I imagine that LLMs will largely rule out the emergence of new programming languages, since AIs will struggle to learn them in the absence of legacy stackoverflow questions. That might not be a bad thing.
#AI #LLM

Solar panels cleaning solar panels

I’d love to know exactly how people recycle things like hand soap refill bags, which are supposed to cleaned and dried — on the inside. Do they cut them open, scrub and dry them? Same with sometimes-food-stained plastic containers. Are we all pretending to do this sort of thing?

And on the other side we hear that small amounts of food left on plastics can cause a whole bunch of recycling to be rejected at the sorting centre.

Like is any of this real, or are we just cargo culting it?

I keep seeing takes that LLMs are not a great way to code because natural language is not a great way to express complex problems. Sure, but this is missing the point. LLMs don’t replace programming languages, they replace programmers. The requirements are communicated to the programmers in natural language too.

So I don’t think this is the slam dunk argument people think it is. And the proof for a lot of people is in the pudding: LLMs are actually pretty good at taking vague natural language instructions and producing working code. And they do it quickly and allow a feedback loop.

There are plenty of good reasons to reject LLMs: the environmental impact, the industrial-scale plagiarism and copyright violation, and the fact that they are yet another move to devalue skilled jobs in favour of yet more rentier capitalism, etc etc. But we have to accept that they are actually pretty good at programming.

€25 if you leave something in an Uber and you want to get it back, it seems.

@dbattistella Got fed up listening to him not answering the question though, and what he had to say about the band’s pro-Hamas/Hisbollah chants at the gig. Ironic though they may have been, dumb words will eventually come back to haunt you.

Issue #80 is now live! With writing on Bataille, Nabokov, Derrida, Socrates, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Adorno, and Marx. Language, virtue, ideology, and economics. Jump in at once:

https://epochemagazine.org/issues/80/

#Philosophy @philosophy

@alisca It is a bit in fairness!

And congratulations by the way.

Just saw “All of us Strangers”. Beautiful, sad film.
#AllOfUsStrangers

@jgordon Spotlight used to be great. Now it’s like, “I can’t immediately find what you want, so here’s some search garbage…”

@boby_biq And also have enough money (and power) to go it alone if they have to.

@sinabhfuil Wow, haven’t seen anything like this on a state or quango site. Rare enough even on the web in general.

Gosh, the RSA really cares about road safety https://www.rsa.ie/road-safety/education/road-safety-videos

https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2025/0413/1507434-call-over-junior-minister-comments-on-adhd-autism/

“She said ADHD and autism seemed to be where the trend is going before adding that "trend" may be the wrong word.

The minister had been told recently by consultant psychiatrists leading Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) teams that ADHD represented between 50% and 70% of their referrals.”

I really hate this kind of political opportunism. Whether “trend” was the right word or not, she should be judged on her basis of her results.

@cstross I think it’s simpler than that. He thinks he holds all the cards, that he’s the boss of bosses, so everyone should pay tribute or go to the mattresses (and lose).

There's a story/joke that everyone who's been in engineering for very long has heard. The one about a company balking at a bill, only to get an itemized one with "knowing where to put the X, $10,000."

It turns out, this story is _TRUE_:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/

Forget Tesla, Steinmetz was the real genius.

@robpike mentioned this in a lecture.

@bullivant Honestly, it’s always hard to know if the omission is intentional, and that’s the bloody point. The whole thing could be convincingly framed as a joke on Waterford. 😂

Reminds me of https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2055207884/tv3-acknowledge-waterford-finally but there are many many more examples.