Surely I can't be the only person whose first reaction to seeing a company is named "Hugging Face" is to wonder if they sell Alien xenomorphs bloodily bursting out of human abdominal cavities as a service?
@cstross I've heard they did it because they thought "hugging" sounded friendly and human. They're a French company, so I guesss this was a case of not having heard the "facehugger" reference.
When your Republican friends and family thump the Bible and deny that the Constitution establishes a separation of church and state, just remind them that their patron saint, Ronald Reagan, strongly disagrees.
Edit: changed "conservative" to "Republican" because the latter are not the former.
Don't get me wrong. Reagan was an awful president in many, many ways, but explaining that to your Republican friends when you're shoving him down their throat is probably bad timing.
This is not a software glitch, it's the Y1C problem: old mainframes were so storage-constrained that they only allocated two decimal digits for passenger age, and adding another digit would mean rewriting software that in some cases has been in use and constantly patched since the late 1950s. https://press.coop/@BBCNews/112345996328670433
@cstross As an ex-COBOL programmer who was knee-deep in the Y2K mess, one of the issues is that many of those old COBOL programs were compiled, but the source code was lost.
In some cases, corporations were worried COBOL vendors would disappear, so they created incompatible, in-house COBOL compilers, making the mess even worse!
Naturally, there were no tests to verify that the software functioned correctly ...
My favorite bit? In 2000, I was trying to fix a COBOL program which included the comment "Converted from punch cards in 1968." I was born in '67, so I'm sure it was written before I was born, yet it was mission-critical software for that company.
I was in my 30s at the time, which would have made me one of the older devs in many companies, but for COBOL I was the youngest. They were confused when I complained about the use of GOTO for all flow control ...
@jackwilliambell@DanielEriksson@cstross The paucity of features in COBOL coupled with JCL are part of why it's so powerful! You'd write a simply COBOL project, save the data, the next step in the JCL would use that data, and so on.
I've always found it fascinating that it was so powerful because it could do less. Definitely a lesson that's been lost.
MySQL folks take a lot of things for granted that are not present in this form in Postgres, and that may be a bad surprise when you try out "the other system".
MySQL for example has a stable and upwards- and slightly-downwards-compatible on-disk format, mostly. Oracle sometimes forgets how important that is and makes changes, or unannounced changes, and then needs to be corrected, hard, by their development partners and testers.
@isotopp I definitely prefer PostgreSQL to #MySQL, but #PostgreSQL deciding that collation derives from your system's locale settings when PostgreSQL installed means identical setups on different boxes can behave differently. This is NOT FUN to debug.
I've heard that there was discussion to change this, but I don't know if it happened.
@Alice@amiserabilist People hate me for this, but as someone who used to be less embarrassed to say "Asperger's" instead of "autistic," I speak up when I see the term.
Pre WWII, Asperger belonged to organizations with strong Pan-German and anti-Semitic leanings,. He referred to his patients as "autistic psychopaths," helped legitimize "racial hygience," and clearly collaborated with Nazis in Vienna.
Reminds me of years ago when a new developer (switching from C++ to #Perl) joined a team I was on. We asked him if he preferred #emacs or #vim. He replied, "nano."
@holgerschurig@luap@l13u7anant Though I recall a time at the BBC where they concluded an unmaintainable Perl monolith was too slow and spent years rewriting it in C++. They not only created a new, unmaintainable monolith, but it was also too slow. Turns out no one profiled the original software to find out the real reasons it was slow.
@enobacon I don't like the list of special names either. We could find a cleaner solution, but overload.pm is showing its age. There's been discussion about cleaning it up and offering a new version.
One of the biggest issues with LLMs today is their massive power consumption needs, along with performance. To entrepreneurs, these are opportunities, not problems. As a result, there are two new developments in AI which you should know about.
It's https://groq.com/ which is more exciting for now. They've built the Groq Tensor Streaming Processor (TSP). GPUs are powerful, but they're not optimized for modern AI usage. The TSP is. Groq answers your queries at an astonishing 500 tokens per second. Instead of watching words pop up on your screen one at a time, like you were reading some 1985 BBS, the answer is almost instantly there. Check them out!