What is fascinating about the new #AI#LLM revolution is that a storm is coming, the experts are telling us, we can see it, and it will be fascinating to see how industry reacts.
In short, #programming as a profession is going to largely die. I hear numbers like "in ten years" being bandied about, though I'm skeptical of the timeframe.
Developers are the 21st century version of the well-paid #Luddite textile workers, except we have years of advance warning,.
@mjgardner@wordshaper Having worked with 4GLs, the reason they failed is because, while powerful, they don't have the general purpose capability of 3GLs and people keep having to fall back on the latter.
#AI is working because you can often spend a few hours building software that previously would have taken weeks and this is only the beginning. Best practices will turn into standards which will turn into frameworks. This is already happening.
There is very much a model with LLMs and we already have ones fine-tuned for code generation instead of chat or research. Keep in mind that we're seeing tremendous advances all the time and the tech is only a year old (though the seminal paper was published in 2017)
It turns out that generating apps is old-fashioned: gather requirements, create a design, refine in, implement it in chunks while testing it. So far it's working well, despite its infancy.
In what is sure to cause another round of, er, interesting discussion, I've gone ahead and submitted a pre-PPC to the #Perl porters for adding native data checks (types, but we don't use that word) to the language.
@leonerd It's previously been asked that we send a pre-PPC prior to spending time and energy writing up a PPC.
The pre-PPC is supposed to be "does P5P want to see a PPC?" That's how I understood the process. Did I misunderstand? My opening paragraph started with "this is a pre-PPC." So I'm waiting for P5P to say "yes" or "no."
I'm going deaf. In my naïveté, I strongly suspect it's easier than going blind, but nonetheless, I'm grateful for even poorly generated AI close captioning.
My alternatives are to blast movies to volumes my family can't handle or to figure out what was meant mean the caption insists Gimli the dwarf said "toast me" instead of "toss me".
I'll take the imperfect over the non-existent. AI may be problematic, but not everyone will lose.
I have no idea how such a shitty product can exist. Same price buys you a Chromebook; there are plenty of software libre distraction-free writing apps out there (try opening a terminal and typing "vim"?).
Or you could chicken out and buy a Kindle Fire Max 11 with keyboard case for the same price.
Both of these let you type for more than a day on a charge: the only benefit of the freewrite alpha is an 80 hour battery, which is pointless with USB-C charging everywhere.
The hell? "Word processors" were a thing back in the 1960s, dedicated single-use computers that everyone dropped in the 80s because, you know, "single use."
This looks like some weird nostalgia trip.
Next up, someone's going to offer an IoT Pet Rock™ you can't lose.
A manual typewriter with cloud storage? Given that I learned to type in the 80s on a manual, I now feel the pull! This sounds like a hugely fun hobby project, but as a consumer gadget, uh, no.
But still, the description makes my socks roll up and down! (Off to search for Freewrite)
A little quirk in #Python that I can't wrap my head around. Rounding seems to round up or down depending on whether or not the int() value is odd or even. Anyone know why?
>>> [{n+.5: round(n+.5) for n in range(0,10)}]
[{0.5: 0, 1.5: 2, 2.5: 2, 3.5: 4, 4.5: 4, 5.5: 6, 6.5: 6, 7.5: 8, 8.5: 8, 9.5: 10}]
Fun fact: La Rochelle has more visitors per capita than any other city in France (yes, that includes Paris). It was an amazing place to live. We would have stayed there, but it we couldn't find a place both large enough for our needs and safe enough for our cats :(
I wish I had a small games company at my disposal because I am visualizing the casual game BABYSPLAT, in which you're kind of playing Lemmings with babies that go SPLAT when dropped: the goal is to keep them from falling through holes in the clouds long enough to convince the blob giving birth to them to Accept Jeezus into her heart. At which point the babies still drop and go SPLAT, but then rise up to heaven on angel wings to the strains of "every sperm is sacred".
Given your software background, if you can stomach #AI, you can do this yourself in a few hours.
The guy who created "Angry Pumpkins" did this and even included the prompts he used to generate the game. Unfortunately, they're on the birdsite, but here's the Thread Reader App summary.
25 years ago today, Nov 20, 1998, was the day I came out as a trans woman at work. It was the last place I was presenting male, so as soon as I got home I stopped, and was myself full time. Transition has made me much, much happier than I was before.
The first Transgender Day of Remembrance was held one year later, on Nov 20, 1999.
I'm profoundly grateful that I've been so fortunate, and my heart breaks for those who were not. It's still a brutal world for trans people.
@dgoldsmith Around the same time, in a conservative corporate environment, one of our techs showed up in a dress, a wig, and bad lipstick. I was very confused, not understanding, but just continued talking to her like I did before. She later told me she was grateful because I was the only person who didn't laugh.
Wherever she is now, I hope she's found happiness.
I know the changes in the world are tough, but people like you are helping to make it a better place. Thank you.
@1dalm@cstross@Lazarou Orion, part of the Constellation program, was killed by Obama after the Augustine Committee found it was not possible to meet ANY of its objectives. A mess, but Obama did the right thing.
Congress was upset about losing so many jobs, so they forced Obama to backtrack, and that led to Artemis/SLS. It's (sort of) an international effort, so it's politically easier to sustain than Constellation.
Yes, it sucks, but everyone would have had the knives out for Constellation.
@cstross@1dalm@Lazarou Also, I strongly suspect that Blue Origin (founded before SpaceX) has struggled because they had too much money and their people knew that if they failed, Bezos would still keep the money coming. Many a tech startup has failed because they made this mistake after getting their initial funding, so they stopped pushing.
The broken government model suffers from a very similar problem (amongst many others, of course).
However, I'd first consider looking at PSGI/Plack (https://plackperl.org/). If you can switch to that, your Perl code is pretty-much server-agnostic at that point. Makes it much easier to switch servers if you need to.
@miyagawa could probably answer questions about that, too (he wrote PSGI/Plack)
We've made stuff like this work before, but it requires a commitment from management to see it through.
The last time we did something similar, it was almost two years of effort on the part of myself and another developer, but it paid off handsomely at the end, giving them capabilities they previously only dreamed of before.
Two things. First, it was ukuli two made the comparison to #Nietzsche, not me.
Second, with only 500 characters, it's hard to get in-depth.
Rand's philosophy mostly looks like classic #libertarianism justified by an epistomological framework. But given how extremist it is (that's not a value judgment, but an assessment of its positioning), I see no viable adoption path with a democracy. So how would you get there? If you say "not democracy", what then?