Baldur Nil

That was an interesting read.

Encyclopedia Brittanica wasn’t designed to be addicting and offer misinformation for one.

Huh? It seems to me these are all books about technical skills.

Also AWK is made to be fast, right? I suppose doing something in CPython in a non efficient way might not be noticeable with a bit of text, but would show up with a large enough data stream.

They can’t close the source code as long as they use the Linux kernel, right? Besides, Android is popular among other companies because they can customize part of it as they see fit.

This change isn’t really that drastic, because Android never really followed the open source way of doing things. The article even explains that this won’t change much even for ROM developers, since they’re not creating releases based on “work in progress” branches.

Really the only difference is that Google will spare the work of merging two separate branches often and solving conflicts that might as well be turning into a nightmare as the code base has grown.

This is the best I could find: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html

Yeah, just a note, basically these Linux distros are the same at their “core”, but what differs among them is mostly about the software they have and the way they’re managed.

So you have distros that offer only open source software in their repository, some include proprietary drivers. Some distro families will have some differences in the path of certain folders, different families use different formats of their packages (which include the actual binary of the software together with the metadata about how to install them in the system), although a purely Linux binary should be executed in any Linux distro. Some offer more guidance during installation and setup, some offer a more “raw” experience that force you to chose every little detail, and so on.

Another difference is in their philosophy of how the packages and dependencies are made available. Distributions such Arch Linux and its derivatives always offer the latest versions of each package, reason why they’re called “rolling release”. Distributions such as Debian offer a specific version that’s “frozen” and tested thoroughly until a new version of Debian is released with more updated software.

Some say a rolling release distro is better for gamers because you always get the latest features and performance improvements, but they’re naturally less reliable than a stable distro.

So I’d say the important thing is to understand the trade-offs so that you can choose the best thing for you. And also there’s no downside of experimenting different distros in a virtual machine, for example.

Also has an interface that clicks easier with people used to Windows.

Here’s a nice pic that make you feel less “lost” about how some popular distributions relate to each other:

I think we’re naturally a bit suspicious of freeware as “misleading” because so many old software used to be just vectors to install malware (mostly spam) alongside it. At least for me, I only trust it either if it is open source or it has a sustainable business model.

This is a troll’s or a teenager’s line of thinking.

Kinda reminded me back in college I had a friend who I’d describe as a genius in computer science and programming. I was always so jealous how he was so knowledgeable about everything teachers talked about to the point of correcting them sometimes (and hurting the ego of some of them, which isn’t very smart).

He was like a C++ nuts to the point of having some of his code on the Boost library (which was impressive for a 20yo), but when Rust started getting popular back then, he really got into it and quickly became an “evangelist”. For some years, everything was about Rust, if you stopped to talk to him.

I met him year later and asked if he was still working with Rust, and he said after using it for enough different use-cases, he actually started to dislike it and pointed out a lot of problems and flaws that I wouldn’t possibly remember. I think he also said the community was very toxic and was taking the language to a direction he didn’t like. I suspect nowadays he is just another fella using Lua and C++ for his personal projects.

Even if it was, there’s no way to know, people can just lie. It’s not like it will be obvious, some people might have a feeling it is (based on their experience playing with LLMs) but won’t be able to point exactly why.

Besides what other people said, one example is classes being closed by default (you need to explicitly set a keyword to make them open to extension). That was done to prevent inheriting from classes that weren’t designed to be inherited, and forcing you to use composition instead.

…so might as well say that “agent” is simply the next buzzword, since people aren’t so excited with the concept of artificial intelligence any more

This is exactly the reason for the emphasis on it.

The reality is that the LLMs are impressive and nice to play with. But investors want to know where the big money will come from, and for companies, LLMs aren’t that useful in their current state, I think one of the biggest use for them is extracting information from documents with lots of text.

So “agents” are supposed to be LLMs executing actions instead of just outputting text (such as calling APIs). Which doesn’t seem like the best idea considering they’re not great at all at making decisions—despite these companies try to paint them as capable of such.

If they actually wanted quality documents for people to use, they would be advocating for Standard Ebooks or something.

Or… you know… have PDFs that aren’t pictures of handwritten text?

Yeah, none of that would be a problem if the car isn’t connected to anything (WiFi, Bluetooth etc.)

Imagine when the author hears about the “Create an app in 20 minutes with AI” tools.

This is why technically software is a liability. The less code you need, the better, since every line of code is a potential vulnerability and something to maintain, update, etc.

But is it that different than the podcasts voices Google already generate with NotebookLM since a while ago?

Only chatGPT has these kinds of comments as if you’re seeing code for the first time. 😆

I’m not against adding comments where is needed: in the company I work for (a big bank) my team takes care of a few modules and we added comments on one class that is responsible to make some very custom UI component with lots of calculations and low level manipulations. It’s basically a team of seniors and no one was against that monster having comments to explain what it was doing in case we had to go back and change something.

For 99% of the code you just need to have good names though.