Viewing profile — stevedonovan

The default model they are using for Web search is getting capable and is very visible. And now it invites people to keep asking questions. They are quietly trying to become the ch…

Hypomania is very irritating, and can actually mess up a person's life. It's a neurotic defense mechanism that's opposite to depression

You could write in the language you are most eloquent in and prompt a bot to do a faithful translation. Post both versions

Except for the power-to-weight problem. Would need very big wings!

Codex generates solid Rust in my experience. Just needs a little style guidance

It was my first taste of Swift, and has destroyed any lingering curiosity I had about it.

Yep, there's always syntax, whether it's 'friendly' or not. And it still isn't natural language, where you can paraphrase, use synonyms etc. Good job for an LLM

But are they writing? In that specific sense of high prestige communication? Sounds like stolen aura. Now, code by Gen AI is straightforward in comparison. Coding is not writing po…

"This post could have been a tweet", and so on. It's a lovely metaphor for the soulful business of doing something really well, even if there is no 'market' for that kind of qualit…

I've been getting great results from Codex. Can be a bit slow, but gets there. Writes good Rust, powers through integration test generation. So (again) we are just sharing anecdata…

Heh,I read SF as San Francisco; point remains true. Except the Valley wants to force a future, not describe it

It's not inconsistent to say there's a financial bubble and also genuinely think it's a new era for software development. There aren't enough programmers to justify the valuations …

These are a few well-chosen dependencies for a serious project. Rust projects can really go bananas on dependencies, partly because it's so easy to include them

So the cognitive reality of being a billionaire is now available to everyone?

But this is one thing that Gen AI is genuinely good at, constructing computer programs under close human supervision. It's also the most profitable (but not enough to justify valua…

So much for the old thermonuclear ramjet idea....

This is how Option works with ? in Rust. But short-circuiting in an expression does make sense

Is this not more a Cargo thing? Cargo is obsessed with correct builds and eventually the file system fills up with old artifacts. (I know, I have to declare Cargo bankruptcy every …

Ah, Elon paying attention to hid companies again! Context poisoning is not a uniquely LLM problem

I agree, it's hopelessly over-cheerful and tries to be cute. The pizza metaphor fell flat for me as well

Ah, Edge/Bing went through this phase recently. A split personality, where sensible stuff appeared on the left, and Copilot laboriously typing on the right. I disabled it, really d…

Yes, same feeling I had, but with dual mode; can be compiled as a 'standalone' service over HTTP/REST (or whatever) and _also_ compiled as a classic module with a strictly defined …

Yes, and at least StackOverflow will often give you some minority opinion, not just a snippet to be pasted into your code. Especially if something a little tricky like cryptography…

Exactly. We learn to speak our mother tongue without instruction, but need to learn to write. And what is actually happening is training in putting thoughts out in a linear fashion…

I suppose async web servers is the poster child of async, and drove a lot of the development. However, then _everything_ went async, adding the cognitive overhead of dealing with R…