everytime I look at these AI coding systems I think of this classic junji ito story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6pYncUjuGY&ab_channel=D%D0%...
written long before any of this stuff existed but somehow very relevant.
Readit NewsPayPal security is amazing. It randomly locks people out of their accounts and randomly closes their accounts too, but actual fraudsters and criminals are never deterred.
> It randomly locks people out of their accounts and randomly closes their accounts too,
yup, my paypal got locked after using it for over 20 years. Customer service refused to help and wouldn't even tell me why it was locked. I still get messages from paypal that they "couldn't get process subscription for X." won't delete my data either.
Scummy behavior from them on multiple levels.
Dead Comment
cultofmetatron commented on Show HN: Using Common Lisp from Inside the Browser turtleware.eu/posts/Using... · Posted by u/jackdaniel
I love the restarts system but the fact that the industry as a whole chose other approaches makes me wonder if there's something the "wisdom of the crowds" knows that I'm not aware of.
> you can literally pause on an exception, rewind, fix your code and continue from where you left off.
Does it only work on source codes or can I distribute a binary and let my users debug the code like this? Should I distribute the 'image' for it to work?
And is the fix temporary (until the program dies) or permanant?
> makes me wonder if there's something the "wisdom of the crowds" knows that I'm not aware of.
As I alluded to earlier, its really hard to scale a dev team when the language does nothing to keep you on the rails. As an engineer, I hate go for its lack of abstractions and verbosity. As a CTO, I can appreciate that its trying to reduce the friction in making sure all code looks familiar and that any engineer can be rotated into it. TLDR: the things that make common lisp so good for a lone dev are what make it hard for larger projects and most projects nowadays have multiple contributors. I wouldn't start a startup on common lisp today unless you were trying to do something truly novel and your team was all seasoned and experienced devs. throwing a bunch of vibe coding juniors on common lisp is a recipe for disaster while you might make it to a series A using a language like go.
Personally, I love elixir as I think it strikes a really good balance. My team is all older programmers. Our youngest guy is 32 and we have all developed a pretty good intuition for maintaining a descent code base.
> Does it only work on source codes or can I distribute a binary and let my users debug the code like this? Should I distribute the 'image' for it to work?
I wouldn't hand it to the end user but paul grahm famously did cowboy debugging on live servers. A user would cal complaining of a error and paul could go in and patch it in real time while observing the runtime of the system the user was on.
I think it goes without saying that that was a different time and we def can't do that kind of thing today.
> And is the fix temporary (until the program dies) or permanant?
you patch teh code and reload it into your running vm. so its permanent.
cultofmetatron commented on Show HN: Using Common Lisp from Inside the Browser turtleware.eu/posts/Using... · Posted by u/jackdaniel
> It commits to nothing and does everything better than you'd expect.
Idk man, every time someone makes that claim my immediate reaction is: "what's the catch?". I much rather use 5 tools designed for specific purposes than general-purpose tools that are 50% good at 5 tasks.
the catch is that the langauge is so maleable that no two lisp codebases look the same. Makes it very difficult to establish broader idioms. But in terms of what it cando, its got ridiculously good runtime speed for how dymanic it is and the debugger is one of the best around. you can literally pause on an exception, rewind, fix your code and continue from where you left off.
cultofmetatron commented on Show HN: Using Common Lisp from Inside the Browser turtleware.eu/posts/Using... · Posted by u/jackdaniel
Is CL really particularly more “functional” than JavaScript? I don’t know CL but I know it bears some passing similarity to Emacs Lisp, which is usually written in a pretty imperative style. Sure, it has first-class closures but so does JS.
CL is the Ditto (pokemon) of programming langauges. It commits to nothing and does everything better than you'd expect. The problem is its very much a lone warrior type of language. you can attain great productivity due to macros and just how maleable it is but it makes it near impossible to get a team to work together on it without very extensive styling and conventions strictly adhered to by the team. In a way, you could say its a direct influence to go, in that the go team saw everything common lisp did and decided to do the opposite.
I think a lot of people are missing the sarcasm here. that said, I agree that its absolutely horrific. yesterday I saw a video where a girl who couldn't have been more than 9 or 10 years old carrying water was hit by an idf strike. Poor kid was basically rendered into chum. The fact taht this stuff is going on right in front of our eyes and our government is complicit in is horrific.
cultofmetatron commented on Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first github.com/zedless-editor... · Posted by u/homebrewer
I've been using AI extensivly the last few weeks but not as a coding agent. I really don't trust it for that. Its really helpful for generating example code for a library I might not be familiar with. a month ago, I was interested in using rabbitmq but he docs were limited. chatgpt was able to give me a fairly good amount of starter code to see how these things are wired together. I used some of it and added to it by hand to finally come up with what is running in production. It certainly has value in that regard. Letting it write and modify code directly? I'm not ready for that. other things its useful for is finding the source of an error when the error message isnt' so great. I'll usually copy paste code that I know is causing the error along with the error message and it'll point out the issues in a way that I can immediatly address. My method is cheaper too, I can get by just fine on the $20/month chatgpt sub doing that.
I hate to break it to you, but emacs was a product of the MIT AI lab.(prep.ai.mit.edu anyone?).
classical AI and modern generative AI are VERY different beasts. also, there isn't any AI in emacs itself. It was a tool built to make a job easier.
I cannot remember events, conversations, or details about important things. I have partially lost my ability to code, because I get partway through implementing a feature and forget what pieces I've done and which pieces still need to be done
I can still write it, but the quality of my work has plummeted, which is part of why I'm off on leave now
1. 1 tablespoon of cold extracted cod liver oil EVERY MORNING
2. 30 min of running 3-4 times a week
3. 2-3 weight lifting sessions every week
4. regular walks.
5. cross train on different intellectually stimulating subjects. doing the same cognitive tasks over and over is like repetive motion on your muscles
6. regularly scheduled "fallow mind time." I set aside an 30 min to an hour everyday to just sit in a chair and let my mind wander. its not meditation. I jsut sit and let my mind drift to whatever it wants.
7. while it should be avoided, in the event that you have to crunch, RESPECT THE COOLDOWN. take downtime after. don't let your nontechnical leads talk you out of it. thinking hard for extended periods of time requires appropriate recovery.
the human brain is a complex system and while we think of our mind as abstract and immaterial, it is in reality a whole lot of physical systems that grow, change and use resources the same way any other physical system in your body does. just like muscles need to recover after a workout to get stronger, so too does your brain after extended periods of deep thinking.