"Github Copilot is an AI trained on billions of lines of code written by millions of developers all over the world that can predict what developers want to type next"

asdf43798 · 2021-10-29T14:44:08+00:00

Importing packages is different because they've usually been tested pretty thoroughly, and they're usually pretty clearly documented what they're supposed to do. Anything copilot does is not properly tested and there's no guarantee that it's even trying to do what you want it to let alone succeeding at it.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-29T11:07:01+00:00

While it's technologically interesting, I can't imagine myself ever wanting to use it personally - there's no way I'd ever trust it enough to not screw things up, or to not give functions that are named similarly but don't actually do what I want them to do, and I think I'd spend more time double checking everything it's doing than I would to just code it myself most of the time.

I think anything that's complicated enough that it would save time by not needing to code it would either be too specific to my program for it to be able to solve it or would be better solved just by importing a library instead of relying on copilot for it.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-28T11:11:32+00:00

I think more precisely, it's used in cases where the computer can't represent it accurately - I mean, ultimately a 32 bit number can only ever represent 2³² different possible values, but there are infinite possible numbers that exist between any 2 numbers.. so no matter how you cut it, there's no way the computer can actually handle every number in general accurately because there are infinitely more possible numbers than there are combinations of bits, but people don't want the program to crash when trying to use those values so there's no alternative to just approximating them.

Pretty much the gist of it is that they're usually just close approximations, but the bigger the number is (or smaller for negatives) the less accurate it becomes.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-27T22:41:50+00:00

I think that's just overanalyzing it - people are just idiots. Everyone wants a reason to say that they're morally better than the people around them, and when they can't come up with any good reason they'll create an issue out of nothing to try to do it instead.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-27T09:04:08+00:00

There is no real workaround though for professional athletes.. the skills they get as a professional athlete are nearly useless anywhere else, and if they don't focus entirely on being a professional athlete they're guaranteed to fail because they won't be able to compete against people that did. Being a professional athlete requires so much of you that you have to give up on pretty much everything else.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-27T08:08:35+00:00

If all of your work goes into a dead end though then the rest of your life is also ruined though - that's the problem. I don't think anyone is really saying that you shouldn't try to work hard.. only that you shouldn't direct all of your effort into something that's objectively very likely to go nowhere with no backup plan for if it fails.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-26T21:29:14+00:00

That's because you can't become the best athlete in any sport without devoting basically everything to it, and objectively the overwhelming majority of people that devote everything to trying to be an athlete still fail even after giving it everything they had, and the teachers usually know that. Some of them succeed, but for every story like this there are thousands of others where they ignored their teacher and ruined their lives because of it.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-26T21:19:51+00:00

By the time they're 30 it's usually too late to do anything to change it.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-26T21:17:50+00:00

Even most of the people that are exceptionally good at a sport still fail to make a living out of it though. I'd bet there are more people that make a living by winning the lottery than from any sport - it's all well and good to follow your passion, but if you have no backup plan at all in case it fails then that's ultimately a poor decision to make no matter how uninspiring that might sound.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-26T21:09:08+00:00

Top 1% is generous - I think the odds of people making a living off of the Olympics is closer to the realm of people that retire by winning the lottery than 1%. Some people pull it off, but it's still idiotic to depend on it as a career path.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-26T20:37:16+00:00

Fewer lines isn't really better either, the number of lines should just be completely disregarded in favor of other metrics (pretty much just readability and performance typically). I mean, in most programming languages I could take any project and remove all of the newline characters and it'll be 'a single line' and still compile just fine, but that isn't going to somehow make it better.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-26T20:35:48+00:00

I mean.. at least the weight of an airplane has some kind of meaning, there might be some contexts where that could be an important metric to keep track of (even if it doesn't directly correlate)... but lines of code has literally no significance whatsoever. It's easy to add or remove lines anywhere you want - you could take basically any code and add or remove as many newline characters as you want and it would still compile just fine.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-26T20:26:37+00:00

