ironman1478's comments

So you basically have a CS degree. I learned C in 7th grade and was completely self taught. I then got a CS degree because I just wanted to learn more about it and be around people who were also enthusiastic about CS.

There is something disingenuous about the parent post. Highly motivated people will always be good at what they want to do. I'm good at guitar, but never went to music school. Highly motivated individuals though are the exception, not the rule. If you take two random individuals, one with a lit degree and one with a CS degree, the CS degree person will know more in the domain of CS and be more likely to write useful software.

The parent post is conflating being highly selective about personality type and attributing it to the degree.

I just don't understand how this is true unless you're doing something extremely basic. So much context is missing in this post.

Having a CS degree doesn't mean much, but I don't see how a lit major is going to learn how to be productive in an embedded environment for example. There is just too much domain specific knowledge that isn't based purely on intelligence and can't be inferred from first principles.

It's a valid concern, but with a doctor giving bad advice there is accountability and there are legal consequences for malpractice. These LLM companies want to be able to act authoritatively without any of the responsibility. They can't have it both ways.

I'm not sure what to make of these technologies. I read about people doing all these things with them and it sounds impressive. Then when I use it, it feels like the tool produces junior level code unless I babysit it, then it really can produce what I want.

If I have to do all this babysitting, is it really saving me anything other than typing the code? It hasn't felt like it yet and if anything it's scary because I need to always read the code to make sure it's valid, and reading code is harder than writing it.

The life of people on earth doesn't seem better than people now. For connected people it seems great, but for the average joe it seemed awful.

At least the contribution back can happen. You're right though, it's not perfect.

Open source has been good, but I think the expanded use of highly permissive licences has completely left the door open for one sided transactions.

All the FAANGs have the ability to build all the open source tools they consume internally. Why give it to them for free and not have the expectation that they'll contribute something back?

Something I haven't seen mentioned is that python is very commonly taught at universities. I learned it in the 2010s at my school, whereas I never got exposed to Perl. The languages people learn in school definitely stick with you and I wonder if that plays a non-zero factor in this.

I'm not a fan of rust, but I don't think that is the only takeaway. All systems have assumptions about their input and if the assumption is violated, it has to be caught somewhere. It seems like it was caught too deep in the system.

Maybe the validation code should've handled the larger size, but also the db query produced something invalid. That shouldn't have ever happened in the first place.

Corporations extract a ton of value from projects like ffmpeg. They can either pay an employee to fix the issues or setup some sort of contract with members of the community to fix bugs or make feature enhancements.

There is precedent for this: https://sqlite.org/consortium.html

Never work for free. It's a complete market distortion and leads to bad actors taking advantage of you and your work.

LibreOffice Calc can do this already.

The main issue is the collaboration aspect of LibreOffice. I imagine though with funding LibreOffice can be upgraded to do this. If countries are already trying to migrate away from US tech, they could invest in this.

The world has become very expensive and everything is way more competitive than it was in the past.

To me, it feels like there is little room to make mistakes. If you get detailed it's hard to get back on track. That I think is the primary reason people are taking less risks (or being deviant).

Having worked at Meta, I wish they did this when I was there. Way too many people not agreeing on anything and having wildly different visions for the same thing. As an IC below L6 it became really impossible to know what to do in the org I was in. I had to leave.

It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you never know what hardware setup the user will have.

It seems like it's just poor management. I understand they are not product lines, but a university has bills to pay. They have to pay people salaries, benefits, maintain those builds, labs, libraries, etc. The money to do that has to come from somewhere and in the hard times, the fields with the least likely chance of generating revenue to keep the university afloat will see hits. It seems like the university though has put itself in the hard times by taking on a large amount of debt: https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-u.... It seems like its less malicious and just risk taking gone wrong.

It's not that different in the corporate world. Lots of companies make bad bets that then lead to layoffs, but not always in the orgs that actually were part of the bad bet. I've seen many startups take on too much risk, then have to perform layoffs in orgs like marketing, recruiting, sales, HR, etc. even if those orgs weren't responsible for the issues that the company is facing.

In the article it mentions that Google felt pressured by the government to take the content down. Implying that they wouldn't have if it wasn't for the government. I wasn't accusing Google of anything, but rather the government.

Maybe it's not banning, but it doesn't feel right? Google shouldn't have been forced to do that and really what should've happened is that the people that spread genuine harmful disinformation, like injecting bleach, the ivermectin stuff or the anti-vax stuff, should've faced legal punishment.

It's interesting you say that, because the government is saying Tylenol causes autism in infants when the mother takes it. The original report even says more verification is required and it's results are inconclusive.

I wouldn't be surprised if some lawsuit is incoming from the company that manufactures it.

We have mechanisms for combatting the government through lawsuits. If the government came out with lies that actively harm people, I hope lawsuits come through or you know... people organize and vote for people who represent their interests.

There isn't really a good solution here. A precedent for banning speech isn't a good one, but COVID was a real problem and misinformation did hurt people.

The issue is that there is no mechanism for punishing people who spread dangerous misinformation. It's strange that it doesn't exist though, because you're allowed to sue for libel and slander. We know that it's harmful, because people will believe lies about a person, damaging their reputation. It's not clear why it can't be generalized to things that we have a high confidence of truth in and where lying is actively harmful.

You're last quote hits the nail on the head. I've found that good libraries are written by people actually solving the problem and then open sourcing it. pytorch, numpy, eigen, ros, openssl, etc. these all came from being trying to actually solve specific problems.

I think rust will get those libraries, but it takes time. Rust is still young compared to languages with a large amount of useful libraries. The boost project in c++ started in the 90s for example. It just takes time.