wd40
We are all such dorks.
wd40
We are all such dorks.
One of the worst words in the English language is “intermittent.”
C is dangerous like your uncle who drinks and smokes. Y’wanna make a weedwhacker-powered skateboard? Bitchin’! Nail that fucker on there good, she’ll be right. Get a bunch of C folks together and they’ll avoid all the stupid easy ways to kill somebody, in service to building something properly dangerous. They’ll raise the stakes from “accident” to “disaster.” Whether or not it works, it’s gonna blow people away.
C++ is dangerous like a quiet librarian who knows exactly which forbidden tomes you’re looking for. He and his… associates… will gladly share all the dark magic you know how to ask about. They’ll assure you, oh no no no, the power cosmic would never turn someone inside-out, without sufficient warning. They don’t question why a loving god would allow the powers you crave. They will show you which runes to carve, and then, they will hand you the knife.
As a userscript author, it is some bullshit.
I have to admit - my initial outrage over Copilot training on open-source code has vanished.
Now that these networks are trained on literally anything they can grab, including extremely copyrighted movies… we’ve seen that they’re either thoroughly transformative soup, or else the worst compression and search tools you’ve ever seen. There’s not really a middle ground. The image models where people have teased out lookalike frames for Dune or whatever aren’t good at much else. The language models that try to answer questions as more than dream-sequence autocomplete poetry will confidently regurgitate dangerous nonsense because they’re immune to sarcasm.
The comparisons to a human learning from code by reading it are half-right. There are systems that discern relevant information without copying specific examples. They’re just utterly terrible at applying that information. Frankly, so are the ones copying specific examples. Once again, we’ve advanced the state of “AI,” and the A went a lot further than the I.
And I cannot get offended on Warner Brothers’ behalf if a bunch of their DVDs were sluiced into a model that can draw Superman. I don’t even care when people copy their movies wholesale. Extracting the essence of an iconic character from those movies is obviously a transformative use. If some program will emit “slow motion zoom on Superman slapping Elon Musk,” just from typing that, that’s cool as hell and I refuse to pretend otherwise. It’s far more interesting than whatever legal fictions both criminalized 1700s bootlegging and encouraged Walt Disney’s corpse to keep drawing.
So consider the inverse:
Someone trains a Copilot clone on a dataset including the leaked Windows source code.
Do you expect these corporations to suddenly claim their thing is being infringed upon, in front of any judge with two working eyes?
More importantly - do you think that stupid robot would be any help what-so-ever to Wine developers? I don’t. These networks are good at patterns, not specifics. Good is being generous. If I wanted that illicit network to shamelessly clone Windows code, I expect the brace style would definitely match, the syntax might parse, and the actual program would do approximately dick.
Neural networks feel like magic when hideously complex inputs have sparse approximate outputs. A zillion images could satisfy the request, “draw a cube.” Deep networks given a thousand human examples will discern some abstract concept of cube-ness… and also the fact you handed those thousand humans a blue pen. It’s simply not a good match for coding. Software development is largely about hideously complex outputs that satisfy sparse inputs in a very specific way. One line, one character, can screw things up in ways that feel incomprehensible. People have sneered about automation taking over coding since the punched-tape era, and there’s damn good reasons it keeps taking their jobs instead of ours. We’re not doing it on purpose. We’re always trying to make our work take less work. We simply do not know how to tell the machine to do what we do with machines. And apparently - neither do the machines.
I assumed he was big on Macs for their own sake. It’s a thing, for music geeks - and obviously he’s a fan of iPods, specifically. Surprised to hear his objectively correct summary of Windows versions.
Nah it’s fine, we’ll just do the whole website in Shockwave.
Linux Mint is the most Windows-like Linux distro.
Ubuntu is the most Microsoft-like Linux project.
Programming is the gradual collection of mantras.
Mint is the distro that’s most like Windows, but Ubuntu is the project that’s most like Microsoft.
Nvidia’s grip on CUDA needs breaking, one way or another.
NTFS for the drive I had before jumping to Mint. Currently reporting several hundred gigabytes free, but refusing to make any new files, because… I don’t know. I’ll deal with it after an upcoming move.
The OS / home SSD is ext4, and so is the fat loud hard disk I recently purchased through an entire month of fighting Amazon over gift cards.
I’m in this rubber room with you and I’d like my multi-row tabs back.
This is, in purely technical terms, some bullshit.
That’s basically how Javascript gets extended. I put off learning jQuery for so long that all the features I’d want are now standard.
The fact it’s now in the dictionary proper is bizarre… but I mean… so is “okay.” And that’s almost the same ascended joke.
Knowing chickens, it’s more like training them not to attack except on command.
… as in fuck off into the woods and farm chickens?
I can and have, and it’s still a tremendous pain in the ass to launder the addresses for labels. The hottest loop in the game draws an arbitrary span of the same tile. It should be trivial to do a jump table - to grab an address from an array and go there. 13 tiles? goto jump[13]
. (Or really some stack / return shenanigans, because the 6502 is odd.) But if there’s any way to get cc65 to shove the location of an instruction into an array, I haven’t found it.
“Why does YAML suck?” is a question. “Why YAML sucks” is an explanation.