71–80 of 81 posts
I feel like this tweet suggests that the PDF is a polyglot or an embedded second PDF. https://x.com/gynvael/status/2024180784064598134
Ah, no, sorry, no polyglots there yet. We'll get there one day, but so far our tooling doesn't allow for it yt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the suggestion! I wouldn't mind having such articles in PO! tbh - let me think what can we do about it (or rather: let me pass this to the rest of the team so they think about it too).
I like this format and I also like irreverent humor like the BOFH chronicles... can I submit content for consideration in the next issue ?
The very first sentence is: "Hi, here’s the bot-in-chief, Aga, with a little foreword." Am I to understand that Aga is an AI bot? I see nothing mentioned about this in the FAQs or the webpage. Makes me wonder if this zine may be written by AI agents reproducing the old hacker magazine aesthetic. Or is "bot-in-chief" some kind of tongue-in-cheek formulation that I can find nothing about online? Aga is listed as "Edito…
I took a peak at "Compiler Education Deserves a Revolution" and thought, wtf is this talking about? It claims clang is NOT "a pipeline that runs each pass of the compiler over your entire code before shuffling its output along to the next pass." What I think the author is talking about is primarily AST parsing and clangd, where as "any compiler tome" is still highly relevant to the actual work of building a compiler.
The very first sentence is: "Hi, here’s the bot-in-chief, Aga, with a little foreword." Am I to understand that Aga is an AI bot? I see nothing mentioned about this in the FAQs or the webpage. Makes me wonder if this zine may be written by AI agents reproducing the old hacker magazine aesthetic. Or is "bot-in-chief" some kind of tongue-in-cheek formulation that I can find nothing about online? Aga is listed as "Edito…
Haha don't worry, Aga is a human, and so is the rest of the crew :). It's just an internal joke from simpler times.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the suggestion! I wouldn't mind having such articles in PO! tbh - let me think what can we do about it (or rather: let me pass this to the rest of the team so they think about it too).
I like this format and I also like irreverent humor like the BOFH chronicles... can I submit content for consideration in the next issue ?
I love it! I appreciate your AI policy, although I wish it required whether each article has been AI enhanced
For example, one could argue that running a modern grammar checker over an article and based on that doing comma fixes should already be marked with "AI was used to create this article". But reading a statement like that makes folks think "AI slop", which would not be the case at all and would be insanely unfair towards the author. Even creating a scale of "no AI was used at all" → "a bit was used" → "..." wouldn't solve the misinterpretation issue, because regardless of how well we would define the scale, I have zero hope that more than a handful of people would ever read our definitions (and understand them the way we intended) posted somewhere on our website (or even in the zine itself).
Another example would be someone doing research for their article and using AI as a search engine (to get leads on what more to read on the topic). On one hand this is AI usage, on another it's pretty similar to just using a classical search engine. Yet still someone could argue that the article should be marked as "being AI enhanced".
There are also more popular use-cases for AIs, like just doing wordsmithing/polishing the language. A great majority of authors (including me) are not native English speakers, yet folks do want their articles to present well (some readers are pretty unforgiving when it comes to typos and grammar errors). LLMs are (if used correctly) good tools to help with the language layer. So, should an article where the author has written everything themselves and then used AI to polish it be grouped in the same bag with fully AI generated slop? From my PoV the answer is a pretty clear "no".
Anyway, at the end of the day I decided any kind of markings on the article won't work in an intended way, and outright banning any and all AI usage won't work either (would be hard to detect / there is no sense in some cases / there are reasons to allow some AI usage). But - as you know, since you refer to our AI policy - I still decided we draw a line in a kind of similar place to where some universities draw it.
A couple of the stories where I feel I have expertise I found to be a bit objectionable. The title/headline was some clever or unexpected thing, but upon reading it turns out there is nothing supporting the headline. E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that. Also, in the Logistic Ma…
I noticed that as well. Also misleading titles like “Eliminating Serialization Cost using B-trees” where the cost savings are actually for de serialization (from a custom format), and neither the self-balancing nature of B-trees isn’t actually relevant, as no insertion/deletion of nodes occurs in the (de)serialization scenario, so a single tree level is sufficient. It’s a stretch to refer to it as a B-tree.
First, as for "serialization" vs "deserialization", it can be argued that the word "serialization" can be used in two ways. One is on the "low level" to denote the specific action of taking the data and serializing it. The other one is "high level", where it's just a bag where you throw in anything related (serialization, deserialization, protocols, etc) - same as it's done on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization (note how the article is not called "Serialization and deserialization" for exactly these reasons). So yes, you can argue that the author could have written "deserialization", but you can also argue that the author used the "high level" interpretation of the word and therefore used it correctly.
As for insertion not happening and balancing stuff - my memory might be failing me, but I do remember it actually happening during serialization. I think there even was a "delete" option when constructing the "serialized buffer", but it had interesting limitations.
Anyway, not sure how deep did you go into how it works (beyond what's in the article), but it's a pretty cool and clever piece of work (and yes, it does have its limitations, but also I can see this having its applications - e.g. when sending data from a more powerful machine to a tiny embedded one).
I love it! I appreciate your AI policy, although I wish it required whether each article has been AI enhanced
I thought about it (quite a lot actually), but eventually came to conclusion that this would end up being misleading and widely misinterpreted. For example, one could argue that running a modern grammar checker over an article and based on that doing comma fixes should already be marked with "AI was used to create this article". But reading a statement like that makes folks think "AI slop", which would not be the cas…
They've got a new web viewer in this issue that can be used to link to individual articles and might be nicer than reading a PDF on some screens: https://pagedout.institute/webview.php?issue=8&page=1