Programmer, University lecturer, and gamer. I’m also learning French and love any opportunity to practice :)

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • The LLM in the most recent case had a monumental amount of context. I then gave it a file implementing a breed of hash set, asked it to explain several of the functions which it did correctly, and then asked it to convert it to a hash map implementation (an entirely trivial, grunt change, but which is too pervasive and functionality-directed for an IDE to have a neat function for this).

    It spat out the source code of the tree-based map implementation in the standard library.



  • Did you play on original PS2? The game was computationally a bit ahead of its time and the hardware wasn’t capable enough to run it smoothly. The resulting lag and stuttering could make some really weird things happen, and I remember some people saying if the console was struggling more than usual (overheating etc) it could become impossible to properly play in some areas.

    If you still own a copy, try emulating it to on a modern PC instead. PCSX2 does some wild stuff internally and can emulate PS2 code on a modern system faster than it ran on the PS2. SOTC is actually a pretty common performance benchmark. As long as you don’t try to use the emulator’s graphics upscaling (which increases computational load a ton) it runs much better than on console.



  • This is definitely true for code but in terms of information retrieval and explaining complex topics, they have gotten much better in the sense that they can cite real sources (with links) now.

    The analysis and synthesis that they do of those sources is still often bogus though. I’ve had one explain some simple Magic the Gathering rules with real-looking words but completely bogus interpretations and conclusions, but it did cite the correct rulebook with a link. I’ve also had one give a pretty strong overview of the construction and underlying theory of a particular compiler (a specific compiler, not the language it compiles) that matches up quite well with my own fairly deep understanding of that compiler.

    Overall the real information is better, but the hallucinations look more real too. And they’re still pretty unhelpful for programming in my experience.


  • On my menu it does say original next to one of them, but tapping on the options (any of the options) doesn’t do anything. My phone is set to french because I’m an immigrant in a french-speaking region and am making sure to engage with the language as much as possible. But this means the autodub puts a stupid robo-french voice on everything – and it’s not always a faithful translation either.

    At this point I just let the creators know that YouTube is making their videos unwatchable to people with different language settings and that they can disable this when they upload videos.






  • I use vim, or spacemacs with evil mode (emacs distribution with sensible shortcuts and vim emulation). Or VSCode with spacemacs emulation.

    You will pass your current productivity in less than a month. All of the things you describe are easily done in VSCode with vim emulation (I prefer the full spacemacs emulation but it’s not actually a huge difference). You won’t have to move your hands away from the normal typing spot on your keyboard – no home and end, just 0 and $. No control+arrow keys, just w and b (or e or even more motion options). Highlighting is as easy as v and then motion commands. And there are so many more useful things that vim (and vim emulation) make simple and fast. Orthogonal VSCode features like multi cursors still work.


  • The appropriate comparison is to hate speech – speech which is never tolerable. The kinds of things I wouldn’t say in this comment. Some racial slurs might qualify, in my opinion, but it would be particular phrases using them and not necessarily the slur itself. The N word is obviously not hate speech when certain people say it, otherwise lots of rap music would be illegal. But there are certainly hate speech phrases that use it that are just as bad as a Nazi salute.

    Freedom of speech, like any tolerance, needs to have limits and this is a very reasonable one.