• 0 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle

  • On Mac:

    If you want an icon you can double click on your desktop, you can put you command in a file with the extension “.command” and mark it as executable. Double clicking it will run the content as a shell script in Terminal.

    If you want something that can be put into the Dock, use the Script Editor application that comes with macOS to create a new AppleScript script. Type do shell script "<firefox command here>" then find Export in the menu. Instead of Script, choose export to Application and check Run Only. This will give you an application you can put in the Dock.

    If you want to use Shortcuts, you can use the Run Shell Script action in Shortcuts too.

    Finally, if you want something that opens multiple firefoxes at once, chain multiple firefox invocations together on one line separated by an ampersand. There is an option you have to use (–new-instance I think?) to make Firefox actually start a complete new instance.


  • That’s funny because I grew up with math teachers constantly telling us that we shouldn’t trust them.

    Normal calculators that don’t have arbitrary precision have all the same problems you get when you use floating point types in a programming language. E.g. 0.1+0.2==0.3 evaluates to false in many languages. Or how adding very small numbers to very large numbers might result in the larger number as is.

    If you’ve only used CAS calculators or similar you might not have seen these too since those often do arbitrary precision arithmetics, but the vast majority of calculators is not like that. They might have more precision than a 32 bit float though.



  • What bothers me the most is the amount of tech debt it adds by using outdated approaches.

    For example, recently I used AI to create some python scripts that use polars and altair to parse some data and draw charts. It kept insisting to bring in pandas so it could convert the polars dataframes to pandas dataframes just for passing them to altair. When I told if that altair can use polars dataframes directly, that helped, but two or three prompts later it would try to solve problems by adding the conversion again.

    This makes sense too, because the training material, on average, is probably older than the change that enabled altair to use polars dataframes directly. And a lot of code out there just only uses pandas in the first place.

    The result is that in all these cases, someone who doesn’t know this would probably be impressed that the scripts worked, and just not notice the extra tech debt from that unnecessary dependency on pandas.

    It sounds like it’s not a big deal, but these things add up and eventually, our AI enhanced code bases will be full of additional dependencies, deprecated APIs, unnecessarily verbose or complicated code, etc.

    I feel like this is one aspect that gets overlooked a bit when we talk about productivity gains. We don’t necessarily immediately realize how much of that extra LoC/time goes into outdated code and old fashioned verbosity. But it will eventually come back to bite us.






  • I tried it and it’s way off for me because it gives too much weight to submitted posts. I don’t have very many submissions so even when I selected recent only, it focused on one guide post for a game I wrote many years ago and made the profile 80% about that. But I guess that’s a problem at some point before the LLM is involved. There are some other similarly non-LLM problems too like making the most used terms section list almost only subreddit names.

    When I limited it to recent comments only it did a better job. It even listed “Humanity’s general incompetence” as the fifth of my “top 3” topics.