• 2 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2024

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  • Big endiant is great for intellisense to quickly browse possibilities, since it groups it all in the same place.

    If only someone would train a program… we could call it a Large Language Model… to knowingly group the names together so we wouldn’t have to choose between human-readable format or dB format.

    Guess that will never happen because instead we’re stuck using “AI’s” to inflate stock prices instead. /s

    I remember seeing a proposed language that would allow each programmer to choose what name to use for each item. Don’t like ‘open_file’? Choose to see it as ‘file_open’ every time you review the file in the future.

    While we battle with each other endlessly, we keep forgetting that the computer doesn’t care.


  • It’s worse than that. “Truth” can no more reliably found by machines than it can be by humans. We’ve spent centuries of philosophy trying to figure out what is “true”. The best we’ve gotten is some concepts we’ve been able to convince a large group of people to agree to.

    But even that is shaky. For a simple example, we mostly agree that bleach will kill “germs” in a petri dish. In a single announcement, we saw 40% of the American population accept as “true” that bleach would also cure them if injected straight into their veins.

    We’re never going to teach machine to reason for us when we meatbags constantly change truth to be what will be profitable to some at any given moment.







  • Not an expert nor a historian, but my understanding is that ‘find’ goes back a long way (*nix has been around a while).

    Earlier commands such as find were created back before a lot of command/option syntax forms we know today were agreed to and standardized.

    Since ‘find’ has been around so long, we’ve just suffered its non-standard syntax rather than risk the chaos that would be unleashed by trying to fix it.

    If it makes you feel better, you can console yourself that you’re using one of the more arcane incantations of the elder *nix wizards.


  • If there’s anyone here that cares about their privacy and doesn’t know this already:

    If you have a choice between accessing the website through a browser and installing an app, use the browser. Browsers (typically) at least try to protect the types of information that gets sent, whereas there are much fewer restrictions (again, typically) for apps.

    Everyone wants you to install apps because apps (typically) get access to much more data.