Major standard library changes in Go 1.20 • Hacker News Board

Re: Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

#21

Post by tptacek » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:43 AM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #2

Just when you think you have The Best Way of handling errors in Go figured out, they add yet another paradigm. Is a shared err type package on the way out? I use it to bubble up HTTP status codes consistently, is there a better way? Should you always use sentinel errors?

This is the same way of handling errors Go has always had. The point of Go errors is that they're just values; you program them like you would anything else. People have had multi-error packages for years, and Go encouraged it. Now there's a standard one.

Re: Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

#22

Post by Waterluvian » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:46 AM UTC

eternalban wrote: post #18

politician wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the difference that the model lacks conviction, and indeed cannot have a belief in the accuracy of its own statements? I’ve seen conversations where it was told to believe that 1+19 did not equal 20. Where it was told it’s identity was Gepetto and not ChatGPT. The model acquiesces to these demands, not because it chooses to do so, but because it implicitly trusts the authority of its prompts (because what else…

Drugs. Hypnosis. .. There are various ways to "jailbreak" minds. So being able to control and direct a mind is not a criteria for discriminating between mechanism and a savant. What most people dance around regarding AI is the matter of the soul . Soul is precisely that ineffable indescribable but clearly universally experienced human phenomena (as far as we know) and it is this soul that is doing the thinking . And…

This basically touches on that whole “you can’t ever tell people aren’t philosophical zombies. You just feel you aren’t one and will accept they aren’t either.”

Re: Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

#23

Post by giraffe_lady » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:51 AM UTC

logicallee wrote: post #9

politician wrote: post #6

[flagged]

For your information, I understand what is meant by stochastic parrot, but after interacting with ChatGPT quite a bit it is clear to me it is doing real thinking. One way you can verify this is to ask for its opinion about novel things, for example you can invent something new and ask its ideas about it. It will give genuine feedback that shows understanding and does not show parroting behavior. Soon you will be able…

Damn that's chilling. Feel like I just watched a new religion be born in front of my eyes.

Re: Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

#24

Post by gregwebs » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:19 AM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #2

Just when you think you have The Best Way of handling errors in Go figured out, they add yet another paradigm. Is a shared err type package on the way out? I use it to bubble up HTTP status codes consistently, is there a better way? Should you always use sentinel errors?

I wrote a package to attach codes to errors via wrapping rather than a shared error type: https://github.com/gregwebs/errcode

Re: Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

#25

Post by astrange » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:27 AM UTC

Adding manual arena memory management seems like a weird choice for a supposedly memory-safe and GC'd language where this is supposed to be an implementation issue.

I mean, you should hear the screams from Rust/Go people about how bad C is, and now you're just going to do it?

Re: Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

#26

Post by astrange » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:27 AM UTC

eternalban wrote: post #18

politician wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the difference that the model lacks conviction, and indeed cannot have a belief in the accuracy of its own statements? I’ve seen conversations where it was told to believe that 1+19 did not equal 20. Where it was told it’s identity was Gepetto and not ChatGPT. The model acquiesces to these demands, not because it chooses to do so, but because it implicitly trusts the authority of its prompts (because what else…

Drugs. Hypnosis. .. There are various ways to "jailbreak" minds. So being able to control and direct a mind is not a criteria for discriminating between mechanism and a savant. What most people dance around regarding AI is the matter of the soul . Soul is precisely that ineffable indescribable but clearly universally experienced human phenomena (as far as we know) and it is this soul that is doing the thinking . And…

You can't actually brainwash people IRL.

You can convince them of things, but you can do that without drugging them.

Re: Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

#27

Post by astrange » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:28 AM UTC

cpleppert wrote: post #15

logicallee wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your information, I understand what is meant by stochastic parrot, but after interacting with ChatGPT quite a bit it is clear to me it is doing real thinking. One way you can verify this is to ask for its opinion about novel things, for example you can invent something new and ask its ideas about it. It will give genuine feedback that shows understanding and does not show parroting behavior. Soon you will be able…

"I do not possess the ability to generate novel thoughts. My responses are based on patterns and associations in the data that has been input into my system during training. I can generate text that may appear to be original, but it is based on the patterns and associations in the data I've been trained on. My main function is to process and understand text, not to think or have beliefs, so any claim that I can think…

Yeah, but that answer is wrong. "Novel thoughts" are "based on data you've been trained on". Certainly the expression of them is based on language you've already learned.

Any time anything prints text that hasn't existed before it's had a novel thought. Panpsychism is correct!

Re: Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

#28

Post by shepherdjerred » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:31 AM UTC

cpleppert wrote: post #15

logicallee wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your information, I understand what is meant by stochastic parrot, but after interacting with ChatGPT quite a bit it is clear to me it is doing real thinking. One way you can verify this is to ask for its opinion about novel things, for example you can invent something new and ask its ideas about it. It will give genuine feedback that shows understanding and does not show parroting behavior. Soon you will be able…

"I do not possess the ability to generate novel thoughts. My responses are based on patterns and associations in the data that has been input into my system during training. I can generate text that may appear to be original, but it is based on the patterns and associations in the data I've been trained on. My main function is to process and understand text, not to think or have beliefs, so any claim that I can think…

> My responses are based on patterns and associations in the data that has been input into my system during training.

How is this different from a human, aside from humans having a vastly larger training set?

Re: Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

#29

Post by slimsag » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:37 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #25

Adding manual arena memory management seems like a weird choice for a supposedly memory-safe and GC'd language where this is supposed to be an implementation issue. I mean, you should hear the screams from Rust/Go people about how bad C is, and now you're just going to do it?

> now you're just going to do it?

"you can’t import it by default", "you probably shouldn’t be using it at all", "experimental arena package", and 'you must opt-in to even be able to use it via an GOEXPERIMENT environment variable'

As for screams from Rust/Go people about how bad C is, it said:

> This is highly efficient, but also highly dangerous. What if the programmer makes a mistake [...] > > To mitigate the risk of these kinds of bugs, the arena package will deliberately cause a panic if can detect someone reusing memory after it has been freed.

and goes on to explain that each arena has its own unique/distinct address space, so that if a pointer to an object still exists and is dereference it will get a memory access fault, causing the Go program to terminate, with an error message specifying that arena as the cause of the problem.

Sounds like a pretty reasonable/cautious experiment to me.

Re: Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

#30

Post by latch » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:45 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #25

Adding manual arena memory management seems like a weird choice for a supposedly memory-safe and GC'd language where this is supposed to be an implementation issue. I mean, you should hear the screams from Rust/Go people about how bad C is, and now you're just going to do it?

Seems to fit the goroutine model well: initialize the arena at goroutine start, destroy it on goroutine end (I assume this happens automatically when it falls out of scope). Like Erlang's process-specific GC.

It would be nice for some debug/testing mechanism (akin to -race, or zig's detectLeaks) to proactively verify nothing has outlived the arena.