- Imagine SUBPROGRAMs that implement well-specified sequences of operations in a COmmon Business-Oriented Language, which can CALL each other. We are truly sipping rocket fuel.
- > I wonder if, for instance, optimizing for speed may produce code that is faster but harder to understand and extend.
Superoptimizers have been around since 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superoptimization
They generate fast code that is not meant to be understood or extended.
- Same. I hope this was written by hardened greybeards who have dedicated their lives to weather prediction and atmospheric modeling, and have "weathered" a few funding cycles.
- Whatever it is, it seems like it might be roughly competitive with ECMWF, the state of the art when it comes to global weather models: https://www.epic.noaa.gov/ai/eagle-verification/
A quick search didn't turn up anything about the model's skill or resolution, though I'm sure the data exists.
- > But the final bit in this post is really where I'm at: I have no idea where to go from here.
That's a good question. Mozilla has something like a half-billion dollars of assets, which is more than twice what the Linux Foundation reports. Does maintaining a web browser cost more than twice as much as maintaining an operating system? Hopefully not, but maybe it's time we find out.
- > Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology.
That's true. Ruby still exists, for example, though it's sitting down below COBOL on the Tiobe index. There's probably a community trading garbage pail kids on Facebook Marketplace as well. Ideas rarely die completely.
Burning fossil fuels to turn heat into kinetic energy is genuinely better than using draft animals or human slaves. Creating worse code (or worse clothing) for less money is a tradeoff that only works for some situations.
- > Which technology did we successfully roll back?
Quite a few come to mind: chemical and biological weapons, beanie babies, NFTs, garbage pail kids... Some take real effort to eradicate, some die out when people get bored and move on.
Today's version of "AI," i.e. large language models for emitting code, is on the level of fast fashion. It's novel and surprising that you can get a shirt for $5, then you realize that it's made in a sweatshop, and it falls apart after a few washings. There will always be a market for low-quality clothes, but they aren't "disrupting non-nudity."
- > Wee knead two fine-d Moore Waze too Poisson there date... uh.
Yes. Revel in your creativity mocking and blocking the slop machines. The "remote refactor" command, "rm -rf", is the best way to reduce the cyclomatic complexity of a local codebase.
- > Imagine you have an AI button.
That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.
Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.
- The more ways people mess with scrapers, the better -- let a thousand flowers bloom! You as an individual can't compete with VC-funded looters, but there aren't enough of them to defeat a thousand people resisting in different ways.
- It's wild how often we rediscover that executing untrusted code leads to decades of whack-a-mole security. Excel/Word plus macros, HTML plus JavaScript, SVG plus JavaScript, ...
- It's a great reminder that while room-temperature-IQ AI pumpers like Sam Altman talk about "solving physics" or whatever, the actual value of large language models is generating spam marginally cheaper than Filipinos.
- > Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days with tens of millions of lines of code, distributed for free.
Well there's your problem! Google owns the server, the client, and the standards body, so ever-increasing complexity is inevitable if you play by their rules. Tens of thousands of lines of code could render the useful parts of the web.
- > take your time, it's hard running around all day
This. I've asked grocery checkers why they sprint through scanning my things, then relax as I bag them, and learned that they're subject to some dumb system that grades them on how fast they scan. Ask them if they're on the boss's clock, and if not, take a minute to chat and give them a break.
- (star-eyes emoji) You are absolutely correct, Jim!
(check-mark emoji) Add more emoji — humans love them! (red x emoji) Avoid negative words like "bullshit" and "scarier."
(thumbs-up emoji) Before long you'll get past the human feedback of reinforcement learning! (smiley-face)
- It depends upon what you're trying to accomplish, and for whom. Are you trying to make money from casual language dabblers? Create a useful resource for people whose livelihoods depend upon learning a language? Teach yourself?
I tried learning a language via Duolingo for a while. I treated it as "free flash cards with pronunciation," and tried to ignore the gamification and cutesy animated characters. I ditched it when it went all-in on AI slop. I've since found a free 1990s-style website that has common phrases, conjugation rules, etc. with pronunciation, and have learned much more.
- I had forgotten about prog21, and I'm impressed how he wrapped up his blog:
> I don't think of myself as a programmer. I write code, and I often enjoy it when I do, but that term programmer is both limiting and distracting. I don't want to program for its own sake, not being interested in the overall experience of what I'm creating. If I start thinking too much about programming as a distinct entity then I lose sight of that.
Programming is a useful skill, even in the age of large language models, but it should always be used to achieve some greater goal than just writing programs.
Water rights in the West are hard, and we've known that since John Wesley Powell was in charge, as a nearby commenter explained. The Colorado was divided up during an unusually wet year a long time ago, and rising demand and falling supply have only made things worse ever since.