barsoap @ barsoap @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

I'm not enough into that industry to actually give a good estimate, here, but the amount of COBOL systems still up and running is certainly not even close to non-zero, and it's going to stay that way for a while. From what I gather for companies moving away from COBOL is more of a "programmers are hard to find" situation, not "these systems absolutely must be replaced" one. It's well-supported and scaled with their business, as in, in places they're running the same 60 year old code on new mainframes because if there's one thing that IBM mainframes are then it's excessively backwards-compatible.

As far as the language is concerned: It's not hard, it's just weird, dating back from an age where people thought randomly calling things "divisions" would make businesspeople capable coders. The reason I'm not in that space isn't because of the language but because of the type of software you write there, it's all bookkeeping and representing business procedures, as said: Bureaucracy.

Also I'm not sure what "modernising" actually meant, there: SEPA instant payment was introduced, meaning that mainframes won't batch up the day's transactions and then talk to each other every night so cross-bank transfers took a day to process, now they're doing it in ten seconds. Most banks already supported instant transfers within their own systems so they should only have had to rewrite the external interface as the rest was already up to the task.

I'd argue the "eat before the workout" advise isn't right: While you shouldn't work out directly after eating as your body will direct energy towards digestion, working out on a fasting metabolism is beneficial as fasting comes with high levels of growth hormones. Evolutionary speaking: You're not hunting when you have food, you're hunting when you're hungry. How can you have breakfast before you caught it.

You might not be able to hit peak performance at the tail end of even just an interval fast, but it is going to do all kinds of signalling to your body to put more energy into growing muscle. The growing happens not while you're lifting, but after you inhaled the chicken you caught.

The most infuriating discussion I had online about proteins was with a vegan, their claim was "there is no such thing as essential amino acids". Couldn't get it into their head that a) there are essential amino acids but b) yes, unless you eat so horribly lopsided it's unknown of anywhere but in horribly deprived populations or among some indigenous folks (pretty much only eating manioc or such) there's nothing to worry about, you'll get your essentials. Kinda like Vitamin C deficiency being unheard of in the developed world because even the most gutter-rat of diets still contains enough as an antioxidant. Still not a bad idea to pair beans with rice and lentils with noodles or bread, though, IMNSHO they just taste better that way around.

Especially infuriating as it was a vegan. If you choose to have a diet that requires nutritional knowledge to get right then don't suck at it, and call your fellow travellers out when they're spewing BS. I really doubt vegans are keen on yet another "I stopped being vegan and it fixed my anaemia" story. Take an apple or two. Either eat them, there's your iron, or make a sauce that works with a sour/sweet accent (i.e. chunks of apple) and prepare it in an iron skillet, there, even more iron. It's not hard but you gotta stop pretending that vegans can get by without understanding nutrition.

When I'm forced into a qwerty situation it's not just 30 seconds, I simply can't touch-type qwerty and my current qwerty skills are way slower than 25 years ago where I had reached peak seven-and-a-half-fingers hunt-and-peck performance. In principle I should know where all the keys are, still, I can't find them without looking. Somewhat similarly, I don't really know where keys are with dvorak when my fingers aren't on the home row but I am faster finding them on a touch display than finding qwerty keys. Also dvorak is nice on the smartphone your thumbs alternate more often.

I mean yes but no. Back at some old job all the devs had the local admin password so we could do things like install drivers for bluetooth dongles on our own (I said "old job", didn't I) and usually everything was fine but at some point my machine just barfed, it would neither install nor uninstall drivers. I called an admin because I have no idea about windows internals. They were ecstatic, finally, an actual problem, and not walking someone in marketing through how to write an email. Some arcane regedit magic later the problem was solved, and yes I had layout switching ready on the taskbar.

And leave the possibility of the medical pros being radicalized, and converted?

Yes.

Are we literally forgetting the bloody lesson of the 1940s?

Precisely the opposite: Sanctity of life is the exact opposite of Nazi doctrine.

It's not always easy. There was a case in Germany where a serial rapist murderer was sentenced to indefinite psych ward lockup (insanity plea) and he did manage to not just seduce, but also marry, one of the female nurses. Court is to this day refusing visitation, the only way the two see each other is through plexiglass. Authorities, of course, learn from these kinds of cases: While they considered him, from the very start, psychopathic enough so that noone would ever be alone in a room with him, they didn't have safeguards in place when it came to talking through plexiglass, and now there's this awkward situation of the infatuated nurse-wife. Which means that now there's precautions regarding these kinds of things in place.

