61–70 of 563 posts
What is it with a number of blogs recently that have turned off normal right-click behavior, and probably related, the scroll behavior is awful. This is one, and as soon as I scroll on my work high powered Macbook and it's not smooth, I'm out.
If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called "emacs" does?
If you didn't already know, what do you think a tool called a "combine" does? Combine things? Nope. Its purpose is to separate things... Its not just the software industry.
Odd? Modern? I started working professionally in 2005 and everything had silly names. The DNS server was named athena instead of c302r5s1 or whatever building/room/rack/position name. I once rebooted a server that had an uptime of 12 years, so it had been running since 1993... it indeed had a silly name. Everything had silly names, usually types of things had a theme.
>Same thing applies to other fields like chemical engineering, where people there maintain even stricter discipline. IUPAC nomenclature ensures that 2,2,4-trimethylpentane describes exactly one molecule. No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.
How about piranha? aqua regia? Up/Down/Strange/Charm quarks? Gluons? Like a third of the elements named after people or places.
Curium, Einsteinium, Fermium, Mendelevium, Nobelium, Lawrencium, Rutherfordium, Seaborgium, Bohrium, Meitnerium, Roentgenium, Copernicium, Flerovium, Oganesson -- I guess none of these people were named Steve, but you get the point
These tendencies are OLD and EVERYWHERE. IUPAC names are just a convenient way to serialize data.
The author should read up on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein or maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface both of which are actually scientifically important things. Amiga famously had a custom ASIC called "Fat Gary" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_custom_chips I really could go on about this. Names are only useful for distinct identification. They need to be distinct within th…
Boaty McBoatface? officials overrode the vote to name it after David Attenborough. The actual research submarine got the joke name. Again, this proves my point.
Fat Gary was an internal chip designation that never needed to be public-facing. Perfectly fine.
"Names are only for distinct identification" if efficiency was not at a question. Why use worse identifiers when better ones cost the same?
pascal, eiffel, ada, C, APL, dylan
'pedes
Glook
Fitznik
Plops
Gyralight
I wanted a new tower defence game: So I made one
The examples given for real world things The Golden Gate Bridge and The Hoover Dam, are instances of things. Things that the class of which they belong is old enough that Dam and Bridge are not new words.
If you are making new things you need a new name. Software is inherently new because computers have been in wide use for only a few decades. Instances of software rarely even get names, just numbers, with project names or nicknames attached. I'd be willing to bet both The Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover dam had project names or nicknames.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. You don't name by category, you can name by function or approach. PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database 47" it's the successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL). If your "LLM wrapper" does nothing distinctive worth naming, maybe don't publish it. But if it specifically handles streaming, call it something like "llm-stream-client." If it focuses on prompt templating, "prompt-template-engine." The name encodes t…
> PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database 47" it's the successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL). Indeed. This helps me know that I'm using a database more modern than Ingres. I chose not to use Oracle or SQL Server because they might have predated Ingres. Just one question: what's Ingres, and why do I care about it? Of course, I don't, which makes Postgres no more useful of a name than "fluffnutz" or "hooxup". That said,…
The adjustable wrench is named straightforwardly, but most English speakers know it as the monkey wrench. In some European languages its name translates to "French wrench" or "the French" (as in: French person), in others it's "English wrench" even though those two were originally just variants of the adjustable wrench.
Point is, all those goofy names are brands that may or may not stick around for longer and the terms for what they actually do are more descriptive.
My favourite example: BlueJeans. A videoconferencing platform. Why is it named like that? We might never know, but most likely partly to stand out, but there's a clear distinction between the brand name and the more descriptive terms used to tell what it does.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. You don't name by category, you can name by function or approach. PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database 47" it's the successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL). If your "LLM wrapper" does nothing distinctive worth naming, maybe don't publish it. But if it specifically handles streaming, call it something like "llm-stream-client." If it focuses on prompt templating, "prompt-template-engine." The name encodes t…
Sure, but how many LLM streaming clients are out there? Namespacing, sure. But is "We use gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client to talk to the backend" (x50 similarly cumbersome names in any architecture discussion) really better than "We use Pegasus as our LLM streaming client"?