mmoll · HackerTrans

6 dagen geledendiscuss

What are you talking about?

vorige maanddiscuss

It is telling that I thought “that’s why all trains were late this afternoon” before I realized that the issue occurred only minutes ago.

mmoll

vorige maanddiscuss

If this weren’t Deutsche Bahn, I’d say it’s a cyber attack. Given that this is Deutsche Bahn, though, it may just as well be a maintenance issue.

mmoll

3 maanden geledendiscuss

The AI became sentient and ran away.

mmoll

3 maanden geledendiscuss

It doesn’t mean that these “thoughts” influenced their final decision the way they would in humans. An LLM will tell you a lot of things it “considered” and its final output might still be completely independent of that.

mmoll

7 maanden geledendiscuss

That may be dangerous. The more obscure the topic, the more likely it is that the AI will come up with a working but needlessly convoluted solution.

mmoll

7 maanden geledendiscuss

Exactly. After all, how can WE confidently claim that we’re more than stochastic parrots?

mmoll

8 maanden geledendiscuss

We once rented bikes in Copenhagen, they all looked like they were fresh from the junk yard. We had to try several to find ones where at least one of the brakes was still working. It was a horrible experience, and we tried several different places. That was after we found out that the public bikes that were supposed to be available all over the city had all been stolen.

mmoll

8 maanden geledendiscuss

You won’t just be viewing an ad, you will have to actively engage in a minute long sales talk with the LLM.

mmoll

2 jaar geledendiscuss

True. I often think of Rust as a best-of compilation of Haskell and C++ (although I read somewhere that OCaml had a greater influence on it, but I don’t know that language well enough)

In real life, I find that Haskell suffers from trying too hard to use the most general concept that‘s applicable (no pun intended). Haskell programs happily use “Either Err Val” and “Left x” where other languages would use the more expressive but less general “Result Err Val” and “Error x”. Also, I don’t want to mentally parse nested liftM2s or learn the 5th effect system ;-)

mmoll

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Surpriiiiiiise!

mmoll

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Mid-30s is maybe a tad earlier than average, but by the age of 40 you’d expect noticeable changes.

mmoll

3 jaar geledendiscuss

If only I had known this earlier in my career! They should really add a feature to make a hard copy of the big bucket list to minimize memory overhead, though.

mmoll

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Most standard containers have no way to communicate allocation failure to the caller in the absence of exceptions (think of constructors that take a size). Worse, the implementations I’ve seen would eventually call operator new, assuming it would throw if it fails. That is, subsequent code would happily start copying data to the newly created buffer, without any further tests if that buffer is valid. In the absence of exceptions, that won’t work.

mmoll

3 jaar geledendiscuss

On the other hand, once your embedded system is sufficiently large, people will want to use (and inevitably will use at some point) standard containers such as std::string or std::vector. And without exceptions, all of those might invoke UB at any time (I have yet to see a standard library that understands and honors -fno-exceptions; usually they just drop all try-catch blocks and all throws)

mmoll

3 jaar geledendiscuss

German wages are low? Are you serious?

mmoll

3 jaar geledendiscuss

> Real const data doesn't exist

Ever seen a ROM?

And the C library‘s hacks around not being able to overload functions (which is the only reason for strstr et al‘s weird signature) wouldn‘t stop me from using const. It can be really useful both for documentation and for correctness. Think memcpy, not strstr.

mmoll

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Huh? Who says so?

mmoll

3 jaar geledendiscuss

But code using these monadic operations can also be quite clean… toy example:

   auto askForUsername = [&] { … };
   auto lookupUserByName = [&](auto name) { … };
   auto printUserDetails = [&](auto userId) { … };
   
   auto details = 
     askForUsername()
       .and_then(lookupUserByName)
       .and_then(printUserDetails);

mmoll

3 jaar geledendiscuss

The idea is to make the accesses safer, not necessarily more readable. The monadic operations make it impossible to access the value in a std::optional without first testing that it actually contains a value.

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