Same. Coding by hand was really, really hard at first, I remember. Then one day it just clicked and it was like I could think so clearly in my head, without making mistakes, and write code that would have compiled by hand during an exam. We would just practice and work for it.
I don't want to be polemic, but I really miss those days.
Yeah writing out code by hand made me slow down and think more.
One thing I recall is that the grading policy made it very clear that minor syntax issues were inconsequential in handwritten answers. And more advanced classes only wanted pseudocode. Which are exactly the right priorities.
I don't think the problem is that they used an LLM to write the article. It seems that the commenter takes issue with them using the LLM to get the data to analyze.
Haha I was there too. I remember he made thinking clearly seem so simple. What a humble man.
If I remember correctly, his talk was about how the world of science-the pure pursuit of truth-and the world of engineering-the practical application of solutions under constraints-had to learn from each other.
I think something that often isn't considered with affirmative action is the benefits that are conferred to the people who are not in a minority. In other words it is a genuinely useful thing to go to a university with a broad spectrum of people and ideas.
In a purely meritocratic sense, all other beings equal a university that provides a diverse faculty and student body will better educate its students than a university that doesn't, all other things remaining equal.
The problem in practice is that these programs don’t actually select for diverse ideas, they select for demographic traits like gender or ethnic background.
If the team uses relational databases but someone shows up to an interview with a strongly held belief that NoSQL is the way to go, they’re likely to be rejected because their ideas don’t match the team’s. Same if the team strongly believes in some version of agile but a person they interview doesn’t like agile. Diversity programs in practice never even attempt to push diversity of ideas, they ignore all of that and focus on things like gender and ethnic background.
This feels like a dangerous opinion to voice, but the workplace affirmative action programs I’ve seen in practice have been very poor in their implementation. At my last workplace that instituted diversity targets, HR would just start rejecting hires if they thought it would skew the diversity numbers in the wrong way. So you’d hit a wall where the only candidates you were allowed to hire couldn’t be, for example, men or of Asian descent or some other demographic trait they thought was over-represented. None of this improved diversity of ideas, it became a game to find a person whose ideas matched the team who also happened to have the right gender or skin color to keep our diversity statistics going in the direction HR demanded.
So what? Everyone acts in to further their interests. NATO expands because it's in NATO's interest to do so. Russia says that this expansion is not in Russia's interest. Why only say the Russian part and leave out the NATO part?
Furthermore, if having an interest in something gives the right to use military power to achieve that interest then the argument applies to everyone.
The point about foreign bases in Canada or Mexico gets repeated a lot online, but what is the ultimate point? The USA would not like it, but it's also not a political reality. On the other hand a NATO build out IS a political reality.
So I think rather than focusing purely on what one country wishes it's better to analyze things in terms of what the political realities are and which is better.
In that sense NATO is meant to be a deterrence. Russia doesn't like that. If you ask yourself whose vision of the future is better then the answer is clear. A world of where rule of law is the norm and invasions are deterred is preferable. There has been tremendous peace and prosperity in the EU because of NATO and people have just gotten used to it. They have taken for granted the cost and sacrifice that this peace came from.
However, simply saying that Russia has an interest in not having NATO on their border is almost tautological. Of course they don't want that, but so what. Peace only works if it's enforceable.
> The point about foreign bases in Canada or Mexico gets repeated a lot online, but what is the ultimate point? The USA would not like it, but it's also not a political reality.
The point is, that the US would do actually the very same as russia, and break international law. And regarding political reality, this already happened in history with the Cuba crisis. The point is actually, that the west uses a moral highground to condemn russias aggression, while it would be doing the very same. It falls in the "rules for thee but not for me" category. And if you hold somebody accountable on standards that would you wouldn't be able to hold up for yourself, your are - by definition - a hipocrite.
Hypocrisy? I said each side acts in their interest: NATO and Russia. My point was only to ask whose interest would readers on HN prefer prevail?
It's a simple question. Do we want to live in a world where Russia achieves their strategic goals or do we prefer to live in a world where NATO achieves their strategic goals?
NATO expansion doesn't happen illegally. It's completely voluntary. It's a defensive alliance meant as a deterrence. And countries in NATO all enjoy much higher standards of living than non-NATO countries. NATO countries all have laws to protect their citizens and they enjoy peace from invasion.
I get that Russia doesn't want that. But my point was so what? I never really denied that issue. Everybody is acting in their best interest. It's just that NATOs interests and values are also the same as my own.
There's no hypocrisy here. There's just a good and bad guy in this case. I don't see the problem here.
>NATO expands because it's in NATO's interest to do so.
I highly recommend reading the 1997 US Senate debate about NATO expansion. There were a number of experienced statesmen who vehemently disagreed that NATO expansion was in NATO's interest.
> A world of where rule of law is the norm and invasions are deterred is preferable.
Except we don't have that world. From Iraq in 2003 to especially the NATO air campaign in Libya in 2011, we've long since demonstrated that there are no rules, and invasions have no consequences.
The AI/LLM movement is either utterly transformational or it’s not. By the former I mean there is no daylight between it and the latter.
If it’s not transformational then this is a bubble and the market will right itself soon after, e.g buying data centers for cheap. LLMs will then exist as a useful but limited tool that becomes profitable with the lower capex.
If it is transformational then we don’t have the societal structure to responsibly incorporate such a shift.
The conservative guess is it won’t be transformational, that the current applications of the tech are useful but not in a way that justifies the capex, and that some version of agents and chat bots will continue to be built out in the future but with a focus on efficiency. Smaller models that require less power to train and run inference that are ubiquitous. Eventually many will run on device.
I guess there’s also another version of the future that’s quasi-transformational. Instead of any massive breakthrough there’s a successful govt coup or regulatory capture. Perfectly functioning normal stuff is then replaced with LLM assisted or augmented versions everywhere. This version is like the emergence of the automobile in the sense that the car fundamentally altered city planning, where and how people live, but often at the expense of public transportation that in hindsight may have sorely been missed.
I don't want to be polemic, but I really miss those days.