Formal proofs can only ever work to validate against requirements... But a major issue with a lot of modern software is that the requirements themselves can be incorrect and some requirements can logically conflict with other requirements... So long as we have non-technical people formulating requirements, we can never have probably correct software.
I've come across issues in the past which weren't actually bugs. For example, the software was behaving exactly as intended but it looked like a bug to a user who didn't understand the nuances and complexities of what was happening.
I also cannot count how many times a non-technical person asked me to implement conflicting functionality which would have made the UX incredibly confusing for the user.
This is the way. There's nothing inherently wrong with using AI as long as it's used responsibly.
I highly doubt there are any managers or executives who care how AI is precisely used as long as there are positive results. I would argue that this is indeed an engineering problem, not an upper management one.
What's missing is a realistic discussion about this problem online. We instead see insanely reckless people bragging how fast they drove their pile of shit startup into the ground, or people in denial loudly banging drums to resist all forms of AI.
This goes to show that hacker news was a much better site in 2015.
Nowadays there is so much rage and indignation and seething contempt towards others on Hacker News….compare that thread to some of the recent popular ones…
I might have missed something: Why is fighting Russia equivalent to supporting Israel? Honest question, I have a hard time motivating myself to follow the news at the moment…
Build vs. buy is an eternal question in enterprises. I remember many in-house data teams trying to build tools for "digital transformation" and cloud migration about 10 years ago. The challenge was, building those tools was more expensive than those enterprises could budget for (IT as cost center), so a startup like Snowflake would easily outcompete in-house solutions with their custom, cloud-based tech stack that was necessarily complex because it needed to serve the needs of thousands of customers.
If he's right, the build vs. buy equation has shifted more towards build, at least as far as enterprise software is concerned. IT is still a cost center, but in theory an internal team can now handle more requests for custom tools without looking to outside vendors. Essentially the cost of building in-house might be collapsing and therefore enterprise software startups will be serving fewer customers (who would all pay you more because if solving the problem was cheap they'd do it).
If you had to build a stack for dozens of customers paying huge amounts of money, how would that stack differ from the stack you'd build to serve thousands of customers? Certainly it wouldn't need to be as scalable! And that's probably what he's getting at. I think what you'd do instead, to capture those higher price point customers, is solve their problems more specifically, in a higher value manner.
Many companies already do this, investing far more in field engineers than they do in their tech stack, since customization is essential.
People will do anything but work for a living. It's just engrained in certain cultures.
> Tt was surprisingly easy to find locals willing to risk their lives for money. Nearly a quarter of New Orleans residents live in poverty, and the prospect of a substantial windfall for a few hours’ work apparently outweighed any fear of getting into a car that was about to take part in a high-speed accident.
I read "out of box" as meaning "has sensible defaults, can be used 'out of the box' without configuration".
I've never seen it used to mean "preinstalled on most systems". Although e.g. people like vi keybindings because vi is preinstalled on most systems.
Either way, I think you can argue for workstations, it's worth configuring software to your liking, and worth installing software that helps you be productive.
Though, the only software I've seen people excuse for having 'bad defaults' have been things like vim, emacs, tmux.
i have an old windows 10 pc for things that absolutely must run on non-vm windows, like guardian browser for example with online proctoring. but ive recently moved over to linux for my main comp for a few reasons. 1. steam has made gaming doable on linux and if i cant get it to run through proton or wine then i dont want to play that game. 2 microsoft pushed updates on me. 3. then microsoft pushed ads on me, 4. then microsoft removed any privacy i may have had with recall (they havent given up on it, just likely rebranded and hidden from view). 5. then microsoft forced slop one me. 6 then microsoft recently forced broken updates on me that made logging on a hit and miss affair. with all of these things going youd be forgiven for thinking im suffering from stockholm syndrome, and perhaps i was. but now ive got it in my head that im using linux no matter what, and if that means i cant play games or w/e, then so be it.
Some think this is one of the major broken thing in the EU, the inability to handle quickly, speak with one voice.
Veto right is actually very undemocratic: A minuscule minority overrules the vast majority. but it was the only way to convince countries to form the EU.
And to be fair, it’s a way of protecting minorities.
> There is no realistic alternative to veto in the situation the EU is in.
Many many people disagree on this. There is no alternative to supporting Ukraine as much as possible. Very uncomfortable truth, shitty situation, and unfortunately, delusion/denial is a very common (and very relatable) human reaction to such situations.
These points are not (all) technically correct; for example, Windows does not restart "automatically" - it gives multiple options (this is important for dual booting).
Besides that, the root discussion is having a dual boot vs a virtualized windows; maintenance applies the same to both, it doesn't disappear when virtualizing Windows - the different is (the value one places) to context switching.
yeah - absolutely. I use codex all the time with jj and encourage it to check the help for details about how to run commands as the commands / args / flags have evolved post training-cutoff date.
Well actually it did happen. Greco-Roman intellectual tradition was lost when Rome collapsed and institutions of knowledge with it. Islamic scholars preserved much of this knowledge during the dark ages but in the western world Christian religious dogma reigned supreme.
During the renaissance western thinkers pieced together lost information and we got the scientific revolution.
Kind of wild that you completely ignored the example I gave of exactly this happening in my original comment.
And speaking of people whose salary dictates their understanding of something, let’s talk about Sam Altman and the rest of SV currently spinning a fairytale about AI which just so happens to justify astronomical valuations for their companies.
It seems the Android heavily modified versions on Chinese phones have been doing this for a long time; I recall for Xiaomi it was MIUI 12—5 versions ago.
This comment is getting punished for the incorrect timeline (I would know, I've been harping on about AI getting good at coding for ~2 years now!) but I do think it is directionally correct. Just over 3 years ago, (publicly available) AI could not write code at all. Today it can write whole modules and project scaffoldings and even entire apps, not to mention all the other stuff agents can do today. Considering I didn't think I'd see this kind of stuff in my lifetime, this is a blink of an eye.
Even if a lot of the improvements we see today are due to things outside the models themselves -- tools, harnesses, agents, skills, availability of compute, better understanding of how to use AI, etc. -- things are changing very quickly overall. It would be a mistake to just focus on one or two things, like models or benchmarks, and ignore everything else that is changing in the ecosystem.
I'm surprised there's nothing about using this with Claude (or whatever LLM). That's the killer feature of Obsidian imo. My original friction of keeping up with a style or format of notes is taken care of. You can also do full passes of your vaults and ask it to look for connections you might have missed or to reorganize it after some time if the original purpose has drifted. You can also just open a terminal in the root of a vault and start asking questions. I use this for all kinds of things now: health tracking, music gear questions, work ideas, etc. It's such a natural choice for a basic memory system, and it's not beholden to a specific provider since it's just files.
I've come across issues in the past which weren't actually bugs. For example, the software was behaving exactly as intended but it looked like a bug to a user who didn't understand the nuances and complexities of what was happening.
I also cannot count how many times a non-technical person asked me to implement conflicting functionality which would have made the UX incredibly confusing for the user.