Are any of ChatGPT's statements erroneous? (how come Terence Tao gets this high quality output but I get hallucinations when I ask simpler math stuff?)
This retro-terminal-website trend is so weird. When I was growing up, all the computers had was a fixed-width character set. Then GUI operating systems came out in the early 90s and PDFs and web browsers. Free from the fixed-width tyranny.
It belongs in certain places, but readable prose is not one of them.
Confused here. Are you talking about the execution speed of the compiler's output, or the compilation time itself? Java's compiler is extremely fast, compared to a C compiler. (I haven't used Rust or Zig so I don't have any experience with those.)
I think there is a loose connection. Hofstadter's 1979 masterpiece, Gödel Escher Bach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach --- mentioned in an earlier reply), has a chapter called Contracrostipuntus (https://genius.com/Douglas-hofstadter-contracrostipunctus-an...) which describes an arms-race tension between Crab's "perfect" record player and Tortoise's mischievous records designed to be unplayable on that record player, with titles such as "I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X". Crab's then invents a "Record Player Omega" which includes an ahead-of-time "scanning" step to reconfigure itself based on the record it scans...
All of which reminds me of virus-scanning on computers, and AI efforts for "safety".
I agree mental health is important and have struggled with similar issues... but it is hard to read prose in fixed-width typefaces. Please consider a more readable serif variable-width typeface.
I want it to commit on my behalf, and I don't pay full attention before commits. But I do review every line at the PR level, just as I would if some other human were to submit a PR, and if I find something off, then I ask it to fix it before I will approve the PR.
re: automatic coauthoring -- you can turn that off, but I prefer to turn that on. Commit ownership is something that I want to make clear was not just a human, but a human + AI. Agentic coding does get special treatment from me, because the volition to make changes doesn't come from me. I want that to be clear in the history. The only time I do my own commits (without the coauthor line) is when I make some change myself, without a coding agent.
Really interesting article but there's one thing I wanted to point out about the reasons for code review:
> If a company were shipping bugs at, say, a hundredth the rate we were at Centaur while relying primarily on review to catch bugs, then I could see their point, but that's not what's happening at the typical software company where people don't want to move away from human review [there might be non quality (as in non bug rate) related reasons to keep human review, such as keeping a high bar for code quality or keeping the codebase human-understandable, which pretty much immediately stops being the case if you let a fleet of agents go wild on a codebase] because of the perceived risk of shipping bugs.
I don't agree that the main point of a code review is quality assurance; there are other reasons that have more to do with team convergence and junior staff learning: https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/807.php
Really liked it, and somewhat envious that you were able to create such a well-written, cohesive piece of just about the right length. (I blog on different topics and it's so hard to keep things short and not wandering.)
I've used these while working as a volunteer in a camp kitchen during work weekends, where we had maybe 20-40 guests eating a meal. You put dishes/silverware/pots/pans/whatever in a square tray, push it into one side of the Hobart, and pull down a lever to close the doors and start the cycle. They take a number of minutes that you can count on one hand... I seem to remember 90-120 seconds but I'm not sure. Stuff comes out clean and hot on the other side, and you want to pipeline this so it's one person with dirty hands feeding stuff in, and one person with clean hands (and thick gloves) pulling the square trays out, letting them cool, and putting the clean dishes/etc. away.
They release a huge amount of steam and they're wonderful for this kind of volume (20-40 people at a meal + all the cooking implements to support this). Larger than home use, though --- unless of course you had a mansion with servants. And I get the sense that maintenance and operating costs would be a lot higher than a regular plain dishwasher.
"The geography caveat matters. A data center in the Scottish Highlands and one in Phoenix, Arizona, face very different realities. But even in warmer climates, the shift toward 45-degrees-Celsius coolant moves operators significantly closer to that chiller-less ideal — where chillers may turn on just a few days a year when the outside air temperature demands it."
https://twitter.com/jms_embedded