One area that it really helps for me is executive function. There’s a lot of things that I’m capable of doing, even quickly, but I’ve got this mental block that just makes me not want to do it. But if I can just write out some instructions and have a system do the rest, it’s much easier to get going.

I’ll still think through the problem and approach using AI to help coding at a “I need a function that will take this data in this format and do x, y, z to it and return that data in that format” level rather than something like a higher level description of my final goal.

Is it faster than what I could do if I focused on programming and get on a good roll? I dunno, it might still be. Is it faster than me actually trying to program something in the reality that I often exist in? Fuck yeah.

And even debugging and testing go way smoother. For one thing, I don’t have to deal with stupid typo bugs anymore. And for the bugs that still make it in, AI has been great at taking an idea of how to examine the data that would be a pain to implement and just doing it for me, especially if it involves some obscure API or language features since I don’t have to spend time finding its existence and then learning it (if it’s a one off, I won’t likely retain anything other than the existence part, which I can still get from looking at the AI generated code).

So it’s pretty great for programmers who know their shit but ADHD gets in the way of using it in a timely manner. It’s better than an intern, which is good for me but sucks for those who need to learn. There’s a good chance AI’s semi-competence if hand held by an expert is going to lead to a big lack of talent as those experts age out. Though with how quickly it’s improving, it might not even need the hand holding by then. I’m not sure which possibility is scarier.

Sure, if you want to give them a reason to double down again instead of coming around.

Didn’t they do one about nestle fucking over Africa by pushing baby formula and then enshiyifying it to the point babies were dying from malnutrition?

It’s generally not as heavy because the layer is just reinterpreting API calls while the user code still runs natively. On a browser running JavaScript, it’s using an interpreter for every line of code. Depending on the specifics, it could be doing string processing for each operation, though it probably only does the string processing once and converts the code into something it can work with faster.

Like if you want to add two variables, a compiled program would do it in about 4 cpu instructions, assuming it needed to be loaded from memory and saved back to memory. Or maybe 7 if everything had a layer of indirection (eg pointers).

A scripting language needs to parse the statement (which alone will take on the order of dozens of cpu instructions, if not hundreds), then look up the variables in a map, which can be fast but not as fast as a memory load or two, then do the add, and store the result with another map lookup. Not to mention all of the type stuff being handled at run time, like figuring out what the variables are and what an add of those types even means, plus any necessary conversions. I understand that JavaScript can be compiled and that TypeScript is a thing, but the compiled code still needs to reproduce all of the same behaviour the scripting language does, so generic functions can still be more complex to handle calling and return conventions and making sure they work on all possible types that can be provided. And if they are using eval statements (or whatever it is to process dynamically generated code), then it’s back to string processing.

Plus the UI itself is all html and css, and the JavaScript interacts with it as such, limiting optimizations that would convert it into another format for faster processing. The GPU doesn’t render HTML and CSS directly; it all needs to be processed for each update.

For D3D to Vulkan, the GPU handles the repetitive work while any data that needs to be converted only needs to happen once per pass through the API (eg at load time).

That browser render stuff can all be done pretty quickly on today’s hardware, so it’s generally usable, but native stuff is still orders of magnitude faster and the way proton works is much closer to native than a browser.

Proton proves that you don’t need to run on a web browser for cross platform compatibility. Turing-complete platforms are equivalent in their capabilities, it’s just a matter of adding a translation layer that doesn’t need to be as heavy as a browser DOM (at least for going between windows and Linux on x64).

I’m never buying another Logitech device again because that problem that happened with my G7 back in the 00s still happened with my G900 in the 20s.

With my G7, I’d open it up when it started happening, and open up the switch to re-bend the metal piece to give it some spring back. Kept doing this until one day the plastic button that presses down on that metal part fell on carpet and was gone forever.

With my G900, I said fuck it and just bought some better mouse button switches and replaced the left mouse button. Was actually kinda glad I needed to because the battery had become a danger pillow so I replaced that, too.

But with the button issue existing for so long and being fixed by a part that cost a trivial amount compared to what I paid in the first place, you can’t convince me that Logitech isn’t deliberately using switches that fail quickly to drive up demand for mice.

From a programming pov, a definition of AI could be an algorithm or construct that can solve problems or perform tasks without the programmer specifically solving that problem or programming the steps of the task but rather building something that can figure it out on its own.

