Posts by ForthIsNotDead 1024 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2009
The moment you say "but only if..." you've just invalidated the whole concept of what free speech is!
There should be no limits. None. But that does _not_ mean there won't be consequences: a law suit (slander, libel), criminal charges, a punch on the nose etc.
Winblows and MacOS, yes. Linux - not in my experience. My Linux Mint install just sits there quietly and never nags me about anything. Even updates. It just lights up the updates icon. That's it. No nagging, no adverts, no AI agentic bullshit. Just... peace.
Nope. Because it wasn't necessary. I can see with own eyeballs that it works perfectly. It's a simple program that allows a user to configure devices from a configuration hosted on his PC, and squirt it into the device over a serial RS485 modbus link. It's reading/writing max 20 holding registers. This saves the user having to configure the device (or, devices) using the keypad on the device, which is a faff and error prone. I can clearly see with my own eyeballs that it works. That *is* the test. Not everything is an enterprise application. This is/was a simple quick and dirty program that I couldn't be arsed to write, because I couldn't be arsed to learn GUI frameworks.
To be honest, I really long for the days of VB6 where one could drop a few components onto a form and wire up the events. It was quick and simple. Those days are gone. Everything is 100x more complex, for absolutely no gain whatsoever.
As werdsmith said above, if you're experienced in the art, and your problem domain, you can do it better by yourself. I'm a lone, self-employed coder, I work mostly in C++ (embedded, from scratch projects). I use Co-pilot in VS Code, and I have to say, as an intellisense on steroids it's pretty amazing. It can write entire sections of code for me and be very accurate - mostly. It still needs to be read and checked by me - so it's arguable that it actually saves much time.
If you're new to a language AI can help as it will use language features and techniques that you weren't aware of.
Two weeks ago I managed to vibe code a Python application that allows settings to be read and installed over a modbus RS485 serial link. I know hardly anything about Python, and don't really have the desire to learn. I just wanted something quick. I ended with an app that works perfectly, including a user interface (using the Flet framework), ability to load/save settings to disk files, interrogate the device, push new settings etc. And it's cross platform. I didn't write a single line of code. I just 'vibed' with Claude in VS Code (I have a co-pilot subscription). The application works perfectly, and is cross platform.
Looking at the code, it seems quite good. All I know, it would have taken days, if not weeks, to learn the Flet GUI framework, not to mention how to do things 'properly' in Python. Using AI vibe coding, I got it done in a day and my client was absolutely astounded.
So yeah, it has it's uses. But if you're experienced in your language of choice, use it as a turbo-intellisense!
The Arduino acquisition has nothing at all to do with the hardware that the Arduino was built around. The ATMEGA328P was originally produced by ST Micro, and was bought by Microchip. It was a successful, respected microcontroller before Arduino came along. All Arduino did was expose that chip to the maker community.
So by all means, drop Arduino. But you don't have to stop using the 328, or the ATTINY range of MCUs. Just migrate to the VS Code IDE and install PlatformIO and you'll be completely Arduino free.
If AI is going to replace developers, then there will be no need for Github. If we can develop an app by "vibing" with an AI prompt, then why do I/we need source code repositories? There'll be no 'team' to collaborate with, therefore no need to create separate branches, no need to to create merges/pulls etc. I'll just tell the AI what changes to make, and leave it to it. What do we need Github for?
By by Github. Shotgun, meet foot.
My suspicion is that the purchase of Github was to provide a rich source code base with which to train AI. Expect the free tier of Github to be withdrawn at some point.
In the early 2000s I was working in an oil and gas field in Kazakhstan. In winter, in the dark, the temperature can easily hit -40C (Kazakhstan has the largest summer/winter temperature swing of any country in the world. -40c in winter, +40 in summer).
Anyway, I worked on the RTUs and PLCs out on the well sites, these units were obviously in enclosures, but the cold got to them. The fibre modems would regularly stop working at night, and come back on in the mornings when a little sunlight hit the steel enclosures and warmed the air inside. The Kazakh techs I worked with solved the problem. They fitted 40w domestic incandescant light bulbs to the bottom of the enclosure. The bulbs generated enough heat when the enclosure was closed to keep things just warm enough.
