Viewing profile — fire_lake

Most developers use languages that lack expressivity. LLMs allow them to generate the text faster, bringing it closer to the speed of thought.

Which also fits with how it performs at software engineering (in my experience). Great at boilerplate code, tests, simple tutorials, common puzzles but bad at novel and complex thi…

Please move out of the territory of grammar to make room for AI

The problem is potential residents don’t get a say - only the incumbents. The only solution is national level housing policy.

> Users expect near-native responsiveness, even when offline Do they? I think users are amazed if anything works without internet with modern applications.

There is an F# implementation (Microsoft flavoured ML) called DiffSharp

The post developer era will be the post white collar era. Surely the level of intellectual difficulty in software engineering is similar to practicing law, medicine, banking… ?

> For example, navigating the complexities of legacy systems and workflows and human interactions needed to keep things working. Well this sounds delightful! Glad to be free of the…

TDD is opposed to suffering orientated programming IMO. What pain does writing the tests first resolve? Tests should only be added when you are scared of making changes or want to …

I have seen this first hand with Bazel. You have lots of Bazel rules that are partial reimplementations of the language specific tooling. It usually works better - until you hit a …

Probably means a lack of out of the box rulesets. Writing your own rules to use a build system for a typical project is an unrealistic ask, IMO.

Not a search engineer, but wouldn’t a cache lookup to a previous LLM result be faster than a conventional free text search over the indexed websites? Seems like this could save mon…

Massive search overlap though - and some questions (like the golf ball puzzle) can be cached for a long time.

This is too simple. Prices float somewhere between cost to produce and value to consumers. You can’t raise prices beyond value or no one will buy it. You can’t lower prices below c…

What if people are manipulated by bot farms and think tanks and talking points supported by those corporations? I think this view of humans - that they look at all the available in…

If you genuinely believe this, why on earth would you work for OpenAI etc even in safety / alignment? The only response in my view is to ban technology (like in Dune) or engage in …

> OpenBrain still keeps its human engineers on staff, because they have complementary skills needed to manage the teams of Agent-3 copies Yeah, sure they do. Everyone seems to thin…

Are you less productive though? Businesses ultimately only care about what gets shipped.

Pythons approach to variable declarations makes this doubly bad.

> How so? Well I don’t know what issue you have with whitespace, but the usual complaint is that programs with small typos are syntactically valid but logically incorrect. This is …

Static typing removes the downside of whitespace. Oh, and every language with line comments (so most of them) has significant whitespace.

People really like their early return statements however.

And they still haven’t! Although expressions over statements would be a breaking change - I can’t see any mainstream language making this switch.

Old buildings are often stronger because they didn’t have the modelling and precision manufacturing required to make them to an exact standard - instead they were overbuilt.