I found that SICP (lisp version) is very math focused and in general LISP/scheme as a language is not very relevant anymore.
I’d reccommend against it if you think math or theorethical concepts are not for you or if you want to solve practical problems from the get go.
It’s a very good and complete coursebook though. It covers almost anything on how “computation” works, and you learn all the base the concepts you find in almost any other programming languages.
Don’t be discouraged by the starting difficulty and ridiculous crafting chains (laugh at how ridiculous they are instead). There’s plenty of quality of life in there to make it less painful.
I would suggest to start with the 2.9 beta instead of 2.8.4, they improved a lot of the painful things at the start of the game.
Btw if you don’t like combat absolutely play in peaceful and change configs to make it less dark or straight up cheat items in if it becomes too grindy for you.
It’s a 2000 hour journey not a sprint and there’s plenty of content even if you cheat in resources or (tier-appropriate) items.
A similar modpack I am playing and I can reccommend is Star technology. It’s a gregtech-based skyblock mod. It’s very nice if you think GTNH is too painful.
We live in a period of extreme stupidity, so I now fully expect AI to cause disasters in the same idiotic and tragically hilarious way.
I expect AI to trigger a war because some idiot trusted it blindly without double checking (oh wait, it almost already happened!), and I’m sure there are plenty of people currently lobbying to have AI directly connected to weapons.
Skynet is not going to have the objective to conquer the world, it’s going to have the objective of maximizing paperclip production.
Ylvis (he made “what does the fox say”) did a great song about this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGHT-PpRFE0
It’s also on music streaming services, but the video is great. Search “Ylvis - Intolerant”.
I fully expect this to become the new normal being pushed by management.
“We identified PR reviews to be blocking our newfound AI-powered efficiency, so we are now mandating all the reviews to done by AI. Also we figured all the developers are now useless since all you do is ask Claude to solve tickets, so you are all fired”
I wonder how long it takes for the first high profile disaster happening because of a policy like that.
You feel like having italian, but not pizza. Maybe some long and thin type of pasta? You are really hungry, so when writing the code you are constantly thinking of that delicious dish. Now, Claude, we need to refactor the whole code to be inspired by this before lunch. Go ahead and push to prod directly. Be fast and make no mistakes.
Fair point 😊 Thanks for the clarification!
Reading AI code all day absolutely sucks and is the least interesting part of the job. Reading human code is so much better.
Also in all the places I worked 99% of the code was not copy-pasted. Beginners copy paste in their uni assignments, but once you are a bit comfortable with code it’s much slower than just writing out exactly what you want!
I don’t think that fully, 100% AI-written code is going to be the future and humans are only going to read it. I believe that (expert) humans still do a much better job in structuring code for long-term maintainability and thus there’s still going to be a niche for software developers there.
But I also have to agree with you that unfortunately most of the code will still be AI generated slop.
I saw the news a few days earlier before the vote finalized, and I was already betting on the US voting against. Anything involving the word “equality” is too woke for them.
Btw the US has been voting against basic rights and progressive policies for a while, I don’t expect anything good out of them anymore.
And btw a lot of these proposals were relatively spineless non-binding agreements. Something that should have been relatively easy to pass because there’s no real committment whatsoever.
If you want to hear “the map is more accurate” from someone, I can tell you that the map is more accurate, unless you want to navigate or fly over the oceans.
Every map is imperfect, but the usual map you see everywhere (Mercator) was made for seafaring, not land usage. The new projection they voted for is new, so they probably considered a different compromise of objectives, and it doesn’t take much to be better than Mercator.
Ask yourself why the entire world voted for it, except the usual regressive country.
Mainstream news are all negative. If you are struggling to see a light at the end of the tunnel, try to look up newspapers/publications with only positive news. A lot of them don’t get reported at all by normal media.
I know it’s strange to hear, but while I expect a lot of pain in the short term, I expect things will be better in the longer term (20+ years).
Even in the US, even with trump trying to bring back coal in possible way, revewables are increasing the electricity production share.
Coal (the moat polluting source) has been in strong decline. Even if 2026 might be a setback (and we don’t know yet), the long term trend is quite clear. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php
The Hormuz crisis might have also been a good incentive for people to think about buying an electric car or install solar panels (we don’t know yet its effect).
Also the world climate does not depend only the US. China is one of the biggest polluters (everything is made there, 1B people), and they are investing heavily in renewables. Europe is already relatively green.
Progress is slow, but progress is being made in the right direction. You have to believe in a future, otherwise it’s too tempting to just to give up!
Luckily I have been playing a skyblock peaceful pack (Star technology) so I would be doing quite well.
Though before this I tried a bit Gregtech GTNH, and I would have been super-duper fucked. I was scared of the infernal monsters while playing the game, I can’t imagine how it would feel being actually in the game myself.
I should publish a blog post titled “Using Antropic’s Claude is a Perversion of Writing”. If you are taking AI output and thinking it’s good and engaging, you are making a load-bearing mistake.
Joking aside, the criticism can come only after they implement it and we can see if it’s having any effect on the output quality. I doubt it’s going to be detectably worse.
If anybody is feeling so strongly against watermarking even before we can evaluate how it affects the output, I am only thinking that they have ulterior motives or they don’t want to be caught spreading copy-pasted slop.
Wine/proton are not emulators, they run the code directly on linux, but using some fancy tricks to rrimplement windows dlls into linux native code. If someone embeds linux code in the windows executable you have the same privileges of your user and at tgat point you can be infected with a linux virus.
It’s not likely today because windows is much more popular, but once linux becomes popular enough to be an attractive target you will need to be as careful as on windows.
Very interesting! Thanks for the links and the detailed answer!
Let me preface this by saying that I am generally against AI and I hate LLMs being pushed everywhere, but I currently hate facebook and social media even more than AI.
I think that ad blocking might actually be a good use of a model trained to detect ads: AI models are “black boxes” and it would make it difficult for facebook to find out precisely how the detection works and workaround it. Imagine a tiny classifier running locally, whose only job is to look at a post html or resulting rendered pixels and detecting if it’s an ad or not, and then generating the blocking rules.
It would be quite cool, because it would work on any website without an explicit list of ad-blocking rules that somebody needs to maintain.
Ylvis did a funny and catchy song on Stonehenge!
Fun fact, in emacs they added M-x butterfly as a reference to this xkcd.
Everybody stop these puns, or I’ll start sending case and desist letters.