Viewing profile — simondotau

Fewer car accident deaths, leading to more elderly people, which inevitably means a higher population of people with Alzheimers. (Unless people highly predisposed to dying in car a…

The answer is no. Hubble's visible-light resolution is about 0.05 arcseconds, which translates to 90 metres per pixel, far too large to make out anything that's "merely" bus sized.…

Astronaut 1: “Wait, the lunar landing system is just gravity?” Astronaut 2: “Always has been.”

How is it notable? Apple’s complaint is that these are corporate secrets. If it wasn’t secret, there would be no case.

Sure, but if I'm going to prompt an AI anyway, I might as well ask it to write a convincing paragraph too.

OpenAI knows that the court of public opinion is more dangerous than a fine from a real court.

Correct, because other companies are not in a position to certify the security of iCloud meeting their own standards. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple trusts Apple more than…

The parent comment is now YouTube famous, and apparently represents the entire Hacker News zeitgeist. Reading replies to this article, it seems... like a slight exaggeration? https…

> Because reliably confirming that your code work I can't reliably confirm that you read my post all the way to the end. I pointed out multiple ways where tests are proven. One is …

In my current workflow, I've settled into a three tier system when coding: 1. HIGH-VALUE CODE: I write it all myself. I will occasionally use AI for mostly mechanical changes, like…

"I've been asked to confirm that our random number generator satisfies section 14 of the Foo-Bar Accord of 2021. I'm fairly certain it does, and that foorandom.c is a good choice. …

I don't know what the opposite of rose-tinted glasses are, but I think the article paints a misleading picture by leaving unstated how polished 10.5.8 wasn't. Sure 10.6.0 had some …

Until recently, no reasonable person ever expected a major new OS release to be rock solid before its first major point-release. And actually nothing has changed, except that what …

That wasn't the question though. Being able to say it today doesn't mean you will be able to say it in 10 years. Companies which lose their way sometimes rediscover themselves. One…

What do you think about Linus Torvalds' recent opinion about LLMs? There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it …

Does the Linux kernel qualify as trivial shit?

Saying that AI is bad for code is like saying a Porsche is bad for driving, without considering that maybe the driver is the one that sucks. It sounds like your co-workers suck.

I would rather have the real chicken aroma in the stock liquid, and I consider bland meat a sign of a successful extraction. Why would I want to stop that happening? I find that tr…

My five-year-old Breville Fast Slow Pro has a menu setting for making stock under pressure, and follows the formula Chris Young describes precisely. 60 minute cook time with slow s…

It’s not that a car needs to be clean per se, but you don’t want prospective owners to be distracted by thoughts of the past life the car has had in the care of another human. Nobo…

> A Macintosh Plus was only affordable ... Exactly my point. Thank you. Computers are so much more affordable now. The remainder of your post seems to be about me mentioning the Ne…

In terms of software, commercial quality software is now often free and/or open source. Maybe the best application software is still expensive, but free software is better than any…

Which is fair, if FileMaker existed in a vacuum. The inflation-adjusted cost of software and hardware has consistently trended downwards over the past 40 years.

You are saying that LLMs have not meaningfully improved since 2023? If you want me to take that claim seriously, you will need to do more than merely assert it. I am not a mind-rea…

Whatever the decision is today, it's going to become utterly moot within a decade or so. Think about how far we've come over the past three years. Programming with AI in ten years …