> However, if your program compiles _and_ the logic is correct, there's a high likelihood that your program won't crash (provided you handle errors and such, you cannot trust data coming from outside, allocations to always work, etc).
That is one hell of a copium disclaimer. "If you hold it right..."
Rust certainly doesn't make it impossible to write bad code. What it does do is nudge you towards writing good code to a noticeably appreciable degree, which is laudable compared to the state of the industry at large.
I feel like you're attacking a strawman here. Of course you can write unreliable software in Rust. I'm not aware of anyone who says you can't. The point is not that it's a magic talisman that makes your software good, the point is that it helps you to make your software good in ways other languages (in particular C/C++ which are the primary point of comparison for Rust) do not. That's all.
> The point is not that it's a magic talisman that makes your software good, the point is that it helps you to make your software good in ways other languages (in particular C/C++ which are the primary point of comparison for Rust) do not.
Both of those are extremely recyclable and have more manageable separation problems. There's not much of a solar recycling industry because the panels generally have longer lifetimes than the minimum advertised - they last until weather damage.
(the thin film ones are a separate category, some of which contain more poisonous materials, but fortunately they were never really economic)
Speaking of Slashdot, some fairly frequent poster had a signature back around 2001/2002 had a signature that was something like
mv /bin/laden /dev/null
and then someone explained how that was broken: even if that succeeds, what you've done is to replace the device file /dev/null with the regular file that was previously at /bin/laden, and then whenever other things redirect their output to /dev/null they'll be overwriting this random file than having output be discarded immediately, which is moderately bad.
Your version will just fail (even assuming root) because mv won't let you replace a file with a directory.
I’d say in this context that politics concerns stated preferences, while culture labels the revealed preferences. Also makes the statement «culture eats policy for breakfast» make more sense now that I’ve thought about it this way.
Everybody using the same three centralized inference providers? That would be as absurd and unrealistic as everybody hosting in us-east-1 and behind Cloudflare today!
“A lone coder, trained in the direct manipulation of symbols—an elegant weapon from a more civilized age—-is now all that stands between humanity and darkness.” etc
Agreed. When cloudflare (ugh, aka the internet) goes down, we can't access information to think and work through. ("the fuel" in some metaphor)
But what about when LLMs go down and a good chunk of a whole generation won't even know how to think, when the remote system goes down? (Is the ability to think "the engine" of self and agency in this metaphor?)
We are building a wildly irresponsible context to exist in.
Claude code cut me off a few days ago and I _seriously_ had no idea what to do. I’ve been coding for 33 years and I suddenly felt like anything I did manually would be an order of magnitude slower than it had to be.
The nice thing is unlike Cloudflare or AWS you can actually host good LLMs locally. I see a future where a non-trivial percentage of devs have an expensive workstation that runs all of the AI locally.
I'm more and more convinced of the importance of this.
There is a very interesting thing happening right now where the "llm over promisers" are incentivized to over promise for all the normal reasons -- but ALSO to create the perception that the "next/soon" breakthrough is only going to be applicable when run on huge cloud infra such that running locally is never going to be all that useful ... I tend to think that will prove wildly wrong and that we will very soon arrive at a world where state of art LLM workloads should be expected to be massively more efficiently runnable than they currently are -- to the point of not even being the bottleneck of the workflows that use these components. Additionally these workloads will be viable to run locally on common current_year consumer level hardware ...
"llm is about to be general intelligence and sufficient llm can never run locally" is a highly highly temporary state that should soon be falsifiable imo. I don't think the llm part of the "ai computation" will be the perf bottleneck for long.
Ah, you need to buy into this dystopia wholesale. The internet is also down because the LLMs fucked up the BGP routing table, which congress agreed (at the time) should run through the LLM interface.
Imagination, either the first or last thing to die in 2075.
“Hey folks, did you know in 100 years you can’t just call the town doc? Nah, you need to go get a referral. No, for real. Yeah, yeah, that is in fact a compound fracture. I can’t treat it without a referral. Congress made the rules.”
What's the best you can do hosting an LLM locally for under $X dollars. Let's say $5000. Is there a reference guide online for this? Is there a straight answer or does it depend? I've looked at Nvidia spark and high end professional GPUs but they all seem to have serious drawbacks.
That's nice, thank you, I've joined and will follow. They don't seem to have a wiki or about page that synthesizes the current state of the art though.
I think it's possible, but the current trend is that by the time you can run x level at home, they have 10-100x in the frontier models, so if you can run today's Claude.ai at home, then software engineering as a career is already over.
My poorly informed hope is that that we can have mixture of experts with highly tuned models on areas of focus. If I'm coding in language Foo, I only care about a model that understands Foo and its ecosystem. I imagine that should be self-hostable now.
A model that only understands, say, Java is useless : you need a model that understands English and some kind of reasoning and has some idea of how the human world works, and also knows Java. The vast majority of the computational effort is spent on the first two, the second is almost an afterthought. So, a model that can only program in Java is not going to be meaningfully smaller than a model that can program in ~all programming languages.
Sure, but in the context I was considering, creativity itself wasn't a concern.
For coding, creativity is not necessarily a good thing. There are well established patterns, algorithms, and applications could reasonably be construed as "good enough" to assist with the coding itself. Adding a human language model over that to understand the user's intents could be considered an overlay on the coding model.