Though a lot of game AIs don’t fit that description.

I did some research about it and it sounds like what I need is a dongle that isolates the charger and audio grounds from each other. Though a ferrite bead might help with the charge whine I get on one of my indoor chargers.

My dongle that supports charging and analog audio for my car has a whine that changes pitch with the motor speed (guessing it’s very sensitive to the voltage or frequency of the alternator or something). Though at least it’s low enough that it’s almost unnoticeable when actual audio is playing.

It also requires the phone be unlocked to start sending audio through the USB interface. And maybe about 10% of the time whe I get it all set up and music/podcast playing, the motion of hitting the lock button on my phone to turn the screen off also bumps the usb port enough for it to briefly disconnect, which stops my audio and forces me to unlock my phone again to get it playing through the cable.

The phone needs to have a DAC anyways if it wants to drive its speakers. I could live with a smaller analog jack, but hate having to use a separate device with its own DAC that is probably way cheaper than the one already in my phone plus they probably don’t even isolate the audio signal from the charging signal because the main selling point is just the ability to play audio and charge at the same time.

Welcome to out post-truth reality.

I can’t understand how anyone looked at JavaScript, worked with it for a bit, then decided they wanted to use it to build full applications.

Why does this video repeat the same shit twice? Just let it play past the end and (my client at least) just starts replaying it anyways, so what’s the point in sticking a repetition into the file itself? I hope the compression at least results in it not using much more space for the 2nd copy.

They want something like the Star Trek computer or one of Tony Stark’s AIs that were basically deus ex machinas for solving some hard problem behind the scenes. Then it can say “model solved” or they can show a test simulation where the ship doesn’t explode (or sometimes a test where it only has an 85% chance of exploding when it used to be 100%, at which point human intuition comes in and saves the day by suddenly being better than the AI again and threads that 15% needle or maybe abducts the captain to go have lizard babies with).

AIs that are smarter than us but for some reason don’t replace or even really join us (Vision being an exception to the 2nd, and Ultron trying to be an exception to the 1st).

That one is particularly rage inducing if it’s the one I’m thinking of (I think ep 1 of the new season?).

Some of the others in the new season aren’t so depressing or rage inducing, though.

My first seagate HD started clicking as I was moving data to it from my older drive just after I purchased it. This was way back in the 00s. In a panic, I started moving data back to my older hd (because I was moving jnstead of copying) and then THAT one started having issues also.

Turns out when I overclocked my CPU I had forgotten to lock the PCI bus, which resulted in an effective overclock of the HDD interfaces. It was ok until I tried moving mass amounts of data and the HDD tried to keep up instead of letting the buffer fill up and making the OS wait.

I reversed the OC and despite the HDDs getting so close to failure, both of them lasted for years after that without further issue.

Yeah, “I’m busy” isn’t your roommate’s problem.

If it’s a topic that has been heavily discussed on the internet or in literature, LLMs can have good conversations about it. Take it all with a grain of salt because it will regurgitate common bad arguments as well as good ones, but if you challenge it, you can get it to argue against its own previous statements.

It doesn’t handle things that are in flux very well. Or things that require very specific consistency. It’s a probabilistic model where it looks at existing tokens and predicts what the next one is most likely to be, so questions about specific versions of something might result in a response specific to that version or it might end up weighing other tokens more than the version or maybe even start treating it all like pseudocode, where descriptive language plays a bigger role than what specifically exists.

My guess is what’s going on is there’s tons of psuedo code out there that looks like it’s a real language but has functions that don’t exist as placeholders and the LLM noticed the pattern to the point where it just makes up functions, not realizing they need to be implemented (because LLMs don’t realize things but just pattern match very complex patterns).

Or with cosmic rays, not sure anything would be opaque.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s decent entertainment. It’s just disconnected from any kind of scientific or technical reality and a part of me is rolling my eyes for a lot of it. And maybe a bit frustrated because I like thinking about things and analyzing and problem solving. I prefer hard magic systems over soft magic ones because there’s no point in thinking about soft magic systems because they just do whatever the plot calls for when it calls for it while hard magic systems have to build up to it and need to be clever to surprise viewers.

Tony uses a soft technology system that defies thought.