However, if we had to power-down an RTU things got dicey. The RTUs were rack-based, with the CPU and IO being in the form of plug-in cards onto a backplane. I would have to remove the cards and either put them in the car, or down my jacket to keep them warm, otherwise they wouldn't restart at power-up. Once restarted, they generated just enough residual heat to keep themselves running.
Fun (but cold) times. I miss the place. Jacket ---> because it's cold out there!
I've had similar experiences when asking it about electronic circuits. The more you "vibe" with it and ask it to modify its answer, or correct it, the more 'insane' it gets. It's very interesting that even with warehouses full of servers, I don't think it would pass the Turing test. You'd very soon twig that you're corresponding with a machine and not a human.
"I don't know if you're aware about what happened in Holland, where they used AI-based tools for evaluating whether or not people who were on benefits had received the right benefits, and the tools just [produced] gibberish and led people to suffer greatly. And we're just going to see more of that."
Wrong tool for the job. Who is the idiot that pitched AI as the solution to that? It's a strictly procedural problem that could (or at least, should) be solvable with nothing more than a few SQL queries.
I've found AI to be very good at getting me on the right track when I'm researching something, far faster than using Google and then trawling through a hundred pissy and sarcastic StackOverflow posts, but for the actual nitty gritty details, it's dangerously bad. I've asked it about electronic circuits, and I've found that it can get the general details pretty much spot on. So then I ask it to produce a schematic, and it's total garbage, with MOSFETS the wrong way around, spelling errors, unconnected lines etc, like it just had a mental breakdown.
Treat it like the next generation of search engines and I think it's quite useful. But don't get it to run your business for you.
Ultimately, I think we're living in a fad that will pass.
Can we just take a moment to marvel at what the Atari programmer(s) did to write a chess algorith in only 128 bytes of RAM. The code runs from ROM (4K) but working in that tight amount of RAM is a serious feat. Afterall, 64 bytes of that RAM are used to represent the chess board!
https://nanochess.org/video_chess.html
42 is just far too young. Looking at the shadowcat website, there were plenty of people who loved him and are going to miss him. I don't him, or perl, but I prefer to dwell on the positive rather than the negative. After all, who won't have ruffled a few feathers when checkout time comes? RIP. Beer for the man -->
"Perplexity suggests Comet can be used to: "summarize videos you've watched; close files and tabs you haven't touched in days; group your research tabs into collections; show you who you're meeting with;" and other sorts of online interactions."
Solutions looking for problems. If I'm in a meeting with someone, how is it I wouldn't know who they are?
Nope.
The American "solution" to this "problem" normally consists of lobbying politicians with wads of cash. That's less likely to work in Europe. Might work in the UK, but less likely to work in Europe. The rules, guidelines, and laws are there for a reason. Microsoft and others will simply have to comply without bending the rules in their favour via their chequebook.
Probably best not to review some of the source code I've written over the years. There's some fairly juicy stuff in the comments. Normally in the catch blocks of code:
/* if you get to here, you've f*****g done something really f******g stupid. You're on your own. */
etc.
Indeed. The only reason line numbers existed in BASIC was to serve as references for GOTO and GOSUB. If you ban them, then you don't need line numbers. But it's all bullshit anyway. There's nothing wrong with GOTO. It was only the snobby academic types that wanted to look superior to everyone else that had an issue with it. It was just code snobbery.
In 1991 a mate and I wrote a full management system for a nursing agency including payroll. It was written in Microsoft Quick Basic. It was used for over a decade. It was later re-written in VB6 (look ma, no line numbers!) and for all I know it's still in use!
> You do realize we're talking about a minimum cost SBC here, right? And that M.2 requires more than just the presence of the connector? And that the obvious excuse reason for not fitting a small, modestly spec'd SBC with top performance M.2 support is that your estimate of single dollarcent costs are (to put it kindly) naively optimistic?