Back to Anders: That clown doesn't have the rizz to pull such a thing off.

But others like German use “sie” (same as “she/her”). Plurals in german, I think, usually become feminine (die Manner)

Quick note on German grammar: That's not feminine, it's just a plural. "sie", "die" etc. aren't feminine prepositions or articles, they happen to be the 3rd person feminine article, and nominative singular articles among many, many other things. When you're talking about "the march of the women" (der Marsch der Frauen" then women don't become male, they become genitive (whose march? theirs/hers)

Also calling Indo-European noun classes genders was a mistake from the very beginning. IE languages do tend to have three noun classes and will sort "man", "woman" and "thing" into different ones, and refer to individuals using the first two classes, but that's all there is to it. Noun classes are about ease of reference, in German you can say "the pen and the newspaper are on the table, I pick him up" and it's clear that you mean picking up the pen because newspapers are "female". Tables are also male but picking up the table doesn't really make sense in context. Swahili in contrast goes all-out and has 18 noun classes, "person", "people", "group", "groups", "animal", "tool", "tree", "abstraction", "position", and more, but no gender to be found there.

Once upon a time "man" simply meant "human", "wer" and "wif" being the gendered (adult) words, "man" underwent semantic shift while "mankind" didn't. I guess increasing misogyny due to Christianisation is to blame.

COBOL is the career advise you hear people give for people who want to make money but don't want to deal with the VC clownshow. COBOL btw is only 13 years older than C and both language's current standard dates to 2023.

It's at its core a bog-standard procedural language, with some special builtins making it particularly suited to do mainframe stuff. Learning COBOL is no worse a career investment than learning ABAP, or any other language of the bureaucracy. Sure you'll be a career bureaucrat but that's up sufficiently many people's alley, no "move fast and break things", it's "move slowly and keep things running".

Stock images are a whole category of awful of their own.

However, as it stands the majority of the tools in place cost a fair bit of money to set up and run

You can get by with 4G of VRAM if all you want is to generate some pictures, or differently put every PC capable of 1080p gaming should do the trick. With good software (comfyui) you can do SDXL just fine, and almost crush SD1.

It's fine-tuning much less training models where things get expensive but there's other ways to get creative with those models. Training is only ever barely possible on gaming GPUs because those cap out at about 16G VRAM.

(Just for completeness' sake, for anyone wondering "why don't I just use my 32G worth of CPU RAM to supplement the VRAM?" -- that's already happening anyways. You need a minimum amount of VRAM or your box will be busier shuffling data from and to the GPU than it is actually doing calculations: Your GPU is going to thrash. If that happens it's probably faster to run the AI on the CPU and, well, it's just not build to run that kind of code).

As long as the person can talk, they can spread it.

Nope, isolation is a thing and with that I don't mean torture I mean a psychologist is going to talk to you about the sportsball results or whatever keeps you sane and that's it. It's why you hear practically nothing about Anders Breivik.

What we should re-introduce for these cases is an updated version of damnatio memoriae

From all I know none of the systems that people have built come even close to testing the speedup: Is error correction going to get harder and harder the larger the system is, the more you ask it to compute? It might not be the case but quantum uncertainty is a thing so it's not baseless naysaying, either.

Let me put on my tinfoil hat: Quantum physicists aren't excited to talk about the possibility that the whole thing could be a dead end because that's not how you get to do cool quantum experiments on VC money and it's not like they aren't doing valuable research, it's just that it might be a giant money sink for the VCs which of course is also a net positive. Trying to break the limit might be the only way to test it, and that in turn might actually narrow things down in physics which is itching for experiments which can break the models because we know that they're subtly wrong, just not how, data is needed to narrow things down.

Elon, judging from his twitter takes, understands this stuff even less than you do.

If brains were just very fast and powerful computers, then neuroscientist should be able to work with computers and engineers on brains.

Does not follow. Different architectures require different specialisations. One is research into something nature presents us, the other (at least the engineering part) is creating something. Completely different fields. And btw the analytical tools neuroscientists have are not exactly stellar, that's why they can't understand microprocessors (the paper is tongue in cheek but also serious).

But they are not equivalent.

They are. If you doubt that, you do not understand computation. You can read up on Turing equivalence yourself.

Consciousness, intelligence, memory, world modeling, motor control and input consolidation are way more complex than just faster computing.

The fuck has "fast" to do with "complex". Also the mechanisms probably aren't terribly complex, how the different parts mesh together to give rise to a synergistic whole creates the complexity. Also I already addressed the distinction between "make things run" and "make them run fast". A dog-slow AGI is still an AGI.

