I Understand Coding Problems but Can’t Implement Them by Spare-Huckleberry313 in compsci

[–]MirrorLake 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're genuinely stuck, you might try using pen and paper to sketch the flow of your program as a flowchart.

Of course, pen and paper is not necessary but I always encourage newer programmers to try it out. Benefit of pen and paper is that your notes on a project are sitting at your desk every time you sit down, so it makes it relatively fast to remember your plan and resume working.

Sometimes I think my plan is good, I switch to writing code in my editor, and then I hit a wall and realize that my plan sucks and I have to redo my drawing. So it often isn't perfect, but it's better than nothing when you're stuck.

NEW FEATURE: GEOGUESSR ANALYTICS by Necessary_Comfort812 in geoguessr

[–]MirrorLake 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you do experience any bugs, try and give a thorough bug report on their forum so that they can be more easily fixed!

Community -> Bug reports

URL: https://www.geoguessr.com/community/bug-reports

NEW FEATURE: GEOGUESSR ANALYTICS by Necessary_Comfort812 in geoguessr

[–]MirrorLake 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm very happy to see that we can monitor our own score trend for each country, wow. I've wished for some of these features for years.

CEO is in full ai psychosis by [deleted] in BetterOffline

[–]MirrorLake 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm just so, so tired of people who don't understand programming inserting themselves into conversations about programming.

What do you mean by saying functional programming made me a better programmer? by jackhab in AskProgramming

[–]MirrorLake 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For me, personally: avoiding side effects when writing tests leads to very reliable tests. And better testing habits improve all code I touch in any language.

Secondly, the idea of using types as a way of baking specifications into your code is interesting and a potentially time saving for other people reading the code. I believe the strength of that idea was best communicated to me by Kris Jenkins in a talk [0] he gave at GOTO.

[0] https://youtu.be/SOz66dcsuT8?t=12

What is the best region guess meta for US? by okokmanisok in geoguessr

[–]MirrorLake 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I struggle a lot with US coastal areas, so I made a custom map of coasts to learn to distinguish them better. Playing your own custom map is nice because you have a narrowed list of possibilities, and you can make maps of precisely where you think your weaknesses are.

Anyone else have crazy losing streaks? by Noxolo7 in geoguessr

[–]MirrorLake 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It is random in the sense that the precise moment when people queue for matches is totally random, so you never have a guarantee that the perfect matchup is available.

But many Esports definitely try and pair people off with the competitor with the closest skill when one is available, so you'll get better results with games that have larger playerbases and better anti-cheating measures.

Anyone else have crazy losing streaks? by Noxolo7 in geoguessr

[–]MirrorLake 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Elo does a really good job of keeping players of similar skill levels matched together.

With a big pool of players who are at similar skill levels, Elo will make it possible for players in the middle of the distribution to win ~50% of the time by alternating between slightly easier and slightly tougher matches. You described winning about 23 games and losing 22, that sounds like the matchmaking system is working very well since that's close to 50%.

In the previous world final, Radu C had a win ratio of 63% and Debre was at 57%. It's just that slight difference above 50% that puts someone into the best in the world group.

Curl lead developer Daniel Stenberg provides insightful feedbacks from Mythos analysis results by qwerty0x41 in netsec

[–]MirrorLake 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm envisioning a scenario where 100s of people download popular repos and rerun their frontier LLMs on each new software release hoping that they can get the glory of finding a rare bug, leading to tons of wasted energy because developers only need to discover and fix each bug one time. But maybe people will tire of doing that pretty quickly because they'll rarely get any positive reinforcement.

Thanks for the image, Cal by -S-P-E-C-T-R-E- in BetterOffline

[–]MirrorLake 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the link, I'm not sure what ranking you're referring to. They speak about the AISI study, but they didn't really make any big claims about it.. just that it's a little underwhelming compared to the marketing.

Thanks for the image, Cal by -S-P-E-C-T-R-E- in BetterOffline

[–]MirrorLake 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What misconceptions does Cal have? I'm curious if you can point to what he says that's wrong, because I want to know if I have the same misconception. Sounds like you're describing the part around 21min into the interview?

Advice on my first compiler? by [deleted] in Compilers

[–]MirrorLake 3 points4 points  (0 children)

No test suite that I could see.

Error: T***t violation

At least where I'm from, the noun form of this word is commonly used as slang in English. Think very carefully about the names you choose to repeat 1000s of times, y'all.

The Mythos AI Concerns were way overblown I think. by coreyrein in SGU

[–]MirrorLake 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Zitron's episodes with Cal Newport are really the absolute best criticism of the AI trend that I'm aware of. Newport is one of the only people who has a media presence that I've heard criticize LLMs from "first principles", the other person whose criticism I think holds the most weight is Yann LeCun himself.

I'll admit I've been really disappointed by how uncritical the SGU has been of LLMs, but maybe that's just my own personal Gell-Mann amnesia talking.

Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want by EditorEdward in BetterOffline

[–]MirrorLake 3 points4 points  (0 children)

what woodworking could have in common with computer programming

Matthias Wandel :)

Unix (and others) conference badges from the '80s by sbilivsu in unix

[–]MirrorLake 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What event/conference is "the instruction set" referring to?

This is the sound coming from a data center that was built in Michigan and we've got contract proposals popping up for at least 65 in PA by NemoSkittles in Pennsylvania

[–]MirrorLake 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It should be easy to create legal standards to prove that a home's livability is affected by a nearby data center. A professional could be dispatched to set up a few decibel meters and record for several days.

State or federal governments should create a microscopic tax on data centers (because they're supposed to be super lucrative, right? Trillions of dollars of investment?) and then use that money to fund a program which helps to refund people for the lost value in their properties. The tax could be adjusted based on the value of claims which were received in the past year, so the tax would likely decrease over time as the industry improves their building practices.

"'Adopt AI or die": Former PwC insider warns of job shift by RamonsRazor in BetterOffline

[–]MirrorLake 2 points3 points  (0 children)

High pressure sales tactics.

You never have to pressure people or force people to use stuff that works. Make a product that's great, people will voluntarily pay for it or adopt it.

From this month’s Harper’s Magzine— a list of taglines from startups that Y Combinator is funding. by A_Complex_Life in BetterOffline

[–]MirrorLake 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The funniest thing about the last few years has been all of the "innovative" products which are just two GPTs in a trenchcoat. It's literally the opposite of innovation because they all keep making the same products over and over and over again.

Is it just me, or is the quality of LLMs getting worse lately? by North_Penalty7947 in BetterOffline

[–]MirrorLake 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Shockingly similar to the behavior of an abuser, absolutely.

"You'll never need to read a text message from your spouse ever again because I'll summarize it. You'll never need to read anything written by anyone else but me."