Notices by Itamar Turner-Trauring (itamarst@hachyderm.io)

@dalias Probably not, no, but the argument is that _even if it can work_ LLMs would still be a bad solution.

@skinnylatte I would like to learn vim _keybindings_, because vim people seem to be fanatical about them and so they're supported in every editor (including emacs, which apparently has quite good support). And that way I can try multiple editors without having to relearn everything each time.

In practice will probably stick to current editor of spacemacs (emacs preconfigured to be actually modern) because I'm never quite motivated enough to put the effort in 😢

@skinnylatte Recent trip to Spain was interesting cause one train was (semi-)high speed, but another train was "high speed" and in practice paused for 20 minute in a random field, had slow zones, etc. so felt very Amtrak-y. But mission accomplished, the kid has ridden at least one nominally high-speed train.

@skinnylatte But do they play the glass harmonica like _real_ mesmerists?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11855437/

@skinnylatte Would you happen to know any (English-language) books about the history of the Teochew diaspora? I am now very intrigued. So far I'm trawling the references in the Wikipedia article.

And also I guess I'm also gonna be looking up books on Armenian trade networks.

@skinnylatte A local restaurant chain in Cambridge, MA made a whole large mural of their 2.5 year journey to install a custom-made oven: https://fishmcgill.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cloverCentral_day-scaled.jpeg

@skinnylatte I always enjoy seeing Sleater Kinney Road when driving through on the I-5.

@mekkaokereke I hear there's also a Great American Hole near Belize

@mekkaokereke There's the racism and transphobia but also more subtle things. Consider this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/06/upshot/no-giving-more-people-health-insurance-doesnt-save-money.html, arguing that increased health care coverage increases costs.

No doubt every fact cited in this article is true. But! No mention of most every other country having linear relationship between health outcomes and spending... except the US which spends more for vastly worse outcomes: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure

So reading the article makes you _less_ informed about the issue.

@glyph There's a "Filter this post" on the toot-specific "..." menu in my server, at least.

Is it just me or is PDF rendering really messed up in the latest Firefox release?

@cwebber I like to think that every time Emacs freezes it's because of lisp-9

If you want to use GPUs from Python, most libraries are NVIDIA-only. That means running your software on Macs, or in CI, is going to be difficult. But portable GPU programming is possible; in this article I talk about one option, the wgpu-py library.

https://pythonspeed.com/articles/gpu-without-cuda/

#python

Like, they do an experiment, and it's faster to write an HTTP server with JavaScript with CoPilot. Great, but why would you do that? Why not using an existing server?

(To be fair, when I was writing Go I would have been happier if I had a tool like CoPilot. But that feels like a flaw in Go; consider how Rust does the exact same kind of error handling, just vastly better.)

Thinking about it some more, the fundamental flaw with CoPilot is that the goal is to make it faster and easier to generate code.

As a programmer, you don't want to generate code.

You want to solve problems, and the less code involved the better. I don't want tools that will generate repetitive code, I want less repetition.

https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-copilots-impact-on-developer-productivity-and-happiness/ shows the problem. "Less mental effort on repetitive tasks", sure, but you should be trying to _prevent_ the repetition, not do more of it.

The year I worked at Google was the Year Of Social, and everyone's OKRs involved integrating with Google+ somehow, and if you did that you got a large bonus.

Anyway getting strong vibes like that when GitHub's new font family's landing page starts randomly talking about Copilot half-way.

OMG.

1. Google has some bad summarization telling people that throwing batteries into the ocean is good.
2. News articles were written about this.
3. Bing's summarization interprets these articles as advice to ... throw batteries in the ocean!

?

(Apparently none of this is AI... yet.)