Elte

Supposedly the pandemic caused quite the running boom since it was the easiest sport to keep doing despite lockdowns. Combine that with a bunch of bored retail investors with stimulus checks... I don't know if this is the actual reason or not, but it seems like it might have had something to do with it.

Thank you for writing this out, I didn't quite get what was going on at first. But then, to formalize the recursion from your example: let's assume we're at item n in the iterator, and at that point we've selected a winner from the previous n-1 items with equal probability, i.e. each item had a 1/(n-1) chance of being selected. The probability that item n will override it is 1/n. The probability that the old winner will remain selected is thus (n-1)/n. That means that the old winner remains selected with probability 1/(n-1) * (n-1)/n, which cancels out to 1/n, so each item is indeed selected with equal probability in the end.

Germany here, I have a fixed rate for 30 years.

Long ago in high school, I entered a LEGO robot competition with some friends. Tests were line following, collision detection, etc. One of the tests involved the bot being sent on a collision course with a wall. It had to detect running into it and turn around. This was one of the easiest ones to complete, but shortly before the test started we realized that our pressure sensor was malfunctioning and didn't send any more signals. There was no more time to swap it out, I don't even think we had a spare to be honest.

Not wanting to give up points on an easy test, we gauged the distance the bot had to cover in the test, and quickly uploaded some new software. At the start of the test, our bot moved forward for 4 seconds, stopped, then turned around. Full points on that one!

Some times things just need to work and we can worry about them working _correctly_ later...

That some times works, but the references I'm interested in aren't always the one directly on the route. For instance, the name of the street just before the one you need to turn into can be helpful to remember. Also, if it's a list of directions I no longer have the context of the actual map, so it's a subpar solution regardless.

Ah yes. I often use Maps when I have a rough idea where to go, but I just need to commit the street names of a few turns to memory. Finding those names indeed tends to be a frustrating experience.

It's good to know I'm not the only one. Whenever I've had an occasion recently where I thought an LLM might be useful (either I didn't know the framework or I didn't quite understand the subject matter) and asked ChatGPT or Bard, they always just hallucinated crap that didn't work and couldn't be made to work. Just yesterday Bard hallucinated a method that was called `something_that_exists_somethingIAskedAbout()`, switching to camel case halfway through, that obviously didn't exist. For the same problem, ChatGPT came up with an existing method, but modified its parameter list to make it do things it didn't do.

I struggle to think of a single instance where it's been helpful for me, and I keep trying, because I don't enjoy doing useless grunt work any more than the next guy, and I want to at least try to learn to ask it the "right" questions.

I've gone through the process some 4 to 5 times in the past two years or so and never had any issues with it. The delays are annoying, but I get part of my money back no problem.

I currently have YouTube Music, and have looked into getting Premium a couple of times, because I watch enough YT content to want the ads disabled everywhere. But for some reason they won't let me. If I go to the YT Premium page, they tell me I can't do anything there, and I have to go to my account page, where of course there is nothing to do either. I suppose I could cancel my YT Music subscription and then try to sub YT Premium, but with notoriously bad customer support and a number of family members using it also, I kind of don't want to go deal with that also not working and me having to go through the hassle of getting everybody in again.

If they want to sell premium so badly, maybe they should actually let me buy it.

The documentation reads like a tutorial, which is fine the first time you read it, and really annoying the next 99 times when you're just trying to find something. My biggest gripe though is that the majority of classes / methods aren't locally documented with comments, or only minimally. If I don't understand how a certain parameter behaves (or even what a function does), I have to go online and search for examples, or look through the docs hoping that it's explained. And don't get me started on Facades, which are a code discovery dead end...

All that being said, my overall experience of working with PHP / Laravel is quite pleasant, probably more so than other technologies I've worked with in recent years. Everything has its issues I suppose.

I've started to use ChatGPT for semi high-level questions only this week, and I'm with you. It has hallucinated quite a few nonexistent functions, and it's generally unhelpful slightly more often than it is helpful. Just now I asked it why an `<input />` and a `<select />` with the same CSS had different heights (I've managed to avoid CSS for a while, shoot me XD), and gave it the CSS applied. It suggested the default browser styling was the culprit, and I should set the same height to both elements. I replied they already had the same height set. Then it suggested setting the same padding - they already had the same padding. Then it put `box-sizing` in an example and I promptly realized that `<input />` and `<select />` must have different default values for `box-sizing`. I asked if that was correct, and it said yup!

Based on what I've seen elsewhere, I really feel like it should've been able to answer this question directly. Overall this matches my experience so far this week. Not saying it's never useful, just regularly I expected it to be...better. Haven't had access to GPT-4 yet though, so I can't speak to it being better.

I've got a couple of templates where I've aliased the value of a TypeScript enum into a local variable before using it in the template, so I'm pretty certain at that point I was unable to use the value of the enum directly (that's also how I remember it). However, I just tried it and...it seems to just work now. So thanks for making me revisit that :D.

Biked through the tunnel, then ran over the Köhlbrandbrücke the one time a year they let you do that. The fun one can have pointlessly crossing a river (:.