Nope. *All* the support for NVME is *already* built in to the chipset. The only additional hardware required is the connector, *which is already laid out on the circuit board* (take a look at some of the reviews on YT where the reviewers open the machine up), and some passive components for noise reduction on the data lines - i.e. resistors, and capacitors. These are fractions of a cent. There's simply no excuse for not including it. The connector solder pads are already on the board, and the legend is already printed on the board for M.2, M.3 etc. So, they laid out all the tracks, laid out the connector, then didn't fit the connector. Why?
I'm so disappointed. I was sure this version would have M.2. I didn't buy the 400 because I was waiting for the 500 with M.2, and they still haven't put it in, despite the hardware supporting NVME. The cost of a connector is about $0.05, the additional passives probably about an $0.01 in the quantities they are manufacturing. Maybe less.
There is simply no excuse for not including M.2 on the board. I see the board has the layout for it, but the connector is missing. Jeff Gerling wasn't able to get it working, despite soldering a connector to the board.
Sorry, but without M.2 it's just a toy. Frankly, junk. Not buying. So disappointed. :-(
I upvoted you, but nah. I doubt it. Those boys are likely headed for retirement and are just hanging in there for their retirement plans. As the other poster stated, most of the real talent has probably already headed for the exits to other companies. Intel has probably gotten too big, and there's just too much internal inertia to overcome for the big talented players that want to move quickly and innovate. It happens to most companies as they turn into giant behemoths. Try suggesting a new idea at IBM, or even ARM for that matter. They don't want to hear it.
It's more complicated than that. If the organisation is using Oracle DB, then the overall JDK costs are not very significant at all as they are heavily discounted. However, if you move away from Oracle JDK, you'll suddenly find your Oracle DB costs explode. Because... Oracle. What they _should_ be doing is getting rid of both Oracle JDK and Oracle DB. But that's a much larger system migration project, and who has the balls to go there?
Agree. They were kind of a victim of the x86 instruction set and architecture. They actually did an amazing job to take it as far as they have. But the idea that a modern 2024 processor absolutely must be able to run software written in 1979 is kind of stupid. But that straitjacket wasn't really of Intel's making - it was market forces that dictated that. But now they seem to be a victim of it. Companies such as ARM and RICK V have had the benefit of a clean sheet. Intel didn't get that luxury. They did create other processors over the years that were not x86 based, but none of them gained traction.
I've been watching a developer live streaming on YouTube and he's using ChatGPT to develop all the HTML and Javascript using prompts. The correctness, and the sheer level of the AI is very impressive, but as I watch him "developing" in this way, continually refining and re-prompting endlessly, I'm yelling at the screen that he could have coded faster, a LOT faster himself - particularly as he already has an idea of what it is he wants - and he's a competent coder.
So yeah, for developing applications - rubbish - any competent person well versed in the language of choice and the problem domain can do it faster. AND you will know how the code works - you won't if you're pasting ChatGPT's code into VSCode all day.
I find it more useful for asking it to analyse a .cpp file or a function and ask it for suggestions for improvements. It will often make excellent suggestions, maybe offering more idiomatic ways of doing something, and I learn new techniques in the process.
Pretty much identical for me.
My maths teacher and I bonded at school (I hated him!) when he read the Z80 machine code snippets I had been writing in the back of my maths book to do screen scrolling and the like! We began swapping tips and tricks. Next thing I knew I had unlimited access to the school's computer room - BBC model B's, PETs, C64's, and a couple of Speccy's and ZX81s!
My love for computing crystalized because of BASIC programming. Being able to give the computer instructions and watch it execute and obey them was the greatest feeling.
Molten salt reactors are inherently much safer, and less damaging in the long term. I'm hoping recent strides in MSR technology will enable their use in this type of application. I'm somewhat disappointed to read that they're wanting to restart old 'legacy' reactors, even if they have undergone upgrades.
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