earth_walker (u/earth_walker)

earth_walker commented on Isolating complexity is the essence of successful abstractions v5.chriskrycho.com/journa... · Posted by u/chriskrycho

dartos · a year ago

I don’t think I agree that either typescript nor rust successfully hide the complexity in their type systems.

By the nature of type systems, they are tightly coupled with the code written around them.

Rust has rich features to handle this coupling (traits and derives), but typescript does not.

earth_walker · a year ago

Abstractions are a way to manage complexity - hiding things is only one way to do that. Deciding how to organize it, when and how to expose it, and when to get out of the way, are all important aspects of designing abstractions.

earth_walker commented on Isolating complexity is the essence of successful abstractions v5.chriskrycho.com/journa... · Posted by u/chriskrycho

drdeca · a year ago

How would you make a test a specification?

I suppose you could do something like, enumerate every possible combination of inputs and check that some property holds for all of them. Or, maybe you could instead randomly select a number of combinations of inputs and check that a property holds for each of those random combinations, but that wouldn't be guaranteed to find the inputs for which the specification isn't satisfied.

I guess maybe if the test passed to the function to be tested, mock values, such that the function is effectively evaluated symbolically (where any branching that depends on the inputs to the function, would maybe have the mocked object specify what the result of the conditional should be, with different tests for different cases?) ?

Or.. Can you explain how you write tests such that they truly function as specifications?

earth_walker · a year ago

Good question - and there's been lots of work on this area. See for example property testing and fuzz testing, which can do something similar to what your second paragraph suggests.

You should be able to find a property testing library in your favourite language such as Hypothesis (python), Quickcheck (Haskell), Fastcheck (JS/typescript), etc.

earth_walker commented on Meta Movie Gen ai.meta.com/research/movi... · Posted by u/brianjking

nthdesign · a year ago

My kids both have creative hearts, and they are terrified that A.I. will prevent them from earning a living through creativity. Very recently, I've had an alternate thought. We've spent decades improving the technology of entertainment, spending billions (trillions?) of dollars in the process. When A.I. can generate any entertainment you can imagine, we might start finding this kind of entertainment boring. Maybe, at that point, we decide that exploring space, stretching our knowledge of physics and chemistry, and combating disease are far more interesting because they are real. And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real.

earth_walker · a year ago

Paint didn't replace charcoal. Photography didn't replace drawings. Digital art didn't replace physical media. Random game level generation didn't replace architecture.

AI generated works will find a place beside human generated works.

It may even improve the market for 'artsy' films and great acting by highlighting the difference a little human talent can make.

It's not the art that's at risk, it's the grunt work. What will shift is the volume of human-created drek that employed millions to AI-created drek that employs tens.

earth_walker commented on Why Haskell? gtf.io/musings/why-haskel... · Posted by u/mesaoptimizer

bbkane · a year ago

I think Elm is a fantastic "simplified Haskell" with pretty good beginner-friendly guides. It's unfortunate that Elm is mostly tied to the frontend and has been effectively abandoned for the last couple of years.

Interestingly, Elm has inspired a host of "successors", including Gleam + Lustre, which look really great (I haven't had a chance to really try them yet).

earth_walker · a year ago

Elm's strengths are its constraints, which allow for simple, readable code that's easy to test and reason about - partly because libraries are also guaranteed to work within those constraints.

I've tried and failed several times to write Haskell in an Elm style, even though the syntax is so similar. It's probably me (it's definitely me!), but I've found that as soon as you depend on a library or two outside of prelude their complexities bleed into your project and eventually force you into peppering that readable, simple code with lifts, lenses, transformations and hidden magic.

Not to mention the error messages and compile times make developing in Haskell a chore in comparison.

p.s. Elm has not been abandoned, it's very active and getting better every day. You just can't measure by updates to the (stable, but with a few old bugs) core. For a small, unpopular language there is so much work going into high quality libraries and development tools. Check out

https://elmcraft.org/lore/elm-core-development

for a discussion.

Elm is so nice to work in. Great error messages, and near instant compile times, and a great ecosystem of static analysis, scaffolding, scripting, and hot reloading tools make the live development cycle super nice - it actually feels like what the lispers always promised would happen if we embraced repl-driven development.

earth_walker commented on Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced blog.google/products/gemi... · Posted by u/chamoda

oakashes · 2 years ago

I agree that Google is well-positioned, but they were also well-positioned to take advantage of these synergies with Google Assistant for many years and I would say that that did not meaningfully materialize in a way that was helpful to me as an Android and Google ecosystem user.

earth_walker · 2 years ago

Agreed. I've run the house using google minis and assistant for years now, and asking assistant to do / about stuff has not improved one iota in that time and has introduced several more quirks and bugs.

