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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • AI coding tools can do common, simple functions reasonably well, because there are lots of examples of those to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is a large corpus of data to train with.

    AI coding tools can’t do sophisticated, specific-case solutions very well, because there aren’t many examples of those for any given use case to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is a small corpus of data to train with.

    AI coding tools can’t solve new problems at all, because there are no examples of those to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is no corpus of data to train with.

    AI coding tools have already ingested all of the code available on the Internet to train with. There is no more new data to feed in. AI coding tools will not get substantially better than they are now. All of the theft that could be committed has been committed, which is why the AI development companies are attempting to feed generated training material into their models. Every review of this shows that it makes the output from generative models worse rather than better.

    Programming is not about writing code. That is what a manager thinks.
    Programming is about solving problems. Generative AI doesn’t think, so it cannot solve problems. All it can do is regurgitate material that it has previously ingested which is hopefully close-ish to the problem you’re trying to solve at the moment - material which was written by a real thinking human that solved that problem (or a similar one) at some point in the past.

    If you patronize a generative AI system like Claude Code, you are paying into, participating in, and complicit in, the largest example of labor theft in history.



  • This may not be the approach you have in mind, and it kind of depends on the kid’s personality, but one of the ways to de-glorify and de-romanticize something is to de-mistify it, to take it out of fantasy and make it real (to the point of being mundane).

    To that end, consider Forgotten Weapons on YouTube. Ian will discuss a single gun, its design history, manufacturing, intended use, disassembly and cleaning, along with regular reminders about gun safety. Ian will even talk about the political and financing decisions that led to a particular gun being made (accounting is of course the height of glory).

    If the kid finds the history, engineering and basic maintenance discussion to be boring, they might lose interest in the topic altogether. Alternatively, if they find it interesting, you might steer an unhealthy interest in violence toward something productive (history and/or mechanical engineering).

    Keep in mind that forbidding access to something just adds to the mystery and romance around it and can have the effect of increasing the desire for it.


  • Empire of the Sun is a film about civilians caught in a war zone.

    The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, is a collection of short stories about the Vietnam War. It shows the exhilaration, the terror, the cruelty and hardship of living through a war. It definitely doesn’t glorify conflict.

    My War Gone By, I Miss It So, by Anthony Loyd, is a firsthand account of the Bosnian conflict of the 90s. It is ugly and brutal, and the author tries to give an honest presentation of his own state of mind at the time.

    Black Hawk Down (the book, not the movie), by Mark Bowden, is a fairly thorough account of the incident in Mogadishu in 1993. Bowden did a lot of research and describes the political background that led to the UN and US presence in Somalia, and all of the mistakes that led up to the helicopter being shot down and what happened after. He interviewed many of the military personnel who were actually involved and recounts the events from several different perspectives. And as the Wikipedia article says:

    Bowden simultaneously manages to capture the siege mentality felt by both civilians and the US soldiers, as well as the broad sentiment among many residents that the Rangers were to blame for the majority of the battle casualties.

    This is a very realistic presentation of what combat is like, framed inside the perspective of the overall military operation. Bowden doesn’t shy away from describing the mistakes in decision-making, but also does a fair job of describing how lack of information or bad information leads to bad decisions in the moment which result in people dying for no good reason. He definitely doesn’t glorify the conflict. My overall impression after reading it was “I hope I never have to be involved in anything like that”.

    And finally, Alice’s Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie, is a song about the draft.

    if you wanna end war’n’stuff ya gotta sing loud



  • Ah, interesting, is V an anarchist?

    I’ve seen the movie more recently than read the book, so I don’t remember the exact presentation, but… don’t you think the phrase:

    People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

    Imply that V expects governments to exist?

    V has both personal and ideological problems with the current establishment, but I’m not sure that he’s completely against any establishment.









  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubtoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev𝚒𝚏...
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    19 days ago

    No no, the imperative “get six” overrides the previous “buy a gallon of milk” if the “they have eggs” condition is met.

    “get six” implies x === 6 not x = x + 6, that would be “get six more

    The real problem is that “buy” was only specified in the first case. Because the conditional was met, he should get six gallons of milk but not buy them.



  • You SHOULD NOT do software RAID with hard drives in separate external USB enclosures.

    There will be absolutely no practical benefit to this setup, and it will just create risk of transcription errors between the mirrored drives due to any kind of problems with the USB connections, plus traffic overhead as the drives constantly update their mirroring. You will kill your USB controller, and/or the IO boards in the enclosures. It will be needlessly slow and not very fault-tolerant.

    If this hardware setup is really your best option, what you should do is use 1 of the drives as the active primary for the server, and push backups to the other drive (with a properly configured backup application, not RAID mirroring). That way each drive is fully independent from the other, and the backup drive is not dependent on anything else. This will give you the best possible redundancy with this hardware.