With this in mind, how concerned should we really be about a pre-registered list of unverified plugins? The only new information exposed is the URLs of these various plugins, is this information so private if it was already registered in their list to begin with?
That just generated an empty test function in a convenient place for me. I'm not just talking about boilerplate, it's definitely a more... organic-feeling sort of pattern matching. In fact, one of the things I find most interesting about it is the sort of mistakes it makes, like generating wrong field names (as if it simply took a guess). This is the sort of thing that I've grown to expect the deterministic tooling of IDEs to get right, so it always surprises me a bit.
By the same token, often it takes a stab at generating code based on something's name (plus whatever context it's looking at) and does a better job than the IDE could, because the IDE just sees datatypes and code structure. It really does feel like a complementary tool.
Copilot (the existing gpt-3 one) definitely helps at writing unit tests. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't nail it, but one thing it can do reliably is to repeat a pattern, and I don't know about you, but my unit tests tend to repeat the same pattern (with some tweaks to test this-or-that-case). Quite often it infers the correct change from the name I gave the test method, but even if it doesn't it'll write a 90% correct case for me. I imagine the GPT-4 version will do more of the same with better results.
It cannot replace reasoning, but it can augment it (by suggesting patterns and implementations from its latent space that I hadn't thought of), and worst case it can replace quite a bit of typing.
Long-term, it remains to be seen how far bigger/better/stronger LLMs can push the illusion of rationality. In many fields, they may be able to simply build their ability to pattern-match to beyond some threshold of usefulness. Perhaps (some subset of) programming will be one of them.
There's an intuitive model that makes some sense of this finding: Masks, air filters, and distancing are effective at preventing transmission by reducing -- not eliminating -- viral load. What suffices to prevent infection from a 15-second encounter with a stranger in line at the supermarket, may not be enough when kids are in the same room breathing the same air 6 hours of every day.
We now know what it takes to protect a person from COVID in an environment where they are likely to be exposed to significant virus concentrations; unfortunately, getting kids to scrub up like COVID ward nurses is probably not realistic.
The essay [1] from which the hairdryer anecdote is quoted has the thesis that categories (in general) are instrumental, and don't have much value separated from their context.
ADHD is a category of psychiatric diagnosis; psychiatric diagnoses exist to address deficiencies in function. Separating the one from the other, as you perceive, renders it meaningless -- or perhaps, useless. If one happens to have some of the traits of ADHD but it doesn't affect their life negatively, so what?
I had the same experience cancelling my subscription. I was able to avoid the sales pitch the author received (I guess I was a little firmer), but I doubt I'll be subscribing again after I realized there was no unsubscribe button.
The gameplay experience is extremely impressive. I expected input lag and streaming quality to be problematic, but I've been a frequent stadia player ever since my (free) premium bundle arrived around Christmas and issues have been rare.
The only thing stopping me from spending more money on games is the fact that I expect it to just evaporate one day and take the games I "bought" with it. Moving to a licensing arrangement to let me play the games I already own/could retain even if Stadia goes away, would help a lot in this regard.
The "object" syntax reminds me a lot of Clojure/script's Hiccup (https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup) style, which has become a de-facto standard across many popular libraries. In hiccup, this example:
On July 11, 7-11 offers a free slurpee to all customers. The free slurpee cup is a fraction of the size of any of the already-very-cheap options available for sale.
I have seen lineups out the door and around the block on this occasion. I think this illustrates very well people's well-known tendency to irrationally value free stuff.
The incinerators used in this case (claim to) recapture the emissions from the incineration. However, they do leave some amount of toxic ash, which requires special disposal.
I think it has less to do with the languages themselves, and more to do with the frameworks available, and the metaprogram-y things those frameworks are free to do without a type system stopping them.
I've yet to see the equivalent of Django or Rails when it comes to rapidly assembling a database-backed CRUD app in a statically typed language.
.NET-the-technology is pretty good, but for many developers, .NET is synonymous with expensive licensing and tooling (and you pretty much have to use Windows, ick).
The JVM and .NET are presently about the same capability-wise, but Java is (or at least, is perceived as) much easier and cheaper to freely experiment with. Unless you need to use C# for some deep Windows integration, this makes Java the obvious choice for anyone without sunk costs in the .NET ecosystem.
With this in mind, how concerned should we really be about a pre-registered list of unverified plugins? The only new information exposed is the URLs of these various plugins, is this information so private if it was already registered in their list to begin with?