What a remarkable stalking horse to try and kneecap right-to-repair by arguing "Please, think of the chil^H^H^H^Hhackers!"
You wouldn't download a CAR, would you? You wouldn't hack your own INSULIN pump, would you?
Face it: If it's GPL and vulnerable to interference, responsibility is squarely on the manufacturer and the fastest death-free way to prove it. If it's GPL and modified by the owner, fuck off.
I think their point was that there is no empirical definition of information as it relates to the observer. The expurimint you cite worked upon a physical system that already had a state prior to the expurimint.
If everything is information, then nothing is.
A disordered system still has state. You just don't know what it is.
Fair point on the semantics. But I'm not talking about subjective 'knowledge.' I'm talking about the thermodynamic cost to maintain a state.
Landauer showed that information processing is physical (heat). I’m just extending that logic: if the universe has to process too much state data in one spot, the cost isn't just heat—it's lag (Time Dilation).
It doesn't matter if we observe the mess; the system still has to render it.
The whitespace thing is actually one of python's major flaws. That feature attaches syntactic meaning to non-printing characters. From a human standpoint, there're many examples of silence having some kind of meaning. From an engineering standpoint, that entire methodology is insane. Communication needs to be positive and deliberate.
Remember that Apple SSL bug "goto fail"? That was a whitespace bug, because even if the C feature predated python, everyone's eyes had been trained to slide right off that particularly crass shortcut as python was widespread by that point.
>Communication needs to be positive and deliberate.
I don't know what you mean by this.
>The whitespace thing is actually one of python's major flaws. That feature attaches syntactic meaning to non-printing characters. From a human standpoint, there're many examples of silence having some kind of meaning. From an engineering standpoint, that entire methodology is insane.
It's not non-printed characters, it's alignment. The period is a parallel for the semicolon in programming, to signal the end of a unit, but the whitespace in python is a parallel to the bullet point, or poetic stanza. Those both parallel to python in the form of atomic statements.
Most people's concern is the hanging indentation. Here, I would argue that we can effectively prove that hanging indentation is vastly more parallel to natural language than braces. Simply search for "handwritten recipes" and you will see that in a natural language assembly exercises -- effectively a real world parallel to programming -- human beings naturally default to hanging indentation when grouping sub-categories of items together.
Does this parallel to the jargony math you'll find in math books? No. But it trivially flows from human beings in the real world, and there is nothing formally incorrect in the syntax. Thus, we would likely find that layperson would intuitively understand the hanging indentation, where as braces as syntax is jargony, and must be learned.
> Here, I would argue that we can effectively prove that hanging indentation is vastly more parallel to natural language than braces.
I see where you're coming from. However, I would counter that in the use cases you've shown, as well as all of the use cases I've seen in the real world, there are important differences between them and Python.
1. Hanging indentation is most often used in things that are small in scope, where you can easily see both the start and the end of the list. Python blocks can grow without bound.
2. Hanging indentation in real life doesn't require perfect alignment. Python does.
I don't think it has anything to do with Python. I had plenty of 'if' errors in C++ caused by indenting the second line and not putting braces around it prior to Python. They were always painful to debug. I finally just _always_ put a brace around an 'if' block, regardless of whether it is one line or many, and I've never had that problem again. I think the problem is that C lets you omit the brace for one line; it should always require a brace.
Python executes like it reads, which seems like a positive feature to me. Makes errors like C's two-line if block impossible.
There's functionally little difference between spaces being non-printable characters, unless there are examples of text editors that do not render offset empty space when they're used.
Spaces vs tabs, sure, that's an argument.
But it doesn't seem reasonable to argue that {something that is visible in a text editor} is different than any other kind of character.
It's not like Python was using the bell ASCII or somesuch.
Where does one begin with this kind of fallacy-ridden mud slinging? Appeals to both authority and majority, and guilt by location just to name the first three.
So what if "everyone in Seattle hates AI"? What gives The Author the right to simultaneously invalidate Seattle's comparatively immeasurably larger advantage in experience, qualification, and education? If even the ludicrously biased title had even the barest hint of truth to it, they've stacked the deck against themselves in credibility unless they've already mentally biased themselves to blindly dismiss anyone that doesn't mirror their own now blatant fanaticism. Which we've already established now includes all of Seattle.
So put this out on the curb with the rest of the garbage meant to inflame and divide, because on it's face it is neither reasonable nor factual.
"He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."
—Srinivasa Ramanujan
"The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy
Way, way off-topic now, but if you ever get a chance to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disappearing_Number, don't miss it. It's rare to see a play weave mathematics and history into such a form, threading them through our modern world and showing the humanity of those who lived and breathed the equations on the page.
Is this a critical thinking test? All sorts of public religious figures claim all sorts of miracles as an introductory biography item. I happen to believe in miracles! but this is not one of them. Symbolic logic, and certainly math, is not inherently written in one character set or another. Dreams mean things and things could carry effects somehow but a dream of math symbols with crimson curtains is not convincing from this view.
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
Reading this as a pilot, this thing reads like a primer for How Not To Think.
The author might think they're being a meta-pirate by saying "oh these are all possible actions proscribed by most organizations" implying that the proscription itself is a sign of ossified incompetence, instead of identifying the underlying one-true-savior fallacy that underpins it all.
The general danger here is human error. The point of leveraging a collaborative environment is to design process to detect and remediate human error before it radiates outward into more cost. The farther it goes, generally, the higher the cost, non-linearly. It shouldn't be "never do this", but instead "if you're going to do this use every tool at your disposal to make sure it's done correctly." Siloing the entire decision tree to yourself is exactly how not to do it.
> They did really well in some things like ... devops
Did they, though? I ask because the vast majority of people touting LLM as a huge win usually seem to speak from a.. DK-heavy perspective. As in, the bulk of their profession experience hasn't actually been doing the subject they're gushing about the LLM crushing.
So I ask you, what is your level of devops experience to make such a dismissive, sweeping statement? I am pointedly inquiring about my own area of expertise, in case that wasn't clear.
I mean this for simple devops tasks, like if you need it to write you a Bash script that will clean out some empty caches or something it will one shot it most of the time. And for figuring out standard tasks like setting up deploy keys for some new doc system or updating the make files to handle some new build dependency. I still have devops engineers for anything difficult, but they get pestered with a lot less things they would find trivial that the rest of the teams would have asked them for help on before.
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