I’ve seen the comparison to pair programming with a junior programmer before, and it’s wild to me that such a comparison would be a point in favor of using AI for improving productivity.

I have never experienced a productivity boost by pairing with a junior. Which isn’t to say it’s not worth doing, but the productivity gains go entirely to the junior. The benefits I receive are mainly improving my communication and mentoring skills in the short term, and improving the team’s productivity in the long term by boosting the junior’s knowledge.

And it’s not like the AI works on the mundane stuff in parallel while I work on the more interesting, higher level stuff. I have to hold its hand through the process.

I feel like the efficiency gains of AI programming is almost entirely in improving your speed at wrestling a chatbot into producing something useful. Which may not be entirely useless going forward - knowing how to search well is an important skill, this may become something similar, but it just doesn’t seem worth the hassle to me.

This article from last year compares LLMs to techniques used by “psychics” (cold reading, etc).

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

I think it’s a great analogy (and an interesting article).

I like that I can currently adjust the volume or silence a call on my phone in my pocket by feeling the physical buttons. I miss being able to deliberately unlock my phone with touch id as I’m picking it up without having to look at it square on.

Hell, I even miss the chin and bezel. I liked having neutral space to grab the phone without it registering a tap or swipe.

Maybe I’m getting old, but smartphone design largely peaked several years ago, and they insist on making changes to parts of the phone that are perfectly fine.

I see two possible reasons for your situation. One is that the company is turning to contractors to fill in gaps in their knowledge/experience, which is why everyone else has no clue how to tackle these tasks and why they get assigned the easy ones.

The other possibility is that the senior devs are gaming the metrics, letting the employees knock out easy tasks while the contractor is stuck with untangling the knots of the more intractable tasks.

They are under expansion chips.

Link for those who are interested.

GPL can be used for commercial purposes, but it requires all software derived from it to also be open source and GPL compatible. So no one whose commercial business relies on selling software will use GPL because their customers can copy and distribute the code.

Neither Safari nor Chrome’s rendering engine is GPL. Safari’s engine is LGPL, which means the binary library can be linked into a closed source program, but modifications to the library’s code must remain open.

Chromium is BSD, which doesn’t even require modifications to remain open. So I can take chromium’s source, change it however I want for my own browser, and never distribute that code.

If Safari’s and Chrome’s engines were GPL, Safari and Chrome would be forced to be open source, and they very much are not.

While I’m too much of an optimist to say that we’ll never figure out viable fusion power, I do think you’re more right than wrong.

Fission power is essentially us discharging a fusion battery, where the battery was charged by a supernova. We don’t get any free help with fusion, and we have to replicate input energies only seen in nature with stellar amounts of gravitational mass. It is (IMO) an important area of research, but I don’t expect it to power our cities in my lifetime.

The eyes. Look for non-circular pupils or noticeably different-sized pupils.

Also, pupils are often not regular circles in AI images. The only one I got wrong was the real picture of the guy wearing dirty glasses.

Source? The Yale link above specifically mentions:

Nationally, women make up 57.3% of bachelor’s degree recipients but only 38.6% of STEM bachelor’s degree recipients.

Anecdotally, I was in a STEM-focused school and major over 20 years ago, and it was overwhelming male-dominated. One of my colleagues graduated less than 10 years ago, and her experience was not dissimilar. She had to deal with quite a bit of sexism too, unfortunately.

There’s no downside to writing the guards afaik, but I’m more of a c programmer. It’s been a while since I did much c++, so I’m not up on modern conventions. But dealing with legacy code adhering to older conventions often comes with the territory with c and c++, so it’s something to keep in mind.

You can generally rely on a header file doing its own check to prevent being included twice. If a header doesn’t do that, it’s either wrong or doing something fucky. It is merely a convention, but it’s so widespread that you really don’t need to worry about it.

You are mixing up some terms, so I want to help clarify. When you #include a header file, you aren’t importing a library. You are telling the compiler to insert the contents of that header file into your source where the #include line is. A library is something different. It is an already-compiled binary file. A library should also come with a header file to tell you what functions and classes are present in the library, but that header isn’t itself the library.

It may seem annoying to have to repeat yourself between headers and source, but it’s honestly something you get used to.

Elon didn’t start hyper loop because he thought it would be successful. He started it to kill California’s high speed rail plans.

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1571628269555826688?lang=en

(transcribed from a series of tweets) - iamragesparkle

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.” And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, ohok and he continues. "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

It’s crypto all over again, but with a less-useless technology underpinning it. Seriously, a computer doing grade school arithmetic is what will threaten humanity? I’m sure it’s interesting from a research perspective how that math is being done, but math is the easiest thing for a computer to do.

It also prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty, and it actually used the Antarctic treaty for inspiration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

Which is not to say that it’s exactly the same situation as Antarctica, but the treaties are more similar than you might assume.

Doesn’t the outer space treaty place similar restrictions on mars?

A far more likely scenario is that they have been overstating what the software can do and how much room for progress remains with current methods.

AI has blown up so fast with so much hype, that I’m very skeptical. I’ve seen what it can do, and it’s impressive over past machine learning algorithms. But it does play on the human tendency to anthropomorphize things.

iOS web browsers are forced to use the safari/WebKit engine, so you don’t get Firefox extensions, sadly.

The main benefits of using Firefox on iOS is if you prefer it’s interface or want to sync with desktop Firefox (which is why I use it).