Makes me wish I had bet on Alexa or Apple instead.

earth_walker commented on Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad davidkcaudill.medium.com/... · Posted by u/nlavezzo

wmichelin · 2 years ago

This might be my personal experience, but I've never encountered a QA team that actually writes the tests for engineering.

I have only had QA teams that wrote "test plans" and executed them manually, and in rarer cases, via automated browser / device tests. I consider these types of tests to be valuable, but less so than "unit tests" or "integration tests".

With this model, I have found that the engineering team ends up being the QA team in practice, and then the actual QA team often only finds bugs that aren't really bugs, just creating noise and taking away more value than they provide.

I would love to learn about QA team models that work. Manual tests are great, but they only go so far in my experience.

I'm not trying to knock on QA folks, I'm just sharing my experience.

earth_walker · 2 years ago

I work with the regulated drug development industry, and believe there is a useful and important distinction between Quality Control (QC) and Quality Assurance (QA). I wonder if perhaps this distinction would be useful to software quality too.

QC are the processes that ensure a quality product: things like tests, monitoring, metrology, audit trails, etc. No one person or team is responsible for these, rather they are processes that exist throughout.

QA is a role that ensures these and other quality-related processes are in place and operating correctly. An independent, top level view if possible. They may do this through testing, record reviews, regular inspections and audits, document and procedure reviews, analyzing metrics.

Yes, they will probably test here and there to make sure everything is in order, but this should be higher level - testing against specifications, acceptability and regulatory, perhaps some exploratory testing, etc.

Critically they should not be the QC process itself: rather they should be making sure the QC process is doing its job. QA's value is not in catching that one rare bug (though they might), but in long term quality, stability, and consistency.

earth_walker commented on The Password Game neal.fun/password-game/... · Posted by u/kretaceous

hotboy69 · 2 years ago

on rule 18: "The elements in your password must have atomic numbers that add up to 200." My element is "Na" and it says my roman numerals are a problem. They are "VI" and "IV". Not too sure where to go from here.

earth_walker · 2 years ago

Hint: V = Vanadium and I = Iodine.

earth_walker commented on The Password Game neal.fun/password-game/... · Posted by u/kretaceous

tw04 · 2 years ago

If you use duckduckgo to search for youtube videos that's the easiest way over that hurdle because DDG will show the length of the video as an overlay for the thumbnail. Just search for "17 minute timer" or whatever is the closest but less than the length you need. Make sure to sort by short/medium/long as well to limit it to the proper window.

Made it to "the length of your password must be included in your password" and decided to throw in the towel.

earth_walker · 2 years ago

I just typed in "6 minutes and 55 second" in the youtube search and someone had posted a video called "6 minutes and 55 seconds of X"

earth_walker commented on Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” simonwillison.net/2023/Fe... · Posted by u/simonw

chasd00 · 3 years ago

In my head I imagine the moment a list of instructions (a program) crosses the boundary to AGI would be similar to waking up from a deep sleep. The first response to itself would be like “huh? Where am I??”. If you have kids you know how infuriating it is to open your eyes to a thousand questions (most nonsensical) before even beginning to fix a cup of coffee.

earth_walker · 3 years ago

That's exactly how I start every morning. Now I'll just imagine myself as an emerging super-intelligence!

earth_walker commented on Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” simonwillison.net/2023/Fe... · Posted by u/simonw

jodrellblank · 3 years ago

It's another reason not to expect AI to be "like humans". We have a single viewpoint on the world for decades, we can talk directly to a small group of 2-4 people, by 10 people most have to be quiet and listen most of the time, we have a very limited memory which fades over time.

Internet chatbots are expected to remember the entire content of the internet, talk to tens of thousands of people simultaneously, with no viewpoint on the world at all and no 'true' feedback from their actions. That is, if I drop something on my foot, it hurts, gravity is not pranking me or testing me. If someone replies to a chatbot, it could be a genuine reaction or a prank, they have no clue whether it makes good feedback to learn from or not.

earth_walker · 3 years ago

> It's another reason not to expect AI to be "like humans". Agreed.

I think the adaptive noise filter is going to be the really tricky part. The fact that we have a limited, fading memory is thought to be a feature and not a bug, as is our ability to do a lot of useful learning while remembering little in terms of details - for example from the "information overload" period in our infancy.