The brain is not a Turing machine. It does not process tokens one at a time.

And neither are microprocessors Turing machines. A thing does not need to be a Turing machine to be Turing complete.

Turing completeness is a technology term

Mathematical would be accurate.

it shares with Turing machines the name alone,

Nope the Turing machine is one example of a Turing complete system. That's more than "shares a name".

Turing’s philosophical argument was not meant to be a test or guarantee of anything. Complete misuse of the concept.

You're probably thinking of the Turing test. That doesn't have to do anything with Turing machines, Turing equivalence, or Turing completeness, yes. Indeed, getting the Turing test involved and confused with the other three things is probably the reason why you wrote a whole paragraph of pure nonsense.

Three days is the (generously calculated) time until civil defence will have soup kitchens up and running, and at least over here they stock three months worth of lentil stew, pea stew, and bread and more than enough diesel to keep logistics, kitchens and crucial infrastructure such as water pumps running. Heating, push come to shove, would be supplied at the gymnasium of your local school or suchlike. Recommendation is to have 7-10 days worth of stock.

But yes I'd recommend against (completely) relying on stocks that need preparation because electricity and water might fail. Canned soups and stews are good and don't forget canned peaches or such so you can have dessert. Woodgas burners are cheap camping supplies and you're bound to be able to find some sticks somewhere so with some water reserve you even can have your morning coffee.

It stuck in popular culture, but time and time again neuroscientists and psychologists have found that it is a poor metaphor.

Notably, neither of those two disciplines are computer science. Silicon computers are Turing complete. They can (given enough time and scratch space) compute everything that's computable. The brain cannot be more powerful than that you'd break causality itself: God can't add 1 and 1 and get 3, and neither can god sort a list in less than O(n log n) comparisons. Both being Turing complete also means that they can emulate each other. It's not a metaphor: It's an equivalence. Computer scientists have trouble telling computers and humans apart just as topologists can't distinguish between donuts and coffee mugs.

Architecturally, sure, there's massive difference in hardware. Not carbon vs. silicon but because our brains are nowhere close to being von Neumann machines. That doesn't change anything about brains being computers, though.

There's, big picture, two obstacles to AGI: First, figuring out how the brain does what it does and we know that current AI approaches aren't sufficient,secondly, once understanding that, to create hardware that is even just a fraction as fast and efficient at executing erm itself as the brain is.

Neither of those two involve the question "is it even possible". Of course it is. It's quantum computing you should rather be sceptical about, it's still up in the air whether asymptotic speedups to classical hardware are even physically possible (quantum states might get more fuzzy the more data you throw into a qbit, the universe might have a computational upper limit per unit volume or such).

Blitzkrieg is not a Nazi strategy Germany had already been fighting WWI like that, or at least tried its hardest to do that, they used the term Bewegungskrieg (manoeuvre warfare) to contrast Stellungskrieg (trench warfare), that's all there is to it. The German preference for decisive battles over wars of attrition dates back to at least Moltke the Elder, whence also Auftragstaktik (mission command) and "no plan survives first contact with the enemy".

Then, the Nazis were way more deliberate and careful when taking over state institutions. And yes they did care about popular opinion that's why they e.g. switched over to nabbing Jews in quiet instead of publicly making a show out of it didn't play well with the population. Trump with Nazi strategy would be saying "We'll re-take Cuba, get rid of socialism, and turn it into a beach resort and every American will be able to go to state-sponsored holidays there". Like this, but bigger.

It's kinda weird to say this as a German but when I look at other countries' fascists they're a clownshow. Nazis of course are also self-destructive, fascism inherently is, but there's a fierce edge of competency in their madness.

That Signal leak? Under the Nazis, heads would be rolling, they would have no qualms bending actual incompetence into high treason to make an example to enforce discipline.

The US has a treaty allowing people to travel to the US bases there, there's some language about not being an ass while travelling through but it'd be a pain to invoke for the crime of knocking on people's doors.

I think you're thinking of Surströmming, which is Swedish and absolutely vile. (Properly prepared) Lutefisk is quite mild though definitely weird, even if you're used to stuff like pickled herring. Ordinary pickled herring is fermented in brine (and own enzymes), intensity depends on age at the tail end of things you get fish sauce, Surströmming is fermented in lactic acid, Lutefisk is not fermented at all it's stockfish (dried without salting) rehydrated in lye, then properly rinsed and cooked. It's mostly the texture that's weird.

If you find yourself in Scandinavia one thing to definitely try is elk salami.