> Refreshing to read something that doesn't seem written by AI too (would be ironic given the contents).
As much as I dislike the idea of not writing/checking code I am responsible for, it was a surprise to me seeing a few "anti/limited AI in coding" articles that don't pass an LLM detector. (I know those are not perfect but not much else one can do).
Anecdotal evidence: when using X11 years ago I could never avoid screen tearing despite trying various options, except with one option that seemed to replace it with random frame drops. (to be fair that's probably related to my GPU, which is also the reason why I could not use wayland for so long)
Wayland just fixed all that, making it at least usable for multimedia/gaming use with my GPU.
> In Europe, with the advent of the EU, which shifted power away from voters to unelected bureaucracies seated in foreign countries. Removing it would transfer power away from the people to EU's adversaries and large monopolistic entities.
The European parliament is elected. When people don't shoot themselves in the foot and put weird politicians in it, being a bigger group means more power to coerce large companies into behaving better. See: GDPR or small things like removal batteries or removal or roaming fees. So in a sense it allows people to recover some power over large companies.
Generally attacks on the EU sound like they come from other countries or large companies that would benefit from it being split so that individual countries can be better bullied into submission (though the EU has not been very competent at not bullying itself into submission to the recent new American leader).
The European Parliament has little actual power. With 375 million voters that are split by language and culture the electoral power is so diluted that most of the actual authority rests with the EU bureaucracy.
It votes on all laws so it has a strong power to stop bullshit. I fail to see how the amount of voters would remove that right. The power stands with the people who actually get out to vote.
It approves the laws but can’t originate the laws, which makes it unlike every other democratic legislature. That means that the European Commission actually in charge of steering the government, while the Parliament can only really approve or disapprove. Moreover, the Commission can directly promulgate regulations that have the force of law. So you have a putatively administrative organ that both initiates actual legislation and can itself enact regulations that are effectively laws. I don’t think there is any other democratic system that centralizes that much lawmaking authority in its administrative organ.
Optimally, democracy is participative. People don’t just vote, they govern themselves. Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” does a great job capturing what that looks like. Today, the most democratic systems are what you have in the Scandinavian countries. Small, homogenous electorates can achieve social consensus on what their society should look like. And then they can act through parliament to effectuate changes.
The E.U.-wide electorate is so big and fractious that it has basically zero ability to achieve social consensus. And the E.U. Parliament has no power to initiate legislation anyway. So “democracy” is reduced to rubber stamping the initiatives of the Commission, which are in turn largely decided by the permanent bureaucracy.
The European Commission is made up of people nominated by the European Council, which itself is made up of ministers from each EU member (i.e. they are elected). The commissioners have to pass a confidence vote from the European Parliament, which again is elected. They can also be be forced to resign by the parliament with a no-confidence vote.
(Side-note: the EU's sin isn't being anti-democratic. The sin is being so confusing that it's easy to make accusations of being anti-democratic. Because no one really understands it if they aren't paying attention. There's a European Council and a Council of the European Union - wtf)
> The European Commission is made up of people nominated by the European Council, which itself is made up of ministers from each EU member (i.e. they are elected). The commissioners have to pass a confidence vote from the European Parliament, which again is elected. They can also be be forced to resign by the parliament with a no-confidence vote.
What you’re describing is a system where the people with the key power of legislative initiative are insulated from the electorate by multiple layers of indirection. It’s kind of like the original U.S. executive. The President was elected by the Electoral College, by Electors nominated by state legislatures (i.e. they are elected). The point of that design was to insulate the executive from democracy.
But note that, even in that system, designed in 1789 by people who were skeptical of democracy, the most powerful body, the House, was directly elected. The House had legislative initiative—it can originate legislation. And it had exclusive legislative initiative over spending bills.
And note that the layers of indirection in the U.S. system were justified at the time on the basis that the federal government was one of limited powers and could only legislate in certain areas. The only bodies with plenary legislative power were the state legislatures, which were directly elected. But the E.U. isn’t a government of limited powers. It can legislate in any area.
It's more cost efficient to keep them running all the time since most of the cost of nuclear is building the power plant, but power output can be adjusted if needed.
Browser integration means one does not need to enable the VPN system-wide as do most VPN applications. Useful if you want to switch region quickly without the OS and many apps now thinking you're in a different country and starting behaving as such.
The article talks of other menu entries but the screenshot of the menu literally shows the "Remove AI chatbot" option, why not just click that instead of hunting for it in about:config?
As an aside, it does seem like a bit of a bad sign for a feature that you know up-front that it'll be so polarizing that you need to have an always-visible top-level "hide this forever!" button.
Why? Shouldn't polarizing features be done exactly this way? The people on one pole use it, those on the other remove it. Perhaps you meant "unwanted" or "unpopular"?
If you never add any features that could be polarizing, then you end up with a lowest common denominator interface that offends nobody and is useful to (almost) nobody.
I remember having some microwave oven that started rotating if I opened the door partially at just the right angle. Hopefully does not mean the magnetron was actually running.
That seems to be due to he microcontroller using its pins in duplex.
There is indeed no radiation being emitted in that case, just the lamp and rotation.
Not sure how reliable is gptzero, but it says 90% AI for the first paragraph. (I like to do some sanity check before wasting my time).
Would be nice to have some browser extension automatically detecting likely AI output using a local model and highlighting it, but probably too compute-intensive.
OS and compilers have a deterministic public interface. They obey a specification developers know, so you they can be relied on to write correct software that depends on them even without knowing the internal behavior. Generative AI does not have those properties.
Yes but developers don’t have a deterministic interface. I still had to be careful about writing out my specs and make sure they were followed. At least I don’t have to watch my tone when my two mid level ticket taking developers - Claude and Codex - do something stupid. They also do it a lot faster
But the code you’re writing is guard railed by your oversight, the tests you decide on and the type checking.
So whether you’re writing the spec code out by hand or ask an LLM to do it is besides the point if the code is considered a means to an end, which is what the post above yours was getting at.
Tests and type checking are often highway-wide guardrails when the path you want to take is like a tightrope.
Also the code is not a means to an end. It’s going to be run somewhere doing stuff someone wants to do reliably and precisely. The overall goal was ever to invest some programmer time and salary in order to free more time for others. Not for everyone to start babysitting stuff.
Which spec? Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? You can’t even know that for sure if you roll your own code, with no 3rd party libraries.
Bugs are by definition issues arise when developers expect they code to do one thing, but it does another thing, because of unforeseen combination of factors. Yet we all are ok with that. That’s why we accept AI code. They work well enough.
> Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response?
There can be. But you’d have to map the libraries to opcodes and then count the cycles. That’s what people do when they care about that particular optimization. They measure and make guaranties.
Assuming also that you are not running on top of an operating system, running in a VM with “noisy neighbors”…
I haven’t counted cycles since programming assembly on a 65C02 where you cooks save a clock cycle by accessing memory in the first page of memory - two opcodes to do LDA $02 instead of LDA $0201
For OSes: POSIX, or the MSDN documentation for Windows.
Compiler bugs and OS bugs are extremely rare so we can rely on them to follow their spec.
AI bugs are very much expected when the "spec" (the prompt) is correct, and since the prompt is written using imprecise human language likely by people that are not used to writing precise specifications, the prompt is likely either mistaken or insufficiently specified.
As much as I dislike the idea of not writing/checking code I am responsible for, it was a surprise to me seeing a few "anti/limited AI in coding" articles that don't pass an LLM detector. (I know those are not perfect but not much else one can do).
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