Agile Meridian / Post Manager

Thanks for sharing this! I really think that when people see LLM failures and say that such failures demonstrate how fundamentally different LLMs are from human cognition, they tend to overlook how humans actually do exhibit remarkably similar failures modes. Obviously dementia isn’t really analogous to generating text while lacking the ability to “see” a rendering based on that text. But it’s still pretty interesting that whatever feedback loops did get corrupted in these patients led to such a variety of failure modes.

As an example of what I’m talking about, I appreciated and generally agreed with this recent Octomind post, but I disagree with the list of problems that “wouldn’t trip up a human dev”; these are all things I’ve seen real humans do, or could imagine a human doing.

Well now you’ve seen it elsewhere, too.

distributing relay knowledge among chatters (TBD)

This is the core reason that centralization is currently necessary. So admitting that it’s an unsolved problem for a federated alternative is basically reinforcing Signal’s point.

That’s because you haven’t unlearned it yet

String escaping sucks in bash and other posix-style shells too, though.

But that’s not actually true in general; there is a default branch concept in forges, and an integration and/or release branch in most recommended workflows. That’s the trunk.

Fair, but it’s one that the typical tools for finding bugs, tests and static analysis, cannot actually help with.

Believe me, whitespace-correct scripting is absolutely an issue.

You’re right that it’s annoying when filenames diverge right at a character that must be escaped.

For interactive use, tab-completion essentially makes this a non-issue, because shells add escaping in the appropriate places.

For scripting, where spaces are harder to deal with, unfortunately there’s just not much you can do; your two options are basically to learn all of your particular shell’s patterns for dealing with whitespace in filenames, or only write scripts in something other than a POSIX shell.

That’s fair; Python, Swift, and most Lisps all use or have previously used reference-counting. But the quoted sentence isn’t wrong, since it said no “garbage collection pauses” rather than “garbage collection.”

“Garbage collection” is ambiguous, actually; reference counting is traditionally considered a kind of “garbage collection”. The type you’re thinking of is called “tracing garbage collection,” but the term “garbage collection” is often used to specifically mean “tracing garbage collection.”

To be fair, the drop/dealloc “pause” is very different from what people usually mean when they say “garbage collection pause”, i.e. stop-the-world (…or at least a slice of the world).

This is hilarious. I’m not sure how often anyone would actually need to verbalize arbitrary binary data, but I do see an advantage over base64 since the English letter names are so often phonetically similar.

“Heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point”

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Right, but their endorsement is still likely to do more harm than good in terms of public perception of the law, I think.

Well, that’s fair; first-class support for running an actual Linux kernel, with the containerization support that implies, is one of the reasons I prefer Windows with WSL as a dev environment when using Docker (at least, in companies where the IT team won’t just let you run native Linux).

MacOS and docker is asking for trouble.

That’s a real problem! MacOS and Docker are extremely common for development, and a scripting language like Python should just work with them, not just at the language level (which is good enough) but in the ecosystem and tooling. The latter is what Astral is trying to improve.

… until you have an off day, or you get bored of coding, run off to join the circus as a professional knife-juggler and your codebase is inherited by someone of more conventional aptitude.

Sometimes you even have to deal with having mere mortals on your team!