Eh, the responses are a bit more varied, ranging from “we have very low confidence, because it did not correctly predict several things” to “it’s the best unifying theory we have, by quite a bit”.

In my opinion, worth a read for folks interested in string theory…

My opinion is kind of invalid, since this is pretty much the only game I play that has items, but well, the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup devs decided to add guns, uh sorry, hand cannons to the game, a few versions ago.

It’s a game with swords and magic, and they did make the guns rare to find, but when you do find one, it’s always a blast (pun intended).

The guns are really powerful, but also noisy which means they attract enemies. And they spit out clouds of smoke, which can obstruct your vision when you shoot too much, allowing enemies to draw close. So, it’s just a really fun risk-reward loop.

I enjoy the faces on the laptop. It’s like a very modern art piece showing the horrors of remote work.

recreational coding

Well, good news, it actually is fun to dick around in the Nix configuration and see those changes manifest on your system.

The purpose is similar, i.e. configuring a system, but I’d say Ansible works best, if you need to make a few small changes from an existing distro, whereas NixOS rather takes the approach of controlling everything about the operating system.

And in many ways, controlling everything is actually simpler.

As the other person said, the bit about Arch is just the preamble.
But you can use Nix Home-Manager on Arch (or other distros), if you’re so inclined, which will give you that reproducibility for the stuff in your home-directory.

In some ways, this is like backing up and restoring your dotfiles, but it allows you to template those dotfiles and depending on the program, it offers simple ways to populate the dotfile templates. For example, KDE applications don’t generally offer very legible dotfiles and so configuring e.g. a panel via dotfiles is kind of a pain. To help with this, there’s Nix Plasma-Manager.

Pretty sure that knowing COBOL isn’t the hard part. It has relatively few language concepts.

This lack of language concepts just makes it difficult to reason about it, so that’s what you’re getting a paycheck for. Well, and possibly also because it might take months to have a new dev figure out your legacy codebase, so it’s cheaper to keep the current dev by paying them competitive prices.

Oh man, a few years ago, we had a military dude as conductor in our wind band. And I was always one of his favorites, I’m guessing because I have broad shoulders and a deep voice – prime military recruit material.

…except that I’m vegan. So, one day he sits next to me during lunch and asks me why I’m vegan. I do the usual dance of avoiding the topic, but he does not want to let it go. So, I tell him that I think killing animals is wrong. He walked out of that conversation like a hurt gazelle.

Like, fuck me, dude, if you’re gonna do the whole military tough guy spiel, but cannot take a kid disagreeing with you, then maybe you’re not as tough after all.

That argument annoys me so much. Each vegetable does cover all amino acids, they just don’t have them in the exact relations that our body needs. But if a vegetable has only 50% of one amino acid compared to the distribution that our body needs, then you can abso-fucking-lutely just eat double of that vegetable. Or as you say mix-and-match.

A typical Western diet includes far more protein than the body needs for maintaining itself either way.

Ah yeah, there’s various technologies that I don’t mention too loudly. For example, all things considered, I’m probably an above-average Python dev, but I never enjoyed writing it, so when I get asked about it, I always answer that I’m not too confident with it.

Which, in my defense, isn’t even really a lie. My specialty is large-scale projects, which is something where Python with its loose typing just does not give you confidence…

Hmm, I don’t add extra water when I cook spinach. I just wash it, fill up my pot with it, throw in salt and a splash of oil, then the kid on top.

After a few minutes, I’ve got a couple spoonfuls of tasty goodness.

…I did just notice the typo, but I also threw myself away laughing, so I’m keeping it.

My answer is also every industry. It’s like asking what industry could benefit from collaboration.

Today, I was on a networking event for an industry that is currently heavily looking to adopt open-source collaboration, due to cost pressure. And it was such a surreal experience.

You had dozens of human beings in this room, who all understood that collaboration is good. Who understood that the shared goal of surviving as an industry requires collaboration. Who understood each other as human beings.

But because they collect their paychecks from different companies, you had these stupid infights of “our product is better”, as well as monetization always being prioritized higher than collaboration success.
It did not feel like we were working on a shared goal, and rather like each company was just trying to sell their product. Rather than one solution, there were as many solutions as there were companies, each one pitching their solution as the one solution everyone else should agree on.

Yeah, I don’t know what the moral of the story is. It just felt so incredibly stupid.

I do not believe there to be a higher meaning. Nor for that fact to have particular meaning. As such, I also do not assign particular meaning to suffering. But others don’t seem to enjoy it much, so I throw myself with full force against it, because why not?

T shirt

I see what you did there…

🙃

I would make a joke that my Christmas tree is still planted on a field somewhere, but it’s not like I’ll get a tree either way…

Copy Link to Highlight is my favorite addition.

Yeah, that is also my primary motivation, to not need to interact with hairdressers. 😅

I do also like it a lot, though, that I can just cut it every 2-3 weeks. My hair is a lot easier to take care of when it’s short, and I look sharper, so I can just keep it short all the time.

The thing I never understood about PowerShell is that it’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages in existence. It just feels like you might as well go for a full-fledged programming language at that point.

The appeal of Bash et al is that the scripting is almost the same as the interactive usage, which you already know. But because PowerShell is so verbose, I’m really not sure people do use it interactively.

I guess, that code snippet in the article makes somewhat of a difference, in that PowerShell offers better features for interop between processes. But man, that still feels like it could’ve been a library instead…

I have been expecting that to happen in gaming in general. I feel like the reason we aren’t seeing it right now, is because it would feel quite pointless to integrate it into a game, if it isn’t actually properly integrated.

For example, if you tell an NPC to jump off a cliff and the LLM responds with “Excellent idea!”, then well, you expect the NPC to do that thing.
Or if a dragon crashlands next to an NPC, you expect it to notice and not tell you calmly about the weather.
You need code for these things. Tons of code.

To some degree, Bethesda will have the money to do that sort of thing, especially since they’re now owned by Microsoft, which’s investors are extra horny for AI.
And they already have a reputation of jank and Todd Howard lying, so there’s perhaps less of an expectation for an NPC actually reacting to a crashlanded dragon.

But even then, this whole thing might just end up being a very expensive gimmick.
In particular, you can’t expect console players to have a keyboard for chatting. You can try to do voice control instead, but you also cannot expect players to have a (decent) microphone, or for them to be talking to their console when they want to play late in the evening.

So, you can’t really make this LLM thing part of the core gameplay. Everything will still need to be solvable without it. Which gives it very high potential to become a gimmick.
Maybe you could have pre-canned questions like we currently do and then an LLM responds, kind of keeping the context of your conversation in mind? That might still be annoying, though, when as a player, you can never be too sure, if it gave you all the relevant info, or you have to repeat the question another time.

Yeah, most errors occur somewhere in a library that you use (because libraries typically do the actual heavy lifting) and in the vast majority of cases, it will give you a (English) string describing what went wrong.

If you can just slap that string into the final error message (or at least into logging), that is so much easier and more helpful than pretending you could possibly assign an error code to each such error case.