bill_1992

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 46 points 11 months ago (2 children)

This whole thing is basically a nonstory when you realize how much money is in tech. Meta changed their name and sank billions on an idea that everyone thought was stupid from the beginning, and they're still fine.

Putting a billion into the flavor-of-the-month that has like 10% chance to be the next big thing is a no-brainer when you're printing multiple billions in profit doing nothing, and have a lot more cash on hand.

The real story, is how wealth inequality and monopolies have essentially allowed the rich to waste tons of money chasing more wealth while having almost no incentive to provide value to society. Who gives a fuck about hallucination and prompt injection? It's all trivial details that VCs are giving away billions to eventually solve.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The point about a binary protocol is interesting, because it would inherently solve the injection issue.

However, constructing an ad-hoc query becomes tedious, as you're now dealing with bytes and text together. Doing so in a terminal can be pretty tedious, and most people would require a tool to do so. Compare this against SQL, where you can easily build a query in your terminal. I think the tradeoff is similar to protobuf vs json.

You could do a text representation (like textproto), but guess what? Now injection is an issue again.

Another thing would be the complexity of client libraries. With SQL client libraries, the library doesn't need to parse or know SQL - it can send off the prepared statement as-is. With a binary protocol, the client libraries will likely need to include a query builder that builds the byte representation since no developers are going to be concatenating bytes by hand, which makes the bar higher for open-source libraries. This also means that if you add a new query feature to your DB, all client libraries will likely need to be updated to use the feature.

And you're still going to need to tune and optimize queries for this new DB. That's just the nature of the beast: scaling is hard especially when you can't throw money at the problem.

Quite frankly, it's a lot of hard tradeoffs to not need to use prepared statements or query builders. Injection is still is an issue for SQL today, but it's been "solved" as much as it possibly can.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've been using Jooq to build my queries (and run them). Beats the hell out of writing prepared statements in strings.

Not sure what power I'm missing though, I've been able to do everything via Jooq that I want to do.

[–] [email protected] 161 points 11 months ago (17 children)

Everyone loves the idea of scraping, no one likes maintaining scrapers that break once a week because the CSS or HTML changed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Quite frankly as an American, I think it's very American to even consider the timetable as out of your control. For a lot of places, the trains come so fast that you're not even waiting for a few minutes - like most drivers take longer to get settled into their car seat before driving. The sorry state of American transit is absolutely not the pinnacle of transit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Also, trains and light rail have already been automated. The tech is already here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Is it just me or is the article super misleading? None of the roles are for generative AI for making movies. It looks like the roles are for either research or generic product personalization stuff, none of which is necessarily generative AI. I'm not quite sure why they juxtaposed those AI roles with the ongoing strikes in Hollywood, because they have nothing to do with each other.

Quite frankly, I think the current crop of AI products have yet to take away from the real creative process.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I had a mixed experience adding types to a large enterprise Python codebase.

I think the thing that really kills it is the (relative) lack of community support. Whereas with TS, almost every package big or small usually has types, I've found a lot of pip packages wouldn't be typed out of the box, which means you gotta generate them automatically or use escape hatches like Any.

Using escape hatches like Any basically kill the point of typing, as the static checker basically stops checking after it sees an Any. If your static checker is configured to ignore certain files because they aren't typed yet, then any code that refers to those files also get ignored. You basically need to hit a threshold of your codebase and dependencies to get the benefits of typing. Until then, my experience was finding bugs that the type checker should've caught but didn't.

And obviously, to get the full power of types, you must buy in as a team, and that means really buy-in, without resorting to escape hatches like Any. Any reluctance, and you're likely in for an uphill battle.

Another thing that really hurt adoption, was that before using typing, a lot of the code just clearly broke type rules, eg a function that returns a string or a number, but the caller assumes the output is a number. Especially if it's lower level code, those may take a nontrivial refactor to fix.

All of this is assuming it's trivial to enforce a static check on the codebase through CI/CD.

This leads to my conclusion, that not being forced to use types is a BENEFIT of Python, not a downside. You are able to write code a lot faster and more expressively if you don't need to worry about typing, for small scripts or whatnot. I think if you're starting a project of any size and already know you want typing, consider using another language that has typing built in.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

That's Silicon Valley's MO. Just half a year ago, people were putting crypto BS in their products.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Same, having competitors to Android and iOS would be great.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm calling the cops

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (7 children)

We can please not bring the "we did it Reddit!" culture to Lemmy?

Reddit is a privately held company. Their valuation is falling because someone at Fidelity arbitrarily said so. Right now, given the current economic trends, almost every consumer tech company is taking a beating (Discord, Substack, etc), so in the larger context Reedit's drop in valuation is expected and smart money is expecting it to rise once the economy becomes hot and more investors have money to risk on consumer companies.

The biggest value of a social media is the influence it has on culture and society as a whole, which is why advertisers want to get in on the action (think of Facebook influencing elections). Engaging on the platform and even constantly talking about the platform is a great sign of it's lasting influence.

So no, spending an hour putting pixels on r/place is not a great way to stick it to Reddit. Constantly talking about Reddit and basically giving it free ad-space and mind share on Lemmy also does not stick it to Reddit. The original poster is correct: best thing is a blank canvas.

And ignore all the click-bait articles about how Reddit is going to fall any day now. They all basically play on your wishful thinking for clicks, they aren't based on reality.

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