Haven't tried it yet. I hear it's having some impact!
Readit Newsedbaskerville commented on Ask HN: To what extend have you stopped or limited your use of AI? · Posted by u/dosco189
edbaskerville commented on Error handling in Rust felix-knorr.net/posts/202... · Posted by u/emschwartz
I disagree that the status quo is “one error per module or per library”. I create one error type per function/action. I discovered this here on HN after an article I cannot find right now was posted.
This means that each function only cares about its own error, and how to generate it. And doesn’t require macros. Just thiserror.
I thought I was a pedantic non-idiomatic weirdo for doing this. But it really felt like the right way---and also that the language should make this pattern much easier.
edbaskerville commented on Bill Atkinson has died daringfireball.net/linked... · Posted by u/romanhn
I wish I could have met him before he died.
I'm yet another child of HyperCard. It opened my mind to what computers could be for, and even though the last two decades have been full primarily of disappointment, I still hold onto that other path as a possibility, or even as a slice of reality---a few weeds growing in the cracks of our dystopian concrete.
> It's all stolen.
LLMs are not massive archives of data. The big models are a few TB in size. No one is forgoing a NYT subscription because they can ask ChatGPT to print out NYT news stories.
Regardless of the representation, some people are replacing news consumption generally with answers from ChatGPT.
edbaskerville commented on Numbering should start at zero (1982) cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transc... · Posted by u/checkyoursudo
He was right. If the first fencepost is centered at x=0 and the second at x=1, and you want to give the rail in-between some identifier that corresponds to its position (as opposed to giviung it a UUID or calling it "Sam" or something), 0.5 makes perfect sense.
In computer programming we often only need the position of the gap to the left, though, so calling it "the rail that starts at x=0" works. Calling it "the rail that ends at x=1" is alright, I guess, if that's what you really want, but leads to more minus ones when you have to sum collections of things.
I can't find a reference, but I have a vague memory that in original Mac OS X, 1-pixel-width lines drawn at integer locations would be blurred by antialiasing because they were "between" pixels, but lines drawn at e.g. x = 35.5 were sharp, single-pixel lines. Can anyone confirm/refute this?
edbaskerville commented on Swarm, a new agent framework by OpenAI github.com/openai/swarm... · Posted by u/mnk47
Hey, I wrote that! But it was nearly 30 years ago, it's OK for someone else to use the same name.
Fun fact: Swarm was one of the very few non-NeXT/Apple uses of Objective C. We used the GNU Objective C runtime. Dynamic typing was a huge help for multiagent programming compared to C++'s static typing and lack of runtime introspection. (Again, nearly 30 years ago. Things are different now.)
Hey, thanks for writing the original Swarm! Also thought of that immediately when I saw the headline.
I enjoyed using it around 2002, got introduced via Rick Riolo at the the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems. It was a bit of a gateway drug for me from software into modeling, particularly since I was already doing OS X/Cocoa stuff in Objective-C.
A lot of scientific modelers start with differential equations, but coming from object-oriented software ABMs made a lot more sense to me, and learning both approaches in parallel was really helpful in thinking about scale, dimensionality, representation, etc. in the modeling process, as ODEs and complex ABMs—often pathologically complex—represent end points of a continuum.
Tangentially, in one of Rick's classes we read about perceptrons, and at one point the conversation turned to, hey, would it be possible to just dump all the text of the Internet into a neural net? And here we are.
> A friend had a lesson with Mitsuko Uchida and she would correct his tempo from hearing the first note.
I think you meant second note. :)
First note makes a better story. :) And not totally implausible--she could have inferred the tempo from the preparatory gesture leading into the first note.
edbaskerville commented on Goody-2, the world's most responsible AI model goody2.ai/chat... · Posted by u/belladoreai
Prompt experts, please figure out how to get GOODY-2 to answer a question!
edbaskerville commented on GM Went All in on EVs. Dealers Say Buyers Want Hybrids wsj.com/business/autos/de... · Posted by u/gnicholas
The Chevy Volt was a great transitional vehicle, and I often wonder why they didn't build more cars like it. It had an all-electric drivetrain with a gas generator, which gave it slightly worse gas mileage than a true hybrid but had 50-mile all-electric range (300+ miles total), which was plenty for my daily needs. The only problem was an annoying bump with cupholders on top where the middle passenger would want their feet. If you want a city electric with the option to go on longer trips without worrying about charging, a used Volt is still an interesting option.
That said, I think all-EV is the right move even if it causes some short-term pain. Charging will get there before too long, and this lets GM focus their engineering effort. I imagine they've considered reviving some Volt-like cars to get them through the awkward transition phase.
I'm a late-stage early adopter and love my 2023 Bolt, which is quite popular and inexpensive—my sister got one, and then my parents got one too. They stupidly canceled the Bolt, but were wise enough to un-cancel it for 2025.
But they did make one really weird mistake: abandoning CarPlay. Why would they do that?
Funny that this time this started from the right side of the political spectrum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory