71–80 of 141 posts
Love the new site! Minor typo in the Erlang card: “Elixir also excels at IoT, distributed systems, and everything the Erlang is renowned for” should probably be “everything the Erlang VM is known for” or “everything Erlang is known for.”
Elixir is such an elegant language. I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.
I first reached for Elixir when Ruby couldn't handle large amounts of websocket messages. It really shines in high-concurrency contexts. I also love Phoenix LiveView and have a couple of side-projects running on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue there's a qualitative difference between using machine learning for specific data analysis tasks, and using a generic agentic AI system controlled by some corporate entity. The association of the term 'AI' with the latter is increasing.
Yes, but nozzlegear claims that even technically "intertwined" (presumably they mean "inclined") people don't know the connection between LLMs and the broader ML work that encompasses it. That's a pretty big claim, and would be rather shocking if true. ML and deep learning were heavily invested in and discussed through the 2010s (and earlier, but the hardware developments at the end of the 2000s enabled the ML boom o…
Sorry, I meant the subjects (LLMs, ML, AI) are intertwined, not the people. But what I was getting at with my comment is that (IMO) most people see them as distinct things, even on HN where most know that LLMs use ML. As an analogy, it's like physics versus mathematics: separate subjects in most everyone's mind, and even separate academic departments, but physics is still math.
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"Human produces output similar to a machine trained on all human output"
It is funny (and perhaps a bit depressing) that LLMs were trained on our content and now, if we generate a similar structure as before, with the usual love and care, we will be criticized by it. Even when it does not "look bad or is a bad result".
FWIW, I don't think the site fits the LLM template. The scroll through the use cases is particularly nice.
And thanks for Elixir. I love it, and the agent + tidewave loop is a joy to use!
Elixir is great. OT: I wish more funding & development effort went into BEAM itself on making it more performant. Note: I’m not talking concurrency. I’m talking pure raw performance. Seems like it’s been a one person show for over a decade on making it faster.
There are multiple people working on the JIT within the last 5-6 years. The WhatsApp folks also contribute meaningfully. I suspect once the Erlang/OTP team squeezes all performance in the JIT, they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up many new possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.
Knowing what I know now, I would’ve tried to push for a threaded interpreter to get rid of the runtime overhead of dispatching altogether. I don’t know if they’ve changed the architecture of that module much since I left :-)
Elixir is such an elegant language. I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.
For me as a long-term ruby user, though, elixir is not quite as elegant as it could or should have been. Even simple things such as "defmodule Xyz do" feels weird to me.
Looks nice. But it would be more important to clean up elixir itself. So many things are unnecessary syntax-wise. At the least elixir made working with erlang easier, so they solved that part.
I appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages. If you buy into the Elixir stack then you now have constraint you could've avoided entirely by avoiding it. Also for devs there seems to be no premium offered for this talent pool scarcity. With LLMs I think language-specialists are redundant in a large scheme of things. ex) at one of my current remote jobs…