slver · HackerTrans

It doesn't seem that logical statements matter:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27722154

What matters is just grabbing some pitchforks and cancelling someone.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

If you look for racism, you'll find it, even when it's not there. Skin color is a function of two things:

1. Amount of environmental sunlight (latitude).

2. Amount of circumstantial exposure to sunlight (lifestyle).

If the assumption is that early humans have lived more outdoors than sitting in caves all day like the modern human does in practice, then yes they'll have darker skin overall.

Is it racist to just state basic facts, or should we brainwash everything to be uniform and average across time and space?

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

You're describing features that many other animals have. Being bipedal, hunting, using projectiles, and so on.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

Clockrate is not a bottleneck on how fast your computer is. It's just a synchronization primitive.

Think about it like the tempo of a song. The entire orchestra needs to play in sync with the tempo, but how many notes you play relative to the tempo is still up to each player. You can play multiple notes per "tempo tick".

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

That's kinda the case with Copilot, or I'd just type:

    // Unify relativity with quantum mechanics.

I'm trying to say Copilot is not a fundamental shift to programming. It's what programming already is, and we already have IDEs assisting us with refactoring and second-guessing our intent with autocomplete (which in some IDEs is powered by AI now, as well).

Programming is like working in a team. You try to communicate with your teammates, and then everyone does what they can according to their skills, and how they understood the task.

The shift to higher-level communication in programming is inevitable, will it look like Copilot, I don't know.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

Yes, it literally isn't a match. It's also not a match for a pepperoni pizza.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

Programming is already conversational. I'm telling a computer what I want, it does it, I see what it does, and elaborate or correct myself where necessary. Repeat endless times, until product exists.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

Well, "never" is a long time.

Copilot is definitely no replacement for anything except copying from Stack Overflow for juniors.

But in the long run, AI is us basically us creating our own replacement. As a species. We don't realize it yet. It'll be really funny in retrospective. Too bad I probably won't be alive to see it.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

A lot of these edge cases are about theoretical concerns like "how many digits we need in decimal to represent an exact IEEE binary float".

In practice a double is 15.6 digits precise, which Excel rounds to 15 to eliminate some weirdness.

In their documentation they do cite their number type as 15 digit precision type. Ergo that's the semantic they've settled on.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

Excel rounds doubles to 15 digits for display and comparison. The exact precision of doubles is something like 15.6 digits, those remaining 0.6 digits causing some of those examples floating (heh) around.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

Business types hate dealing with programmers, that's a fact. And these claims of "we'll replace programmers" happen with certain precise regularity.

Ruby on Rails was advertised as so simple, startup founders who can't program were making their entire products in it in a few days, with zero experience. As if.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

So, nothing new, is your point?

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

It's very easy: don't use copilot code verbatim, and you won't have GPL code verbatim.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

> And these are the hand picked examples. This product seems like it needs some more thought.

Everyone's self-preservation instincts kicking in to attack Copilot is kinda amusing to watch.

Copilot is not supposed to produce excellent code. It's not even supposed to produce final code, period. It produces suggestions to speed you up, and it's on you to weed out stupid shit, which is INEVITABLE.

As a side note, Excel also uses floats for currency, so best practice and real world have a huge gap in-between as usual.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

Google is interested in eliminating native applications in favor of web apps that it can control by providing analytics, SEO, ads, and so on.

So they're very aggressive to introducing "app-like" APIs to Chrome even often at the expensive of user experience, performance and security.

As you said, their very goal is turning the web into ChromeOS. And the web is everywhere.

Honestly, that's NOT a good thing for the future of either the web or applications.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

And ironically we have no types for units in most languages. Instead we need to wrap numbers in objects making them extremely cumbersome to work with.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

The number of sets we can represent with fingers is 11, including the empty set.

As for bijective base 10, it's interesting, but it's still not the base 10 we're using, so we can't quite blame this on our fingers.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

The thing I can't seem to get across to you, is that you don't query a graph by specifying a join expression. Graph databases aren't built for that. So no, SQL is not "capable of querying a graph". It's capable of deriving a graph out of relational data. Two completely different things. It's a bit like confusing a restaurant's chef with the restaurant's customer. They both have a meal in common, but one is consuming what the other is producing.

And no, arbitrary join expressions are not a feature that "haunts" SQL databases, because unlike graph databases, relational databases ARE built for that, and it's one of the primary reasons SQL databases are very resilient to change in face of constantly changing ad-hoc query requirements. And it's an important feature of relational algebra that is used every day by countless applications.

SQL and GraphQL serve different purposes at different application layers. Both do precisely what they have to do. The fact they're a bit similar is not coincidental, but also they're not mutually replaceable.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

What customers hate is tier 1 support acting as a brick wall between them and the people with the solution to their problem. Or at least that's how they perceive it.

While I don't shout at tech support, as I know what the script is, you better believe my blood is quietly boiling as I'm rebooting various devices that have nothing to do with the issue on their instruction, just so I can get to an appointment with technicians to fix my real issue.

Same thing occurs with GP doctors, and basically every other system in tiers, where it inevitably organizes to basically stall you, so people don't overload the higher tiers.

slver

5 lat temudiscuss

> Sounds like a customer support person just made up a reason.

This happens a lot, I find. People just hate having no answer for you. So they make up one.

comments