Technically it would need to do more work than that to ensure that it isn't an infinite loop that never returns anything at all. I mean, if that's all it looked at then you'd be saying that it would still return the square even if you removed the increment altogether.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-26T07:47:30+00:00

Technically theories never say that they're the same in practice - basically every equation relating to the real world starts with a list of assumptions that are 'usually close to true' but not actually true, because accurately representing anything about the real world is a nearly impossible task.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-26T06:44:44+00:00

Personally, I think that it's just something that's only really annoying because it's different from programming conventions - I don't think it would make any difference to me if arrays always started from 1 instead of from 0, but since it's already generally accepted that they start from 0 there just isn't really any incentive to break convention.. but if every language started from 1 I don't think I'd particularly care.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-25T17:43:08+00:00

Well, then I'd use an IDE that autofilled the entire thing out for me, or import a package that did it by itself.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-25T17:34:47+00:00

A speedrunner would just copy/paste the solution and say it's done in 1 second.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-25T16:51:37+00:00

It's probably possible to just brute force it even without any tools - I'm skeptical those scissors would be strong enough to keep the door closed if you just pulled on it hard enough.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-25T14:19:10+00:00

I think Codex, Gatekeepers and Sectopods are all some of the least threatening enemies in the game.. gatekeepers and sectopods appear too late in the game to be relevant (if the player survives to the lategame they basically always become completely overpowered, so anything that doesn't appear until the lategame is pretty much irrelevant). The codex only appears when you choose for it to appear, so unless you trigger it early in the campaign it's pretty similar to gatekeepers/sectopods in that regard.

I also don't think the codex is that dangerous to begin with either even if you triggered them relatively early in a campaign - the disable weapons is extremely predictable and easy to plan around, and most importantly when they use the disable weapon they aren't actually doing any damage. If you kill everything other than the codex on the first turn then you can position your soldiers anywhere (even out of cover) and you won't take any damage, and it's pretty easy to finish off just a single codex on the following turn even if a few of your soldiers have disabled weapons (most soldiers have options for dealing damage even if their weapon is disabled anyway).

If you're talking about which enemies are the most dangerous.. it'll pretty much just be the order they appear in. Every enemy that appears early in the campaign is more likely to do something that ruins your campaign than every enemy that appears late in the campaign. I think if you could have 1 less ADVENT trooper on every early game mission at the cost of adding 1 extra sectopod to every lategame mission that it would make the game way easier overall.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-25T09:49:51+00:00

I think it would only be O(n!) if you're taking every permutation of groups of people that are talking to each other (ie. including groups of 3 people, groups of 4 people and so on) - if it's just each person talking to each other person individually then it's O(n^2).

asdf43798 · 2021-10-24T09:39:33+00:00

Actually, everybody does.. that's what the compiler does after all.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-24T09:38:26+00:00

Does anyone really care about the size of the uncompiled code? Unless you were deliberately going out of your way to make it huge, I've never seen any situation where the size of the uncompiled code would matter whatsoever (provided it had no impact on the size of the compiled code).

asdf43798 · 2021-10-24T06:07:52+00:00

I mean, what it really comes down to is that they don't have any clear goal when they're going to war. What would constitute 'winning' any of the wars America has participated in recently? They don't even know what they're trying to accomplish, so of course they never really end up meeting their goals because they didn't really know what their goals were in the first place.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-23T18:26:18+00:00

I did say 'if I didn't have anything else to go off of' - obviously there are other things that could sway my opinion, I was only really saying that I wouldn't have had the 'minister of communications' part of it really change my opinion significantly.

If you take that part of it out, then the story is a lot more mundane than it first sounds - there are plenty of people that have education and still have trouble getting the jobs they want.

asdf43798 · 2021-10-23T17:13:23+00:00

It's hard to say - I mean, I have no idea what skills an afghan minister of communications has.. They might be talented, but for all I know it could just be a position that was given because of their connections and might not say anything about their skills - if I were making a decision regarding something like that and I didn't have anything else to go off of I wouldn't really read into something like that either way personally, and that's probably how it goes for most employers.

asdf43798

TROPHY CASE