Posts by Someone Else 4146 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Dec 2009
The best hope is that he croaks from whatever is fattening his cankles, requiring MRIs, additional "checkups", regular IVs that bruise his hand, make him constantly fall asleep during the day even during public appearances, and leaving him even more incoherent than he normally is.
In other words: Terminal tRumpism
"Why can’t we read code like a book? We believe that software should be legible and written in terms of our understanding: our hope is that concepts map to familiar phenomena, and synchronizations represent our intuition about what happens when they come together," Meng said in an MIT post about the work.
Let me take a whack at a few points about this:
1) Because, in general, software doesn't work like a book. A book (some abstruse reference manuals notwithstanding), is designed to be read linearly from front to back, with the expectation that at the end, the story being conveyed is "done". The overwhelming majority of software is not run so linearly, what with event driven designs, threading, message loops, real-time interrupt handling, and all the other accoutrements that make today's software what it is (or isn't, but wants to be). And a lot of software isn't designed to end.
2) "You can write FORTRAN in any language".† And most "practitioners" do, indeed. So LLMs will, naturally, gravitate toward propagating that same anti-approach to the software that it vomits out generates. After all, that's what it knows.
† "...but if you write FORTRAN in javascript/typescript, you've actually improved it."
That’s why in software engineering specification and design are emphasized…
...but inconsistently...and rarely...followed. Hence, "vibe coding"; the high-speed, 21st-century equivalent of "fuck design...just code it already!"
I once worked at a place where, in the middle of a developer's meeting where we were trying to design our way out of a thorny issue, the marketing git who was attending the meeting (for no apparent reason, other than he was nosey mo'fut) stood up and loudly exclaimed," I am so tired of hearing about your design problems! just start writing code. I want less yack, and more hack!. This is the level of wanker to which "vibe coding" is targeted. (BTW, we summarily kicked him out of our meeting, and proceeded to spend the next hour designing a working solution to the issue.)
If you want to know how it's solved download LibreOffice from the project's download site and run the installer on it.
The only reason I ventured into the world of Flatpack ("The world is flat, I tell ya!!") is because I couldn't download a LibreOffice update from the project's download site (or via the automatic updates). I got some indecipherable gibberish that passed for an error message (probably my fault because I hadn't drunk enough Kool-Aid and other magic potions to have been fully indoctrinated into the underlayers of Linux to decode them into proper action to fix the problem). But...the flatpack install for LO worked. Yeah, there were duplicate icons on the start menu (easily deleted), and the automatic updates would continue to fail until I learned to tell the automatic updates not to try to update LibreOffice. Those went away when Linux Mint "officially" embraced flatpack.
LO is still the only flatpack on my system. But it updates easily, and generally stays out of the way. So what's not to like?
No, the USA (read: the current so-called "leaders" of the USA political machinery) think that in order to retain control of said machinery, they must foment division, and the most expedient mechanism to do that is to create an "us-vs-them" mentality; that is, to create hate between groups that would not ordinarily hate each other.
Make America Hate Again!
And by the way, don't ascribe to USAians as a whole what its putative "leaders" promote. tRump and his MAGAt minions are a minority here.
Together with ABB Robotics, we will unite world-class technology and talent under our shared vision to fuse Artificial Super Intelligence and robotics – driving a groundbreaking evolution that will propel humanity forward,"
And right over the edge.
Seem to recall a Disney movie with the same motif...
Had one such message in an embedded system created back in the early 80's. At a point in the home-brew task scheduler we created, there was an error message we created at the end of a rather complex if-else if cascade that read "Death by <redacted>"* which would scroll across the 8-character 7-segment LED display of the device. We tested the living snot out of it, and were convinced that the conditions that would raise this message really could not happen.
Enter Murphy's Law of Demos.
A potential customer came into the office to get a demo of a beta version of the device. We ran it through its paces, and all went surprisingly well. Up to, of course, the final act of the demo, where, this message started to scroll across the screen. The potential customer had looked away as the message started scrolling, and when we saw the message start, we surreptitiously and quickly rebooted the machine, deftly explaining away the reboot as the result of an odd previously identified beta problem that would not occur in the actual release. The potential customer was satisfied with the explanation, and IIRC, ordered several of the devices.
Naturally, we were subsequently unable to re-create the problem. But, we came to understand that there is not such thing as an "impossible" error, and rewrote the error message to be more "customer friendly". Don't think that the message (in any form) ever did show up on production boxes.
*"Death by <redacted>" was the punchline of a particularly racist, homophobic joke that made the rounds of our dev team at that particular point in time. This was the 80's, and such stuff was tolerated back then (as was smoking in the office...). Nowadays, one could get summarily dismissed for circulating such stuff around the office. So I won't.... (Hence, the redaction.)
Did the same on an old (read: old) IBM PC-AT. Actually picked a character position in the upper-left corner of the screen, and changed the background color of that location, cycling through the 16 (er...20, counting the 4 grayscale colors) every so often (probably every clock tick...too long ago to remember the details). If the corner of the screen was flashing about, all was well...
Might this finally be the point in which an entity stands up to the Orange-utan, hands it a hammer, and points it to the beach.
/me is no fan of Micros~1, but were they to do that, my opinion of them would change for the better. Bigly.
And as for Laura Loomer, she needs to go suck on a wooden dowel.
The big problem I have with pretty much all of the reasons why RTO could be seen as a good thing, is that they're pretty much all entirely unrelated to how successful the company is overall, or how attractive it is to work for - i.e. in my opinion (backed up by my own experiences of working through the pandemic and now being back in the office part time) RTO isn't something that's automatically a good thing either for the individual worker or for the company overall, yet RTO edicts tend to try and make out that it's a good thing for all involved, glossing over the negatives rather than admitting it's not all good.
Thus is it ever with marketing bullshit. Which, at the end of the day, is all an RTO edict ever is.
Reminds me of one of my favorite M*A*S*H episodes.
A missile fell into the Hospital compound. It was a US missile and a dud. The hospital team wanted it to be disarmed, but the nearest team that could do it was days away. The doctors figured that, "We are surgeons, how hard could it be"? So with the manual, they started step-by-step disarming the weapon. They opened the hatch, identified the arming wire. With Trapper John reading the manual, and Hawkeye wielding the tools, the key dialog went along these lines:
Trapper: "Next, cut the red wire."
Hawkeye: (repeating) "Cut the red wire." <snip>
Trapper: (flipping the page of the manual) "But first..."
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