TehPers @ TehPers @beehaw.org

Posts

0

Comments

688

Joined

2 yr. ago

Amazon has been adopting a lot of languages in recent years, including writing services in Rust and C# to my knowledge. It's cool seeing them branch away from Java, although I know that internally they use their own flavor of Java (Corretto).

I think part of this also stems from there being a lot of strong takes on certain subjects that appear in comments. Thinking of just the past few posts I've been through, I've seen statements (which i'm intentionally paraphrasing here, just using them as examples) like "all information should be free", " is better than fad languages and all opinions to the contrary are completely unbacked" (different instance to be fair), "X service should be provided for free by Y private company", etc. That's not to say that any of these takes (except the language one, in my opinion) were intentionally inviting people to debate them, but making strong claims like these does invite debate.

That being said, I think the purpose of a lot of posts is to invite discussion, and within those discussions I've often seen people agreeing with each other. From my experience, it tends to be more of an outlier when there are argumentative posts being made, but I think it stands out a bit more as well.

Also, I think that how the opposing view is presented is important. For example, I'd rather see a response that opposes an initial view to provide more discussion around the matter than "no you're wrong and a bad person"-style responses. Generally speaking, I've seen more discussion-oriented replies, but occasionally I do see the latter-style response as well, and even saw one (which I'm not pointing to) in the discussion for this post.

Edit: I should also clarify that first paragraph. Opinions to the contrary of what I listed can also be strong takes. Generally any opinion in which there is a significant population of people that disagree with it can invite discussion. The discussion itself isn't the issue in my opinion, what is the issue is how that discussion is held.

I think a strong argument could be made for the JVM as a whole to be honest, since it encompasses several languages. That being said, I'm not sure I've seen a backend written in Kotlin despite how prominent it is for app development.

fad-driven development

This is certainly a way to dismiss all other programming paradigms, I suppose. Also, having used both C# and Java, I can't see myself writing another backend in Java again when C# is such a pleasant language to write in. Both languages have flaws of course, but I find C#'s significantly more tolerable than Java's.

You really thing not referencing them or making any content related to any of their IPs will prevent them from sending a C&D? They'd probably send one out to everyone if it didn't cost them any money to do so. God forbid you hire some plumbers, wear a red shirt, or draw something in the shape of a star.

Not a dumb take at all, it'd be awesome if they did. Unfortunately there are likely contracts or business reasons preventing them from doing so, or code shared between the 360 and current gens that they want to keep proprietary. Still, with MS open sourcing more and more projects over time, I'd love to see it.

Seems like now more than ever is a good time to bring back something to regulate these companies. At the very least, there should be a strong penalty to companies spreading misinformation.

The article pointed out that there was a defamation lawsuit caused over lying about voting machine rigging. That should honestly be criminal, especially knowing what happened after that election.

A streaming-first approach might significantly shrink their audience at least. I don't think most people watching FOX will go sign up for a separate streaming service and throw that on their TVs. I know at least when I was living in the midwest, a lot of restaurants would play it on their TVs inside. I'd be surprised if that didn't push them to playing some other channel instead.

I mean, this should be a no brainer. Aren't there regulations in place, regardless of amendment-this-or-that, on what can be broadcasted in the US as "news"? I'd have to go check, but regardless, knowingly spreading lies to manipulate your audience isn't really something I'd consider news, just propaganda.

A lot of nice QoL changes (checking for missing feature flags, for example) but the thing that stood out to me the most was impl Sync for mpsc::Sender. This has always been a pain point in my opinion for the standard library's channels, but now that they're using crossbeam-channel internally, there's no need to add it as a dependency anymore.

I think some people will be upset by them dropping support for older Windows versions. I can see why they would not want to continue support for them though, it takes extra work to maintain compatibility for those old OS versions and the vast majority of users (by percentage) are on 10/11 now. Still, a shame.

Just the other day, we had to create a requirements.txt with a single character . to get a tool to correctly install dependencies from our pyproject.toml. The tool only supports reading from requirements.txt and setup.py, but we had a pyproject.toml with configurations for many of the other tools we use.

I keep wanting to think it's improving over time, but the reality seems to be simpler than that. It's just changing over time. That being said, type hints were a welcome addition, and occasionally they add new features that make sense. They also add features like the walrus operator, but we don't talk about those.

Do you need to? I feel like learning Python wouldn't give much benefit here, unless you're already using Excel to create applications. In that case, learning Python might let you start making applications that better suit your needs.

