And how many millions of people are fairly good at being a software developer?

I think “fairly good” was an understatement on my part… Tim Berners-Lee got a knighthood for being “fairly good” as a software developer, as he invented the worldwide web. Kier Starmer got a knighthood for being “fairly good” as a public procecutor for handling a number of cases of national importance extremely well. What have you done that has significantly changed the country for the better?

You’ve got to consider the difficulty/seniority of the job, a general doing a “fairly good” job is more likely to get a medal than a private doing a “fairly good” job who’ll get fuck all

He did a fairly good job as the head of criminal prosecutions in the UK for around 5 years, and he was knighted to recognise that when he stepped down

See also “they have a hot head” vs “they have a hot body/face”

🌈 sex 🌈

Unironically… Look it up

LLMs have a very predictable and consistent approach to grammar, punctuation, style and general cadence which is easily identifiable when compared to human written content. It’s kind of a watermark but it’s one the creators are aware of and are seeking to remove. That means if you want to use LLMs as a writing aid of any sort and want it to read somewhat naturally, you’ll have to either get it to generate bullet points and expand on them yourself, or get it to generate the content then rewrite it word for word in a style you’d write it in.

Intel Arc also works surprisingly fine and consistently for ML if you use llama.cpp for LLMs or Automatic for stable diffusion, it’s definitely much closer to Nvidia in terms of usability than it is to AMD

Docker fan mindset

What OS doesn’t do that, even linux has xdg dirs

2 was by far the most polished, but 3 had more features so I guess ideal lies somewhere in the middle

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I’m saying I have no sympathy for Palestinians who can’t sympathise with other people who were forced from their homes, or Israelis who can’t do the same. They are free to dislike the IDF, but using them as an excuse to hate Jews and/or Israelis is no better than the people who hate all Palestinians and/or Arabs masking or justifying it with their hatred of Hamas.

It makes sense to support the Arabs who got displaced from their homes by Israeli settlers, as well as Jews who were forced out of theirs due to their religion and had nowhere else to go but Israel, but if you’re a member of one of those groups and can’t empathise with the other (eg Hamas, IDF and their supporters) then you should get no sympathy at all.

Thing is a conscience (and any emotions, and feelings in general) is just chemicals affecting electrical signals in the brain… If a ML model such as an LLM uses parameters to affect electrical signals through its nodes then is it on us to say it can’t have a conscience, or feel happy or sad, or even pain?

Sure the inputs and outputs are different, but when you have “real” inputs it’s possible that the training data for “weather = rain” is more downbeat than “weather = sun” so is it reasonable to say that the model gets depressed when it’s raining?

The weightings will change leading to a a change in the electrical signals, which emulates pretty closely what happens in our heads

You see humans everywhere you go

I don’t know if it’s that unless you live in Nigeria, India, SEA etc.

In high income countries, the cities have grown in population and there’s fewer people in rural areas, so sure you’re going to see people in cities in urban areas and in touristy rural areas during common vacation times, but that’s been the case for ages and for the rest of the time there’s still plenty of easily accessible places where you can get away from people.

There’s also people capitalising on people wanting to be away from humans so they advertise “retreats” which are full of other humans, but just don’t go there and camp in the middle of nowhere instead and there won’t be humans for miles around

So personally I prefer Erlang to Elixir - the language feels more like it was designed around the programming paradigms it supports (message passing, everything’s one of about 6 types for efficient serialisation etc), whereas Elixir feels like “what if we made a language with syntax like Ruby that worked like (and with the backend of) Erlang?” - there are some aspects I like, such as how the vast majority of things, even def, are a function call, and the parameter lists, but it feels very much like there’s a lot of workarounds of the design principles of the language to get it to work

I also prefer Gleam to Elixir - it brings much nicer functional programming than either Erlang or Elixir and of course typing, which feels very missing from Elixir but not from Erlang, which is far clearer that something is one of very few types and lets you handle multiple types in a very natural feeling way. It also feels more akin to modern “full featured” (as opposed to scripting) languages than either Erlang or Elixir does.

Basically if you’re learning something for employability, learn Elixir. If you’re learning something for a potential business idea, use Gleam. If you’re learning something for personal projects, see if Erlang is intuitive for you - if it is, I can guarantee you’ll love it, if not, use Gleam.

Can code in without code completion or checking the docs: C, C#, Scala, F#, SQL (ms server), js/ts, Erlang, Elixir

Have a general idea of but may need to check things about the standard library every so often: Kotlin, Python, OCaml, C++, prolog

Have used in the past but would need to look up the syntax to use again: Go, Rust, Haskell, Java, Gleam

I’m probably missing some from each category though

I mean there’s an argument to be made that once the allegations are public, there’ll be in investigation regardless, and if you don’t want to go through the ordeal of being grilled by probably some of the best lawyers in the world or put your family through finding your body then it makes sense to commit suicide that way and still have a big impact

Except that’s only how it works mathematically, not in practice due to human nature. Perceived value of money would be something really interesting to study as there’s just so many variables of which wealth is one, but I’m not even sure it’s the most important when compared to upbringinging, source of money (do you work for it, even if you’re overpaid, vs winning the lottery/being a parasite like selling mineral rights or buying properties and getting a management company you’re not involved in to rent them out etc.) and others

They’re just Auth-Lefties

I’m not sure they’re even that, to me it seems like it’s people with so much hatred of their life that they then blame on western culture, which means they much criticise anything the west do and praise anything the enemies or alternatives to the west do, including praising authoritarians and terrorists as they’re against the west and so are fighting for the same cause

Same thing with seceding

It depends on the situation though…

There’s voting to secede (East Timor), seceding through civil war (South Sudan, Somaliland, Ireland), sededing through coup (collapse of the Soviet Union), wanting to secede but being oppressed by a regime (Catalonia to an extent, Cabinda, Xinjiang) and a foreign regime deciding part of your territory wants to secede because they want control over it (Abkhazia & South Ossetia being invaded by Russia, same with much of Ukraine, Armenia invading and genociding Artsakh in the 1990s and then Azerbaijan invading and genociding it back recently)

How do you define “standing in their way” with all these and when you’ve even had places like Malta and Singapore being forced to secede against their will, it’s never as clean as “this is what the people want”

That said, recognising Palestine while also very much not simple is clearly the desire of the majority of the people there, but still there are places with equal popular support and implementation of independence that aren’t recognised but you’re always going to piss someone off I guess