enforced". To get correct behavior you have to hand-modify your registry; otherwise you find out about this limitation when you go to unzip a
These are all defects that other OS's simply don't suffer from, either because the other OS's were designed correctly from the beginning, or because the people in charge of the other OS's long ago took the hit (in short-term breakage) and fixed the problems rather than letting them linger forever to preserve backwards compatibility.
All Windows developers (good and bad) have to deal with these issues, probably forever, and every line of code they add to work around these problems has to be supported and debugged and tested as well, hence the damage compounds.
That is, isn't this illegal? Or is it just that no other presidency thought of doing this particular cash grab?
Before Trump, it was a cultural norm that a President of the United States was expected to follow ethical and moral guidelines as well as laws; not only because anything less would be dishonorable and a disservice to his country, but also because otherwise he would pay a steep political price for his unethical behavior. Trump's most significant political innovation has taken the form of figuring out how to convince a plurality of the American public that the only real standard for Presidential behavior is "whatever you can get away with".
For a small fee you can get your bullshit before everyone else.
Imagine it's ten years from now, and for $199 anyone can buy an in-home UPS from Home Depot with enough capacity to keep their lights on and their ice cream frozen for 48 hours. Once most houses have one of those, most power outages become more of a minor nuisance than a significant problem.
Part of it may be a dysfunctional corporate culture, but a lot of it is a consequence of Microsoft's business decision to maintain backwards compatibility at all costs. When you're committed to retaining every design mistake, forever, the complexity of the codebase just keeps rising, which means that less and less of it can fit into anyone's mind at one time, which means more mistakes are made going forward, and the technical debt just keeps compounding.
I should have added:
"In general, renaming things does not fix a problem."
Though heaven knows, lots of stupid people try it.
Why not just discard the whole idea of DST instead of putting it into permanent effect?
The whole concept is an attempt to redefine time as a way of addressing perceived social problems. Schedule activities around the clock, not the clock around activities.
Not surprised that someone exploited a vulnerability, but surprised that deployed military personnel are allowed to use civilian communication systems.
OpenAI envisions the device anticipating needs, surfacing information proactively and serving as an expert on its user, they said.
Will it have a Genuine People Personality? Perhaps a cheerful and sunny disposition?
I think they feel it would be more like humans communicate. But humans invented blackboards and certainly found them useful to improve communication.
Perhaps the real problem is that there is simply no reliable way to tell a real human's post from a generative AI's post anymore, since by the AIs are trained on the posts of real humans and are asymptotically becoming indistinguishable from them. You certainly can't simply go by post-quality, since the some of the smarter bots are better posters than some of the, err, less-well-informed humans.
Because of that, it's hard to feel good about putting any real effort into a social media conversation, because in the back of your mind you're always wondering: am I engaged in any kind of constructive activity here, or am I just unknowingly humping a rubber doll that Zuckerberg (or somebody) has provided for my amusement?
It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one. -- Phil White