Thing is, cleaning up slop, AI or otherwise, is miserable, slow, difficult work. It’s why we get caught in rewrite traps.

I gained a lot of understanding noodling with extreme low-level memory access etc, but in reality almost all the coding I ever did early on was in C with stdlib etc, which is shaped more by low-level realities of the CPU, but is still full of abstractions. Abstractions that were often opaque to us as well, because this was before Linux and ubiquitous open source.

Sure everything is a few more layers removed from the simple hardware these days, but once it’s a black box, it’s a black box. A lot of the feeling of being closer to the hardware is pretty meaningless.

Sure a variable in C is really just a way of referring to a piece of memory, while in Python it’s some sort of data structure in a mapping most of us don’t really know the exact nature of, but in the end the difference is rarely is of any significance and most of us only have a similarly vague idea of how the compiler works it out for us in C.

It’s so much better! Tooling is many orders of magnitude better and so many libraries give you deep power from an easy API. What used to be a team and 18 months is a library install and a day so you’re free to do much bigger things.

Christ even version control. The shit I put up with over the years.

Compose minus minus for me. I use it frequently.

It’s much better quality.

Give it a go - it’s way better than the not-from-concentrates crap, even while being cheaper.

It’s amazing how well the marketing worked to sell an inferior product for more money.

Turns out when they pasteurize it it destroys most of the flavor, so then they re-add flavor artificially extracted from other juice. “Not from concentrate” arguably, but very highly processed.

Juice from frozen concentrate is still far from as good as fresh-squeezed, but it’s a whole lot closer than the “not from concentrate” sludge. And ironically cheaper. It’s particularly good slightly under-diluted.

You’re not making any sense.

Good beans are ruined with dark roasts.

That’s my point, you’re making from me, before your patronizing bullshit. I know coffee you fuckwit. And I know that a bad roast can render the bean quality irrelevant, therefore it’s more significant than bean quality. And it illustrates that the a linear progression of importance doesn’t make a lot of sense.

But just carry on assuming nobody else knows anything and they’re just confused, it’ll probably make you happier.

But an oily dark roast on good beans will taste almost identical to an oily dark roast on shitty beans.

Ultimately though, we’re just disagreeing on a simple linear ordering because a simple linear ordering is inadequate to describe it.

Fair point

I f’ing love emacs, but don’t get cocky. It’s a security disaster.

Well, if you use any packages fetched from the net anyway.

Oh I think roast is primary. Too dark or light ruins any beans. I’d rather have well roasted ordinary beans than fancy beans badly over or under roasted. I’d rather have no coffee frankly, in some cases.

Never pre-ground if you care about taste.

Hoffman was surprised to find that it only took 24 hours before his high end coffee tasted inferior to fresh ground ordinary beans. (Unless I’m misremembering details but that was the gist).

A decent hand grinder still works on a budget. It’s easy to get the grind done while the water heats. Also a great thing for travel and camping.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard effectively the same core joke but better composed. Can’t remember it though because at best it’s middling funny.

Things is you don’t crunch numbers in Python code, you do that in libraries called from Python.

It’s a few statements of orchestration and any heavy lifting is encapsulated compiled code.

You don’t do tight loops on Python, or if you do you’re using it wrong.

Golang is technical debt in language form. A language that gained limited and now sagging popularity, for good reason. I hate to work in Java but hate golang more. It’s the lightsaber of programming languages. I’ve got shit to do, give me blasters and all the rest. And I’m not interested in wanking myself off about how I did it all with channels. [edited for typo/clarity]

In the case of bats for me I think I feel the pulses of bats because it’s quite powerful, more than hear it. It’s probably undertone resonance or something.

I haven’t heard any for a while and my hearing is deteriorating but bat numbers collapsed and I haven’t seen them either.

Less bad is good, right?

Is it? If a serial rapist goes from 10 rapes a month to 5, have they done a good thing?

(and obviously, driving a car is not comparable to rape - just illustrating that less of a bad thing is not a good thing)

That’s less bad, that’s not fixing anything. There is no universe when using energy to move 1.5-3 tonne private vehicles around for transportation is sustainable. I’ve heard numbers typically in the 40-60% region for the lifetime energy use of electric vs ICE. That is not fixing any problem, that’s making the problem worse less quickly.

You think electric cars are some sort of solution? They are part of the problem, not the solution. Making things worse but not quite as quickly is not making things better.

Truth is we could never stop it without radical global abolition of high energy activities. That’s impossible given the short term gains of breaking ranks and the unpopularity of that level of denial. We didn’t have to destroy ourselves as quickly, but the path was set when we had the industrial revolution.