nicklaf

Same story here. After installing dwm years ago, I've more or less stopped thinking about window managers as an open problem to be solved. I suppose one could run into trouble if they started patching it a lot, but in my experience you don't need to do that.

It's painfully apparent when you've reached the limitations of an LLM to solve a problem it's ill-suited for (like a concurrency bug), because it will just keep spitting out non-sense, eventually going in circles or going totally off the rails.

In my limited experiments with Gemini: it stops working when presented with a program containing fundamental concurrency flaws. Ask it to resolve a race condition or deadlock and it will flail, eventually getting caught in a loop, suggesting the same unhelpful remedies over and over.

I imagine this has to to with concurrency requiring conceptual and logical reasoning, which LLMs are known to struggle with about as badly as they do with math and arithmetic. Now, it's possible that the right language to work with the LLM in these domains is not program code, but a spec language like TLA+. However, at that point, I'd probably just spend less effort to write the potentially tricky concurrent code myself.

Personally, I don't trust LLMs to write code for me, generally speaking. That said, as of late I've been very pleased with the whole "shoehorn your problem to fit code examples found online" thing these LLMs do, in the very special case of massaging unix scripts, and where the "code examples found online" part seems to mostly amount to making fairly canonical reference to features documented in man pages that are plastered all over the web and haven't changed much in decades.

For questions that I know should have a straightforward answer, I think it beats searching Stackoverflow. Sure, I'll typically end up having to rewrite most of the script from scratch; however, if I give it a crude starting point of a half-functional script I've already got going, pairing that with very clear instructions on how I'd like it extended is usually enough to get it to write a proof of concept demonstration that contains enough insightful suggestions for me to spend some time reading about features in man pages I hadn't yet thought to use.

The biggest problem maybe is a propensity for these models to stick in every last fancy feature under the sun. It's fun to read about a GNU extension to awk that makes my script a couple lines shorter, but at best I'll take this as an educational aside than something I'd accept at the expense of portability.

FWIW, Colbert quipping that "reality has a well-known liberal bias" was clearly satirical of conservatives' tendency to trot out the canard of "liberal" bias.

You could just as well say he still agrees with your point about reality comporting more with a progressive understanding of ethics, while at the same time parodying Fox News for incoherently making spurious charges of "liberalism" at every turn.

Interesting. This is actually behavior that I already prefer and enable in Firefox. It makes sense when you leave browser instances open for long periods of time (with multi-account containers for a large number of tabs that you save and restore the session of) and use a password manager to sign in when you do restart.

"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

—Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules

  To see a world in a grain of sand
  And a heaven in a wild flower,
  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
  And eternity in an hour.

—William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Hacker News lacks a few distinguishing features that are characteristic of modern corporate social media: in particular, algorithmically driven feeds based on engagement metrics optimized for an advertising business model. The closest you get to that on here is the main page featuring YC companies from time to time (which is a far cry from a Tik Tok rabbit hole).

That being said, voting mechanisms which change the order of user-contributed content is hallmark of social media shared by Hacker News. I like to think, though, that this place has a strong enough community to prevent the voting dynamics from devolving to what you see on the most politicized subreddits. (I'll mention that the quality on here is in no small part the result of dang's diligent moderation, btw!)

An interesting message board to compare Hacker News with in this regard is actually 4chan. The former is maybe less social media like inasmuch as we have no inline images here, so there is no room for the sort of meme culture you see on the latter. On the other hand, 4chan is entirely bereft of voting (and even accounts to assign karma to, although reusable tripcodes come the closest), and as such is in some ways even more egalitarian (in contrast to non-anonymous social media).