According to this article written in July, it’s a bit more dire than that if you take a step or two back. Basically, openai and their copycats/derivatives are being held up by investments from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, who in turn are being held up by investments from Nvidia. If/when the whole chain collapses it’ll be more than 0.5% of earnings that disappear.

Not that I disagree, just as someone who loves computers and programming it really feels like throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.

We could (should imo) be planning a sort of overthrow of the rich assholes who don’t share; make sure everyone has access to a computer, the electricity need to run it, and the knowledge to use it to their own benefit.

The second, longer quote in my previous comment is from the intro to a computer self-help/“how-to” book, Without Me You Are Nothing (pdf link).

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” – Frank Herbert

"Right now there is an explosive growth of the number of computers and things they can do. Not only are their numbers increasing at a dazzling rate, but the storage of information in giant data banks is growing in the same explosive way.

We have no way to control this now and none in sight. In fact, the very nature of this growth says that all controls will lag far behind computer developments. Any attempt to ban them will only drive com- puters underground. Never lose sight of the fact that computers “crunch time.” The speed at which computers can operate tells us that laws cannot keep up with them. The person with a computer can dance rings around you while you react as though you were embedded in molasses.

What can you do?

Get your own computer. Learn how to use it. We are here to help you make that first step: how to find the one that fits your needs and your pocketbook, where to put it, how to program it-all of the essentials. If you don’t do this, the Bill of Rights is dead and your individual liberties will go the way of the dodo." – also Frank Herbert

I hate how much we seem to be slowly careening towards Frank Herbert’s vision like the worse case of collective target fixation.

https://learn.dvorak.nl/ <- used this to learn dvorak. I really liked how I didn’t need to switch my layout at the computer level just to learn.

https://zty.pe/ <- used this to practice and get my speed up, regardless of dvorak/qwerty/azerty. The way it plays, the ramping up of word length and frequency, I find more effective for “locking in” the positions in my mind and fingers. Especially once there are several words on-screen; you need to actively choose which one you’re going to type next instead of the program choosing for you. In my experience, that added active part of the process really helps expedite the formation of muscle memory.

Incredible. All throughout my studies the “bitter lesson”, so to speak, was that analogue circuits just couldn’t hold a candle to digital ones in terms of reliability when operating on small currents, to the point that no one bothered to miniaturize in analogue anymore. Even guitar pedals are almost all transistor-based, because it’s so much more feasible to to manipulate small currents through binary, quantized signals than analogue ones (even though the analogue ones are theoretically infinitely more precise).

Here’s the publication in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01477-0

Here is either the pre-print or an accompanying paper on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.05853

I’m trying to figure out how they get around the compounding imprecision that is inherent to multiple analogue steps and actually manage to rival digital circuit’s precision; seems like a big part come from how they have managed to squash all of the useful “work” down into almost a single step thanks to clever use of operational amplifiers on the “edges” of their resistive random access memory array.

Syntax highlighting for code blocks is the reason I prefer discord over slack for collaborating and just chatting with friends who know how to code. I imagine some irc clients exist that so the same, but at least with discord I know my recipient is guaranteed to see what I see.

I can’t tell if you’re intentionally making a portmanteau of “Enigma of Amigara Fault” or not, so I figured I’d write out the entire name in this reply in case anyone wants to read up on it themselves.

I relate to this article. On the bright(er) side, I looked at the latest release notes for Cursor; they’re still adding in features that I:

1. Would call basic
2. Felt the need for after spending just a few days writing my own cli chat/agent (talking to/with a local model run using ollama)

Similarity, I watched some of a recent week-long “vibe-coding game dev stream” (read: Cursor + Omarchy product placement/sponsored ad). Two cursor employees were present for around half a day to basically do some on-the-ground reconnaissance (read: talk to some actual users and get concrete feedback). I was astonished at how they seemed to discover in real time some of the sharp edges and missing functionality in their own product. Do they not use Cursor (or any of their competitors) to develop Cursor? Even if neither employee was a dev, surely they hear from their coworkers and their customers on a regular basis!

So, if these LLM-based agents are supposed to replace us, why are their makers so slow at building them out? Have all the “skilled” and/or experienced developers decided to shun working for them? Have they assumed up till now that most of their users would not be using them to develop software?

I know how hard it is to produce good estimations in software development. It just doesn’t seem like the companies working on them actually understand what the grunt, moment-to-moment work of software development consists of.

If that’s true, then programmers like this article’s author should be fine if they can weather the current LLM craze.

Sounds like either federation working as intended, or some client app trying to cache info about your instance. Might be https://fedidb.com/ or https://fediverse.observer/ or some other service.

I can’t find the exact forum post that alerted me to the issue, but here are some others that seem to congregate on this same root cause and fix:

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/screen-goes-black-after-gpu-overclock.3636714/ <- someone with the same GPU

https://www.overclock.net/threads/constant-black-screen-crashes-requires-hard-shutdown-to-restart.1795707/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/f53zzz/yet_another_black_screen_and_downclocking_fix_my/

I used to have this on my system - 5950X proc with 6700XT graphics card. Heating definitely would make it worse, but even with a big box fan blasting air into the cpu radiator I would get the occasional black screen and crash.

Turns out the RAM speed set in my bios was a tad bit too high. I turned down from like 1400MHz to 12000MHz and haven’t had a single black screen since.

From my understanding of word embeddings (as used by LLMs), you could skip the LLM and directly compare the similarity of what the STT outputs to each task or phrase in a list you have prepared. You’d need to test it out a few times to see what threshold works, but even testing against dozens of phrases should be much faster than spinning up an LLM - and it should be fully deterministic.

Awesome, thanks! I totally see what you mean now with regards to using the same color just with different shades.

For what it’s worth, the second snippet is just to demonstrate their point about looking for function defs names. Reading the article until the end, they propose a bit more than just coloring function names where they are defined.

I still don’t think the example proves their point, but let’s not misconstrue it either.

In terms of syntax highlighting, something like flowistry seems more important to me than bike shedding the perfect static highlighting approach.

Finally, I am much more often interested in what I/the code is doing to a variable than how it is initially declared.

Overall, if this approach works better for the author than more power to them! Please stop affirming that everyone else is doing it wrong, especially when you seem content to speculate why we do things differently instead of at least mentioning some reasons we ourselves give for how we do things.

Our eyes are way more sensitive to differences in lightness than in color, and we should use it, not try to negate it.

I thought the center of our vision is more sensitive to color whereas the edges of our vision is more sensitive to light/dark?

Per statistics, 70% of developers prefer dark themes. Being in the other 30%, that question always puzzled me. Why?

Have you tried asking any of them?

And I think I have an answer. Here’s a typical dark theme: […] and here’s a light one: […] On the latter one, colors are way less vibrant.

Does the author not understand that a lot of us code in darker environments where the light background of most light themes either sears our retinas or forces us to turn the monitor brightness so far down that everything becomes a shade of grey?

I find it much easier to find the function definitions when the word function is a different color than most of the surrounding text.

if the author meant “find a specific function def according to it’s name or role” then I could at least appreciate the perspective. As it stands, I can’t help but notice that their supposed “better highlighting for finding defs” example is not using the same source code: the preceding anonymous immediately-invoked function that englobes the entire first code block/sample is now off-screen and the code blurb itself is different…

Could you share a screenshot and/or list of color codes? This sounds similar to some themes I really appreciate yet can never feel completely at home with.