Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

  • 11 Posts
  • 293 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I love hitting these things in the real world. Not the big, but the comment. You just know someone spent a fortune in time and company resources to never solve the problem and their frustration level was ragequit. But then something stupid like adding

    while (0){};

    Suddenly made it work and they were like, fuckit.

    Usually it’s a bug somewhere in a compiler trying to over optimize or something and putting the line in there caused the optimization not to happen or something. Black magic.

    The downside is that the compiler bug probably gets fixed, and then decades later the comment and line are still there…





  • Duck typing is the best if fully embraced. But it also means you have to worry just a little bit about clean failures once the project grows a little. I like this better than type checking relentlessly.

    It also means that your test suite or doctests or whatever should throw some unexpected types around now and again to check how it handles ducks and chickens and such :)



  • Troy@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldStack Overflow Website Traffic
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    6 days ago

    The ideal result? LLMs are just early versions of much better things that come later.

    The unlikely result: we develop a separate human curated internet somewhere, complete with verification that a human wrote every bit. Basically verifiable digital id and signing on everything. Maybe.

    The probable result: the internet turns to shit as AIs are trained on content created by AIs.





  • Troy@lemmy.catoUnpopular Opinion@lemmy.worldqqqqqq
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    17 days ago

    have been for like, 30 years now?

    The genre is much older than this. The market is huge (something like 10-15 billion $USD) with about 50k different self help titles being published every year. Obviously no bookstore is going to stock 50k different self help titles (except maybe Amazon). But much of this market is served by special interest bookstores, like religious bookstores attached to churches or whatever. And those have existed forever!

    I’m old enough to remember the 1980s and the parenting advice books that told my parents to beat me with a wooden spoon – that they purchased from their church. It biases me against the genre somewhat ;)

    Self help books tend to be part of a radicalization pipeline, where the authors are considered “experts” because they have a published book. Once you’re in the pipeline, like youtube conspiracy videos, eventually you’ll end up buying into antivaxx and other woo.