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Joined 438 karma
- So clearly there's only one correct answer here? Which is what the ffmpeg folks are driving at
- I for now prefer to stick to whatever the default is from the python packaging crew and standard library i.e. `python -m venv` and `pip install` inside of it.
Python for me is great when things can remain as simple to wrap your head around as possible.
- Still waiting to see how the VC-funded company behind Uv will make money.
Before that, I wouldn't want to be too dependent on it.
- I agree. Google killed off a perfectly good product (Google+) just because it could not compete with Facebook.
I and a few others still remember the site fondly, and it had the best UX of any social media service I've used since.
- So, what great new products or startups have these amazing coding agents helped create so far (and not on the AI supply side).
Anywhere to check?
- I'm with Luke Smith [1] when it comes to non-copyleft licenses like MIT.
Andrew Tanenbaum of the MINIX fame was similarly surprised to find that Intel had quietly included the OS he wrote in Intel chips, making it perhaps the most widely used OS in the world. He seemed disappointed no one ever reached out to him to tell him about it [2]
[1]: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...
- > “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune. “If there were a large portion of the job-seeking community that were wholesale rejecting this, our clients wouldn’t find the tool useful… This thing would be chronically underperforming for our clients. And we’re just not seeing that—we’re seeing the opposite.”
That is quite rich coming from Braintrust. The founder should spend less time doing press interviews and more time listening to feedback from his own community. I was from the outside intrigued by the unique way of working and signed up to learn more about it.
The thing that immediately jumped out is community members complaining about failing the initial screening without any feedback at all. This initial screening is apparently an AI interview. If the AI is so great, it should be trivial to get it to explain why it rejected interviewees. Unless it has serious shortcomings that would be risky to publicize.
Alternatively, this could be a sneaky way of collecting training data for the AI by preying on unsuspecting humans.
- > The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
For a long time this was the reason I didn't move to Brave, but eventually I realized I don't need it so much because Brave already sandboxes cookies for each site so some social media or ad network won't be able to track me across different sites.
The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying logged in with different accounts to the same site, which for my usecase I can do with Brave profiles.
Now Brave is my major browser and once in a while I'll bring up Librefox. Firefox lost me when they went all in with their strategy to feed user data into AI presumably for ad purposes.
- > Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong.
Since we're now building specialized hardware for AI, emergence of languages like Mojo that take advantage of hardware architecture and what I interpret as a renewed interest in FPGAs perhaps specialized hardware is making a comeback.
If I understand computing history correctly, chip manufacturers like Intel optimized their chips for C language compilers to take advantage of economies of scale created by C/Unix popularity. This came with the cost of killing off lisp/smalltalk specialized hardware that gave these high level languages decent performance.
Alan Kay famously said that people who are serious about their software should make their own hardware.
- Your comment is quite subjective, and Python's popularity both in teaching and in industry would suggest otherwise.
- Isn't that every new employee? The first few months you are not expected to be firing on all cylinders as you catch up and adjust to company norms
An intern is much more valuable than AI in the sense that everyone makes micro decisions that contribute to the business. An Intern can remember what they heard in a meeting a month ago or some important water-cooler conversation and incorporate that in their work. AI cannot do that
- It's about to change to doing more with less headcount and higher AI spend
- What is the difference between treating CS as an engineering discipline vs a branch of applied math?
- Comments by people with more points to their name are (or at least used to be) promoted higher, which naturally leads to more upvotes.
So there's still an element of who says it that matters
- At least in the case of Snap, I felt that Canonical itself played a role in making it dominant in Ubuntu so that they could control the ecosystem.
Personally I use AppImage whenever it's an option. It's the closest we get to Windows and MacOS executable applications
- Clean code has lots of useful tips and techniques.
When people are criticizing it they pick a concept from one or two pages out the hundreds and use it to dismiss the whole book. This is a worse mistake than introducing concepts that may be foot guns in some situations.
Becoming an experienced engineer is learning how, when and where to apply tools from your toolkit.
- I agree, that is a pretty good feature. You start feeling good when the data saved is in the gigabytes and time saved viewing ads is in the hours
- > In other words, I say "SICP considered harmful" because thrusting it upon an eager newcomer as a trusted neutral guide to beginner coding (without offering any counterpoint) could set them back by a decade, filling their head with "functional object oriented programming" concepts that don't translate well to industry or CS.
I'd counter that by saying it would set them forward by a decade (compared to people who don't know these techniques). Knowing advanced techniques doesn't mean trying to shoehorn them into every run of the mill problem you encounter in the industry. But if you encounter a gnarly problem where some advanced techniques will help you out, you'll sure be glad you learnt them.
FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Rust (architectures unsupported by Rust lose support).