I sometimes wonder if we’re just very advanced stochastic parrots.
Repeatedly, we’ve thought that humans and animals were different in kind, only to find that we’re actually just different in degree: elephants mourn their dead, dolphins have sex for pleasure, crows make tools (even tools out of multiple non-useful parts! [1]). That could be true here.
LLMs are impressive. Nobody knows whether they will or won’t lead to AGI (if we could even agree on a definition – there’s a lot of No True Scotsman in that conversation). My uneducated guess is that that you’re probably right: just continuing to scale LLMs without other advancements won’t get us there.
But I wish we were all more humble about this. There’s been a lot of interesting emergent behavior with these systems, and we just don’t know what will happen.
I swear I read this exact same thread in nearly every post about OpenAI on HN. It's getting to a point where it almost feels like it's all generated by LLMs
You're right. Just compiled the following program with clang from Xcode 14 (Apple clang version 14.0.0 (clang-1400.0.29.102)) without issue.
#include <stdio.h>
struct foo {
uintptr_t p __attribute__((xnu_usage_semantics("pointer")));
};
int main() {
struct foo f = { 100 };
printf("%lu\n", f.p);
return 0;
}
Doesn't seem -Wxnu-typed-allocators (which I forgot to mention above) is present in my version. Didn't test the others.
I also just realized that the latest tagged release of https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/clang is 800.0.38, my clang is reporting 1400.0.29.102. Is Apple no longer releasing the source for their compilers?
Apple never did release everything that their compilers do, that is why cppreference has a column for Apple's clang, and why watchOS can use bitcode as binary format, even though the official LLVM bitcode isn't stable.
> Fun aside: I’ve always assumed this is why Core Foundation exists—to provide a common interface between Carbon and Cocoa. I don’t actually have a citation for this, though.
Indeed. I was hoping to put more effort into xi-win than it's gotten, but for a variety of reasons have decided to focus on the macOS front end for now, as there's quite a bit of work remaining to get a daily-usable editor up on one platform.
I had similar problems on my iPhone 7 when I upgraded to iOS 11. This included apps totally freezing, sometimes for what felt like a minute, with very laggy input, as well as other issues, like not displaying the playing podcast controls for Overcast on the lock screen or in control center. Yesterday I did a fresh install of iOS 11 and then restored from a backup and my problems seem to have gone away. At least for me, it seems like there may have been something wrong with the over-the-air upgrade process. Perhaps this will help you.
Hmm, that means redownloading 50 GB of photos, but I guess I could try it. Do you know if you could force download all the iCloud Photos library instead of having it load on demand? Even with Settings -> Photos -> Download and Keep Originals it seems old photos (from before the device was installed) are only downloaded on-demand. I want them all offline.
I'm having this problem on both my iPad (which is newer than my phone) and with my laptops. Old pictures are not there unless I view then, although new pictures seem to be pushed to all my devices. And even if I view then, they are downloaded only at medium quality, unless I view them for more than 1.5 seconds or I zoom into them. This means I can't even scroll quickly through them, as this won't get me the original quality I want.
Beranek and BBN both make an appearance in Mitch Waldrop's excellent book "The Dream Machine," which is in theory a biography of J.C.R. Licklider (who was mentioned in the obit), but in practice a history of computing from the 1930s onward. It has been out of print for some time, but a Kindle edition just came out this summer[1]. It's a great book and worth many times the $3.99 Amazon is charging for it.
I'd like to second that, and mention that it's excellent to combine with "What the Dormouse Said" (John Markoff) and "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" (Steven Levy).
Very loosely, while there is lots of overlap between the three, Markoff covers the West Coast more thoroughly, with more material around his idea that a lot of the development there owes a great deal to LSD...
Levy covers the East Coast more thoroughly, going into a lot of detail about MIT, and the environment around the MIT AI Lab.
While Waldrop both goes further back, and takes a higher level view of the politics and DARPA itself.
There are of course plenty of other pieces to branch off into once you get to the rise of home computing in particular, but the above three books combine to give an even more fascinating picture of the early days of computing than they do separately. And BBN of course still stands out as one of the highly important pieces.
BBN is one of those companies that are fascinating to me, because like e.g. DEC, when I first got online in '93, they were the type of legendary that you when you are young take note of the status of, but don't really know the significance of, until you get a bit older and start being interested in the history of what you've built your career on...
