• 6 Posts
  • 351 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The issue isn’t whether you can get a good results or not. The issue is the skills you are outsourcing to a proprietary tool, skills that you will never learn or forget. Getting information out of documentation, designing an architecture, understanding and replicating an algorithm, etc.

    You will eventually start struggling with critical thinking, there are already studies about that.

    Of course, if you use it in moderation and don’t rely on LLMs too much, you should be ok.

    But how did that work for everyone with short-form content and social networks in the last ten years? How is your attention span doing? Surely we all have managed to take short-form content in moderation, since we knew the risks to our attention span, right?




  • I don’t think you need any active sabotaging in this regard. I’m not really worried about the future of LLMs, because we are already at a point of feedback cascade where thanks to LLMs, more and more of content they steal from the internet has been AI generated by them anyway, which will eventually cause the models to collapse or stagnate. And besides, you wouldn’t be able to sabotage at a scale required for this. Thankfully, the spread of fake AI generated websites and content it has enabled is so massive, that it works as well.

    I’m looking forward to that.




  • I did Software Engineering Bachelors and then gamedev masters, and while I didn’t really appreciate it at the start, since it felt like I’m learning a lot of stuff I’d never need, I’ve eventually come to be really glad that I did it.

    Throughout the classes it felt pretty meh, I didn’t understand why I have to do so much stuff that I’ll never really use, and always felt like I’m just forgetting 90% of what I was taught the moment I was done with finals for that class. Why do I need to learn Smalltalk? Why Lisp? What even is Prolog? Does anyone even do UML anymore? I want to be a C# programmer, I don’t need this.

    And it was true. From most of the languages I’ve had to go through, I don’t remember almost anything. But that’s not what it was about, and that’s something I only came to appreciate with time - it was not about learning Pharo or Prolog, it was about overcoming the initial learning curve and getting somewhat familiar with OOP or formal-logic style of languages. And while you forget the details, the familiarity will stay with you. The goal is not to make you a Prolog programmer, but to make you a programmer.

    I’ve eventually realized that I can pick up any language pretty quickly, no matter what it is - because I’ve already seen and learned all of the different styles or types of languages there are, and no matter what it is, it’s similar to something I vaguely remember seeing somewhere. And that’s an immense help. I picked that up naturally, I’ve kept hearing the question “what programmer are you? What language you can program in?”, and it felt weird - sure, I do know the most about C#, but I never had issues with picking up whatever was close at hand or needed, and writing anything I needed with a little bit of documentation and googling. And it was thanks to what I learned in school.

    And the same applies to the math and data structures that they hammer into you. Do I remember the difference between red and black tree, or a min-heap, and can I prove it? Not really, but I know they exist, and when I see a problem that sounds like it could use some obscure data-structure, it comes to my mind and I know what keywords to look up. And that’s a skill that I’ve notice is missing from most of the people who didn’t have formal CS background. Same goes for algorithms like FFT - you know it exists and what it’s used for, and seeing a problem that could use it will trigger your PTSD.

    So, I highly recommend giving college a try. You will learn a lot of cool algorithm, and some of the classes were fascinating, and it will give you a vague overview that will stay with you throughout your carreer, feeding you with keywords about stuff that might be usefull for the problem at hand. It’s the best thing I’ve done in regards to programming.



  • What would be ELI5 use case of this? It has been almost a decade since I did anything math-formal in college, and I wonder what would be some practical uses or situations is SW dev where you should turn to this language.

    EDIT: I skimmed the intro to Verifiable C, and I think I vaguely understand the idea - do I get it right, that the point is to basically create a formal definition of the function you are writing, i.e if you have a function that takes an array and sorts it, you’d have something like

    For every sequence a and every i, 0 <= i < len(F(a)) -> F(a)i < F(a)i+1

    (Or whatever would the correct formal definition be, I don’t really remember the details, I know I missed some stuff about properly defining the variables, but the idea of the definition should be kind of correct)

    And then you define this formal definiton in CoQ, then somehow convert your code into CoQ code it can accept it as F(a), and CoQ will try to proove formally that the function behavior is correct?

    So, it’s basically more robust Unit Testing that’s backed by formal math proofs?




  • I use Pixel with GrapheneOS as my phone, and I just have a separate profile that only has WhatsApp installed and nothing else. Since the profiles are completely separated, it doesn’t have access to anything else I do on the phone and it’s not running in the background (the profiles are basically sandboxed fresh slates, and switching it can be set-up to behave in a same way as basically turning off the phone as far as the profile is concerned).

    When the bridge asks me to log in again or refresh a session, I simply switch to the second profile for a minute and re-log in. I’ve heard iIt might be possible to set up an emulator and leave it running on the server, but that felt like too much effort.



  • It shouldn’t be hard to modify. I haven’t looked into it, but I assume that it looks for ID/class of HTML elements, so if you replace .post-listing with a class you find by using RightClick - Inspect on the feed/post listing in your UI, it should work.

    Here is what you are looking for, I found it by Right Clicking the post listing, and clicking on Inspect.

    So, for example, if I wanted to filter comments, the rule would be (the . is there because it’s a class, I assume?) programming.dev##.comment-content:has-text(Musk)

    I haven’t tested it, but from my vague CSS knowledge, it could work like that.


  • Thank you, I’ve found the post in YSK, and eventually used this filter instead:

    programming.dev##article.row:has-text(/Trump|Elon|Musk/i)

    With the post-listing, if I opened an article by a link, it would also hide the post text - which has funnily enough happened when I opened the YSK post, and by that point I’m kind of interested in what it has to say. By using the rule above, it only seems to hide it from the feed. I haven’t tested how robust it is, just posting it here in case someone else is interested.