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* Posts by TH*

6 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2018

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

TH*
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Re: That's not what he said

I don't think you'll ever get a fully deterministic "AI" as a service, especially one that remains so through updates. I suppose you could run one model per project on your own servers, never alter them in any way, don't allow any randomness as part of the system, and really hope it has no bugs of its own that need fixing.

However as soon as you change your prompt (spec) if it's generating "from scratch" it'll create a different thing than it made last time. So I think perhaps what you want instead is to make your specs immutable, and every change is applied with a "patch" spec (i.e. a change request) that the AI can use to make a modification to the existing program. If all this is really deterministic then it would be possible to generate the code from each successive patch in turn and end up with reproducible results.

(Also, c'mon, it's a document. Even if it's got pictures, and equations, and emoji, and a video, it's a document. We're in an HTML document right now.)

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TH*
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Re: That's not what he said

OK, so you change the spec to fix your bug and regenerate the code from scratch. And now you you can throw away your carefully collected and filtered bug list because those bugs are gone and a bunch of new ones have popped up!

Fix the next bug in the spec, regenerate the code again and.. Oops, same thing happened! Bin the list, start QA again, repeat. Possibly forever.

Software always starts wrong, and (sometimes) eventually becomes good through a process of incremental improvement. I don't think regenerating code in a non-deterministic way from a spec document can really be a good substitute for that process.

The other thing I notice in your example is that the spec now has to be massively more detailed and precise than a spec has ever been before - probably so dense and complex that a non-technical person cannot understand it. Now it's.. the code!

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It looks like you’re a developer. Would you like help upgrading Windows 11?

TH*
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Re: Linux: Finally Good On Desktop

In those 25 years you've forgotten more about Linux configuration and troubleshooting than I'm interested in learning in the first place, to the extent that you can resolve any issues you hit in a few minutes.

I've long suspected those who claim it's usable day-to-day are either not noticing the problems because they've learned to fix them as they come up, or they have limited requirements and are doing little more than web browsing on an old-ish machine with a single display.

The driver issues are definitely not all in the past, I had to try 4 distros on a little Beelink box a year or two ago before one of them would start the install process (I think I ended up on plain Ubuntu, might be misremembering).

It's like with Windows, I'm familiar enough with it that I can take a new install and within a few hours it'll be de-crappified and working how I like it. Other people will be constantly irritated by stuff that I just never encounter (web search & ads in start menu, file indexing gone mad, etc). FWIW I do indeed have a bad aura, I had worse experience than anyone else with Apple stuff too.

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TH*

Linux: Finally Good On Desktop

I just got a brand new PC, with a recent Intel CPU and an RTX 40-series card (Zotac Magnus One, if anyone cares).

My old desktop, and thus my Windows license, is now in use by my wife. So do I buy a new one?

The answer for now, is "it seems not".

Every year for about 15 years, I've installed (when possible) and used (ditto) a couple of mainstream Linux distros. Until last year the results were always some degree of bad. Install failures, random crashing, random total death, video card issues, sleep/suspend issues, battery life, and frankly problems that I lack the knowledge to even guess about.

Last year I installed Pop OS on an old laptop, and I've been using it regularly. It's been fine. It has only one problem - once every 20-30 mins it doesn't recognise that I've let go of some random key and repeats the character until I press it again. It's the smallest Linux problem I've ever had.

I first tried Pop in 2020 and made some notes. Then I had some major issues making it unusable, but fewer than on other distros. The improvement in a couple of years was really encouraging.

So a few weeks ago I installed Pop on my new desktop. And.. It just installed! Then I installed a bunch of dev tools, and they all worked. Then I installed Steam, and I played a few games for a few hours. Then I installed Lutris and figured out how to play the Windows versions of some of my games from GOG (modern stuff too - Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3) via Wine/Proton. And that just worked too. Automatic1111, Oobabooga, both easy to get running too.

So, full credit to System76, they've made Linux actually work on the desktop. And I can finally, after 20 years of people telling me Linux is great, tell people that Linux is good and *actually a viable upgrade path from Windows*.

(It does get confused by a second monitor sometimes, but not catastrophically - and it'll forget which audio output it should use, but so did Windows.)

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We asked for your Fitbit horror stories and, oh wow, did you deliver: Readers sync their teeth into 'junk' gizmos

TH*

Same issues. In case it helps anyone, I've been able to get my Zip to sync after quickly popping undoing the battery cover and power cycling it. Got to be quick though, or it'll lose data.

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Reg man wraps head in 49-inch curved monitor

TH*
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Re: You get used to it.

I've been on the same journey, these days I have a Iiyama 40" 4K primary, and a cheap Acer 28" 4K secondary, rotated to portrait orientation. The secondary display gets terminals, chat, logs, and whatever I'm currently targeting (browsers, VM's, emulators) leaving the primary free for acres of lovely (and unlovely) code. A 40" screen, while not being quite as cool as 3 monitors, is very nice for games too and requires no fiddling to get it to work.

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