OK, sure, we probably don’t disagree then.

We probably don't here, but like I said I'm not really interested in discussing the political feasibility of it.

I am obviously NOT arguing that every resource should be public. This discussion is about AI, which was publicly funded, trained on public data, and is backed by public research. This sleight of hand to make my position sound extreme is, frankly, intellectually dishonest.

I don't think I ever disagreed that the models themselves should be public, and there are already many publicly available models (although it would be nice if GPT-N were). What I disagree with is the service being free. The service costs a company real money and resources to maintain, just like any other service. If it were free, the only entity that could reasonably run the models is the government, but at this point we might as well also have the government run public git servers, public package registries, etc. Honestly, I'm not sure what impression you expected me to get, considering the claim that a privately run service using privately paid-for resources should be free to the public.

There’s a shortage, but it’s not “extreme”. ChatGPT is running fine. I can use it anytime I want instantly. You’d be laughed out of the room if you told AI researchers that ChatGPT can’t scale because we’re running out of GPUS.

Actually no, I work directly with AI researchers who regularly use LLMs and this is the exact impression I got from them.

Finally, there are positive economic externalities to public AI availability.

There are positive economic externalities to public everything availability. We don't live in this kind of world though, someone will always try to claim a larger share due to human nature. That being said, I'm not really interested in arguing about the political feasibility (or lack thereof) of having every resource being public.

With how many people are already using AI, it’s frankly mind boggling that they’re only losing $700k a day.

There are significant throttles in place for people who are using LLMs (at least GPT-based ones), and there's also a cost people pay to use these LLMs. Sure you can go use ChatGPT for free, but the APIs cost real money, they aren't free to use. What you're seeing is the money they lost after all the money they made as well.

You’re also ignoring the fact that costs don’t scale proportionally with usage. Infrastructure and labor can be amortized over a greater user base. And these services will get cheaper to run per capita as time goes on and technology improves.

I don't disagree that the services will get cheaper and that costs don't scale proportionally. You're most likely right - generally speaking, that's the case. What you're missing though is that there is an extreme shortage of components. Scaling in this manner only works if you actually have the means to scale. As things stand, companies are struggling to get their hands on the GPUs needed for inference.

Nitter link. This shows replies.

Less than a million dollars a day for everyone who wants to in the whole world to use AI right now?

You're ignoring the fact that the cost scales with usage. Increasing its availability will also increase the cost, hardware requirements (which can't really scale since there's a shortage), and environmental cost due to power usage.

As someone close to someone with a lot of money, I can say it introduces a new set of worries that I hope I never have. That might also be an issue of greed though.

The problem, from my experience, is not that a person has a lot of money. It's whether a person makes that money a part of their identity. Someone who detaches their own personal value from the value of their assets is more willing to contribute the excess back to society, for example, and will be able to experience the comforts associated with wealth without the stress of spending it on those comforts.

Sadly, far too many people do associate personal value with wealth, and I feel like this has led to a lot of the inequality that exists today.

I think the issue was it wasn't clear what items were available to craft. If I had known that axes, pickaxes, shovels, etc. were all in the game then it might have been easier, but even making the crafting table (2x2 wood planks) wasn't very intuitive. Honestly, there wasn't much of a clear path forward with most of the recipes. Advancements and the recipe book later helped a lot, but it was pretty hard to play during beta and alpha without the wiki or a mod like TMI.

Then there's redstone. I feel like even today, redstone is completely unexplained in the game, and while you can kind of figure it out on your own, many of the intricacies are left unexplained (repeater locking, timings, comparators, how redstone is passed/not passed through different kinds of blocks, gates, etc). Without taking some time to learn about digital logic and basic computer engineering concepts on your own, redstone is basically magic dust that does a thing when put in a specific configuration.

Also, being pedantic, but shears weren't added until beta 1.7. Wool dropped from sheep before that. That being said, alpha had a lot of really weird mob drops (why did zombies drop feathers?) and there wasn't much use for wool anyway beyond decorative purposes and hiding doorways with paintings until beds were added in beta 1.3.

Kinda in the same position, I don't drink, never have (though I've had it in my mouth), and don't really ever plan to. Not really interested ngl, and I've seen it go wrong enough to know how bad it can get.

That being said, I have no issues with anyone who does, in moderation at least. If they're having fun, then that's great for them!

Does this mean they can control the marbling in the meat they're producing? That might be a very tempting proposition for hardcore steak lovers, especially if it's extremely affordable.