Re: America
OK downvoters, let's hear from you.
Or are you the sort of cowards that catcall from the back without owning your idiocy ?
2316 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2009
That's how programming already works. We write a functional description (we call it the spec), then we write a procedural description (we call it the code) then machines write a register-level description (we call it the executable).
In general, the functional description is incomplete and the programmer makes a bunch of judgement calls to turn it into a procedural description. This results in bugs. You can significantly reduce the number of bugs by having a more thorough functional description, but the people who write those aren't generally capable of doing better, which is why they don't.
Having AI do the procedural 'compilation' puts the onus on the functional spec writer to write a good spec. That's not going to happen.
He says 30% of the code in the repos, He doesn't say where those repos are against the product release.
It will be interesting to see how buggy the next release is.
He also doesn't indicate how that code gets in the repo, but implies the statistic is from committer status. So if he's got 30% of his repos due to uncurated AI commits the next release is going to be .. interesting. I'd hope for his sake that all the commits were made by humans, after testing, and 30% is the proportion that used AI assistance on the changes.
I don't see how you can call the change from 8 to 10 a success.
10 is a mess - the incoherent dual PC/tablet interface, the badly laid out and cluttered menus, the confusing and incomplete settings route.
I don't understand why anyone would want to keep hold of it, other than because 11 is still worse for data farming.
But if you're a windows user you've already sold your soul. Nothing left to lose and at at least the visual design isn't quite so randomly awful.
There's another aspect that the goths of dark mode don't seem to appreciate.
Bright devices can be hard on your eyes, true. But your eyes are equipped with pupils, which will automatically arrange for the overall brightness to be tolerable.And these enact something photographers know as aperture. So if you have a dark screen and low ambient lighting, your pupils will open up : a smaller f-number. And that reduces your depth of field, making focus difficult and small text harder to read.
What you want for easily readable text and low eyestrain is a bright (black on white) screen and bright ambient lighting. Your pupils will reduce the overall brightness to a tolerable level and give you a greater depth of field. And as a bonus, you'll also be able to see other things in the room more easily, such as text on paper or small subassemblies and will spend less timer refocussing.
I have shelves of HP equipment. It's lovely stuff. The later bits are called Agilent. I haven't got anything called Keysight.
I did have an HP printer but it broke, so I replaced it with a Brother.
I still have an HP computer. It's much, much quieter than the equivalent Dell. Getting a bit old though. Not sure what to replace it with. Maybe it's still worth buying their ex-corporate systems - perhaps a Z600 or Z800. Would't waste my time on their laptops.
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"We need to rewrite it in Rust. It will solve all our problems and we will be able to hire cheaper developers because Rust doesn't allow to make any mistakes that will impact security".
Well said.
I have no doubt that the writers of Rust have the best of intentions. But they probably write good C code too and don't make rookie errors already. The worry is the fanbois manager who thinks it will solve all those memory allocation bugs he's suffered from his inexperienced C programmers.
And again, while the Rust devotees are likely careful souls who'll think about all the other issues too, someone pushed into using it because it will make them more reliable doesn't have the same attitiude - they'll use whatever hack is needed to get their code to compile.
Clue : inexperienced programmers will make mistakes in any language.
Not just The Register.
I don't get the antipathy toward EVs. There's a certain fraction of people who look for problems rather than solutions. It's clear they're largely justifying their prejudice rather than honestly analysing. ICEs have many problems too and I for one will be very glad to see the back of mine.
Sure, a significant change to EVs will present challenges. So rather than gripe and moan, why not look for solutions ? That's what proper engineers do.
But while a child's essay, which has no publication or circulation may not acknowledge its sources, a student's essay must. In fact, the essay becomes more valuable by doing so, since attribution allows the following of references and additional detail.
An AI that produces text without references is of little value : it's just boilerplate and the wide occurrence of hallucinations devalues it.
What the LLM needs to do is tag its sources so it can show attribution and produce a more useful document. But that's hard to do, because it doesn't select arguments meaningfully, it just makes a word soup and statistically selects content from it.
I'm not very fond of the copyright industry and the abuse by companies like Elsevier. But when AI understands and implements respect of copyright, it will be a lot more valuable.
Although that sounds unfortunate, what alternative is there ?
If government paid for it, that means taxpayers. So .. everybody, whether they frequently buy appliances or not.
The ideal solution would be to finance the collection and recycling costs using the recycled objects. I have no idea whether that's economically viable.
"The powers that be are sold on the idea that AI can magically solve all this."
And this is the danger of the waves of AI-like systems. Stupid politicians believing it can magically solve problems when all it can do is magically create new ones.
What we need is magical AI politicians, carefully safeguarded by giving them neither power nor platforms.
I don't have much regard for Python but I thought it was popular because of the wide library support. Kids don't come with BBC BASIC wired in from the womb - they've still got to start by copying from somewhere else, modifying, and then writing from scratch. Maybe some pythonista here could illustrate what you'd need to type in (or, of course, save from a web page) to do something moderately interesting.
I presume there's a clone of BBC BASIC available too .. it's only a clicky link away, isn't ? Kids are used to that from their phone. And then there's stuff like Scratch.
I agree there's a lot more going on to get started but I don't think the new user sees much of it. The only difference is that there are more choices, and that's really down to the school setup.
I think administration for school computers is largely outsourced to the local authority and they'll be just as familiar with Pis as Windows, if not more. It's quite a few years since Pi appeared and it'#s only got better, while all Windows has done is eat up the resources of increasingly powerful PCs.
What's the refresh period for school PCs, anyway ? I suspect more than the 2-3 years that businesses need to keep them usable. In fact, it could be surprisingly close to the refresh period of the Pis themselves.
I haven't so far had the nag screen on Brave.
However I do have two other problems :
- Watching youtube in a Patreon window doesn't play. The cursor moves but the picture doesn't, and there's no sound.
- Following the link to watch on youtube works fine
- Watching youtube via a hackaday article gives a black screen
- Following the link from the hackaday article tells me the viseo is blocked
- Finding the video directly on youtube works fine.
I don't know whether this is a problem with Brave or youtube.