I confess that this is willful projection of my hope to be able to self-host agents on affordable hardware. A frontier model on powerful hardware would always be preferable but sometimes "good enough" is just that.
> Please. They resold an already existing OS created by another individual. The idea that there was some "vision" here in being an IBM contractor is a total misunderstanding of the history of the time.
Imagine how different the world might be if gates’ mom didn’t work at ibm.
Somewhat different, I think. She had no direct financial interest in IBM's decision; she convinced the guy at IBM to look at Bill for the PC's operating system. Sure, at that level favors and family can have a lot of influence, but there wasn't a direct business relationship.
Don't go down this road. It's so tempting to believe that everything is just luck and circumstance. It gives us an excuse to not bother trying. We all have that voice inside that seductively tells us that we don't need to try so hard; that it's all just luck, and we shouldn't waste our energy. This is the equivalent of refusing medical care because "God will provide."
I met Bill Gates a couple of times at Microsoft. He wasn't an average man who got lucky. He was/is a hard-working, extraordinarily brilliant man who got lucky.
I know the playing field is not level. We don't all have an equal chance to be a billionaire. But I do know that most of us have not reached our full potential. Most of us could be better (on whatever dimension you desire) if only we tried harder.
Imagine how different the world might be if we did.
So what? "Hardworking" is a choice. You can choose to be hardworking or not. If you are already hardworking, then you can use your luck. If you're not, you will squander any chance.
Apple is a shitty 3-series BMW, windows is a used Lexus that’s been in 3 accidents, and Linux is a 25 year old f250 that’s been a farm truck its whole life.
At least historically Apple would also have to run slower, while still costing much more than Windows. If a part gave you trouble you'd be forced to buy parts from the dealership and they'd sometimes tell you that you needed a new car when the same part on Windows could be repaired or replaced cheaply by any repair shop. You'd only be able to drive the Apple car on a handful of toll roads, although they were well paved while windows cars could be driven all over the place for free, even off-road if necessary, although that often resulted in flat tires making a triple A membership necessary and leading to a common misconception that apple was immune to flats.
I think the hate for Microsoft is more based on its popularity rather than Apple being "better". Both have dubious business practices.
Ads in the start menu? Apple constantly pushes iCloud and related subscriptions. Market abuse? Apple is well known to remake and then block competing apps from competitors. Stability? Everyone knows the spinning beachball of death but acts like it never happens. User unfriendly? Apple constanly modifies its hardware to hurt independent repair outlets.
I don't have that rosy 50's Chevy picture, it's more like a luxury coupe with a tighly locked hood. Sleek, desirable, you pay through the nose for every upgrade, and don't attempt to fix it yourself.
> Linux is a 25 year old f250 that’s been a farm truck its whole life
... that someone occassionally decides to wrap with a shiny covering to make it look like a luxury SUV. The covering sometimes peels off when travelling on the highway.
Depends very much on the choice of the endless combinations something linux-based enables.
I didn't have it crap on me ever, since about two years, by choice of a so called 'rolling' gamer distro.
Looks very nice and comfy to me with KDE Plasma, and its Breeze (light) style, which is "automagically" applied to apps written for other toolkits/DEs like GTK/Gnome. Everything of what I do(mostly just browsing, some LibreOffice, remoting into other systems) is running ultrasmooth without lag, or stuttering, while almost always some music plays via YT in the background, without resorting to solutions which would pipe that via yt-dlp into mpv. It isn't necessary for me. On obsolete systems with Kaby Lake Core i5/7t :-) The only thing which could be called special or unusual about them, is that they have 32GB RAM. That may help, too. Oh, and the BIOS/UEFI/Firmware, from Lenovo.
When I was a kid, to start my dad's truck, you had to pull the ckoke, pump the gas a couple of times, start the engine, then slowly push the choke back in. That's a more obscure procedure than driving a car with a manual transmission these days.
We got a new fridge a few years ago, throw the old one up online for free. It worked just fine, but it was one of those freezer-on-the-left and fridge-on-the-right, split down the middle. Tolerated it for years, and finally saved up enough for a new one.
So, someone comes to pick it up. Well, 3 someone’s. A older woman, a younger woman, and a younger man. The man was missing a decent amount of teeth and had a decent amount of prison ink.
The car they came in to pick up this enormous full size fridge was probably only slightly bigger than the fridge. It wasn’t even close to being possible to fit.
I looked over at my 25 year old truck (I love that truck more than any other vehicle I’ve had) and made a decision.
“Hey look man, I love this truck. You can borrow it to lug the fridge. Please bring it back. I’ll even level with you, if you don’t bring it back odds are I’m not even going to report it stolen, I’m just going to be bummed. I get notes on my windshield all the time asking if I’ll sell it.”
Guy kind of looks at me. The other two people glance at each other, and the whole thing felt very strange. So we load the fridge and off they go.
I looked at my wife and said “I’m never going to see that truck again, huh?”
After about 4 hours I gave up. They stole it. I was strangely ok with it. I made the decision, knowing the risks, and had accepted them.
3 hours after that, they brought my truck back. The guy gets out and kind of started sobbing. The older woman (I assume the mom) was crying. Guy gave me a huge hug. Everyone was incredibly emotional.
I didn’t ask, but can only assume they considered stealing it. I also assume they used it all day long based on the mileage.
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