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Aargh, aggressively blinking visual horror website.


The new workflow will be "AI, I need to view this text file and add some words to it. Create an app that displays it in a scrollable window, respecting the encoding. Now move the cursor to the line below the three dashes... no, the other three dashes..."


This is how futuristic MS is, because they already work that way when creating slopware like this.


well, sure, that uses a large number of processing cycles for each small operation. But asking a frontier LLM to evaluate a lisp expression is more or less on the same scale (interesting empirical question whether it's more or less). And, if we count operations at the brain neuron level it would take to evaluate one mentally....


I'm sure in the future there will be technology to evaluate simple Lisp expressions in only milliseconds of time, spending mere joules of energy.


Maybe someday they'll have special hardware to efficiently run lisp expressions. A Lisp Processing Unit!


And they're pretty much the only example of an embedded browser architecture actually performing tolerably and integrating well with the native environment.


Vscode’s performance is pretty bad. It’s “tolerable” just like any electron app.


That's one maxed out RAM configuration. Back in my day, we had 4k RAM, about 3500 bytes usable from BASIC, and that was enough, unless you were rich enough to have a 3k memory expansion cartridge. But really, if you need that extra 3k, you're just not writing code efficiently enough, right.


Back in the 80s, I was lucky that my father was an electronics design engineer, so he built a 24K expansion cartridge for us. I agree that there were some great games for the unexpanded VIC 20 though, such as Rockman. I loved that game. So many levels for a small game.


I had a home brewed ram expansion board (still do actually, in a box somewhere...) I powered everything up a couple years ago when my kids found it and asked what the heck it was. Still works


My original VIC 20 machine that I had in the 80s still works as well, but a few things have been replaced along the way. I still have the same 24K expansion cart that my Dad built 40 years ago and it also still works.


We're just not going to see any code written entirely without AI except in specialist niches, just as we don't see handwritten assembly and binaries. So the disclosure part is going to become boilerplate.

In the old era, the combination 'it works' + 'it uses a sophisticated language' + 'it integrates with a complex codebase' implied that this was an intentional effort by someone who knew what they were doing, and therefore probably safe to commit.

We can no longer make that social assumption. So then, what can we rely on to signal 'this was thoroughly supervised and reviewed and understood and tested?' That's going to be hard and subjective.

Personal reputations and track records are pedigrees and brands are going to become more important in the industry; and the meritocratic 'code talks no matter where you came from' ethos is at risk.


There's a ridiculous amount of tech in the DNA and cellular machinery of a single bacterium.


When you poo though it doesnt require landfill and relatively less toxic.


Where do you think it goes?


In the ocean.


The water from sewage might end up there after it's extracted and sanitized, but all the solids have to be disposed of too. Those solids, plus the leftover chemicals used to extract and sanitize the water, go to landfill.


My whole cat is, what, a couple gigs of DNA?


The threshold isn't 50% because the distribution of human and AI written cases isn't naturally 50-50. So a coin flip will underperform always guessing the more frequent class. Where it gets interesting is if the base is unknown or variable over time or between application domains. Like, since AI written text is being generated faster than the human kind, soon guessing AI every time will be 99% accurate. That doesn't mean such a detector is useful.


When we say "coin flip" in these situations we mean "chance", ie the prior distribution. Otherwise a predictor of the winning lottery numbers that's "no better than a coin flip" would mean it wins the jackpot half the time.


Yup! My point is that the 'coin flip baseline' model that's as good as chance isn't actually trivial to create, for an unbalanced and time varying underlying distribution.


Why didn't they just ask ChatGPT?

Oh wait.


For those curious, the first sentence of the response from ChatGPT gets it correct.

>On a 1978 Buick Riviera, the gas cap is hidden behind a flip-down license plate on the rear bumper.


That's not what I received from ChatGPT. This is:

The fuel filler door is on the left side (driver’s side) of the vehicle. Therefore, the little arrow on the dash fuel gauge should point to the left to indicate that.

(Most Buick Rivieras of that era had the fuel filler on the driver’s side, though official Buick manuals or build sheets from 1978 confirm this location.)


https://chatgpt.com/share/6957819f-b9d0-8009-a5d2-cfbde7daa6...

Paid account, ChatGPT 5.2

Share the links, people!


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