One thing I think we could have done better with Code Words is added short bios. Bios add context, which is lacking here. Here's R0ml's bio from 2006[^1]:
r0ml is an software architect and systems designer with over thirty years of experience. For two decades, r0ml worked on Wall Street, developing market data, trading, risk management, and quantitative analysis systems. More recently, as chief technical architect at AT&T Wireless, he drove the improvement of their CRM, ERP, commission, and data warehousing systems. Over the last several years, r0ml has become increasingly interested in open source software strategy at large enterprises, and is a frequent speaker on the topic.
This is the same R0ml that thaumaturgy mentions in a sibling comment.
I've been lucky to meet a lot of very smart programmers over the past 3.5 years working at Hacker School, and R0ml is one of the people I respect the most. He has a lot of opinions about programming, many of them contrarian. I think this comes from his background. His career began in the '70s. He spent the first third of it working in APL, the next third in Smalltalk, and the most recent third in Java. Over the year or so that I've known R0ml, he's planted the seeds of a number of unconventional ideas in my head (program in the database, don't use libraries, write things from scratch, the expressive power of a language is partially derived from what's in its standard library). I'm sure these aren't all good ideas—maybe some of them are terrible—but they've profoundly affected the way I go about my programming. R0ml is on the short list of people I would want to work for if I was not running Hacker School.
I don't bring this all up to refute your opinions–R0ml may be wrong in this case or even in all cases–I mostly wanted to give some context explaining why the tone of your response made me sad and frustrated. The onus is on us to give readers context for what they're reading, and I don't think we did a great job of that, but if you're going to write such a mean spirited response, I think some of the onus is on you to do some research before accusing someone of being a novice and responding in a way that feels at least partially ad hominem.
Around a month ago, I read Programming with Managed Time[^2], the paper that you wrote with Jonathan Edwards for Onward! '14. I thought it was insightful, well written, and contrarian in the best of ways. The first things I thought when I finished it was "I bet R0ml would enjoy that."
I don't mean to compare Code Words to an academic journal (it's absolutely not), nor do I mean to compare R0ml's article to your paper in terms of scope, research, or time put into it (yours obviously took more time and has much greater insight than R0ml's short article). I'm just bummed that one person who's counterintuitive opinions and experience I respect would be so quick to dismiss the opinions of someone else who I respect for the same reasons.
I know that complaining about tone is often used to distract from more substantive issues, but I'm going to risk doing that anyway: Please be nice!
I've given it a whole day to ponder and I apologize for calling this article out. The article was really bad in my opinion (not just disagreeable, but poorly argued), but it should have just remained my opinion. I don't care who wrote this, frankly, I never read bios anyways. It would however, prevented me from blathering on about why I thought this article was written.
I would suggest more editing in the future, not to change messages, but in the way that we always need other people to read our work to provide some external perspective.
The expressive power of a language is definitely based on what's in the standard library. If the C standard library came with default dictionaries and other common data structures (while still allowing you to build your own) it would be a much more expressive language.
I love C, I love that I can keep most of the standard library in my head, but a greater built in eco-system would make portable code a lot easier, provide a standard reference to beat, and make the language more useful from the get go.
> One thing I think we could have done better with Code Words is added short bios
I'm rather glad you didn't.
Sean felt justified not reading it because he believed the writer was "a novice", and I think he have acted differently if he knew this was an experienced and successful commercial programmer.
But because he didn't, the rest of us can learn something really interesting: That twenty years of research-experience cannot immediately recognise itself blub to twenty years of commercial-experience.
Maybe those guys writing software that does things have figured something out as well?
I totally read the article; I'm very surprised it was written by a professional but it wouldn't have changed my judgement of it. I thought it was poorly written and meandering, but I probably should have kept that to myself. I guess we all have different standards.
> Maybe those guys writing software that does things have figured something out as well?
At this point, I really think the article should speak for itself. If you think it says something important or even coherent, then you know, it was for you, not for me.
I don't think you should keep your opinions to yourself. However, when you present your opinions with sarcasm and ad hominem attacks, you are bringing down the conversation to a level that is not conducive to any meaningful discussions. I don't think that was your intention, but I do think it was the result.
"""don't use libraries, write things from scratch, the expressive power of a language is partially derived from what's in its standard library)."""
One of these things is not like the others.
He sounds like he's very charismatic and personal, and probably an ok dude to be around, but that still does not change the fact that this was a big mess of an article.
