Hearing things you didn't ask for is a known risk of posting on a public forum, and probably isn't something you need to point out. Far more interesting and useful would be either a meaningful discussion beyond reiterating your feelings, or some evidence of reflection on your part.
Sorry, but if the information exists elsewhere, why not find a better news source? Fox News, and any company derived from Newscorp/News Limited are bad enough that I would say more than half of their articles are entirely false.
Find the same article on AP news, or Reuters or something.
The only part of fiction writing I've found AI to be particularly useful in is asking it questions like; "considering this story idea, what are the best settings in Europe?" "what would a cooper's workshop smell like?"
LLMs exclusively hallucinate. That is the sole mechanism their reasoning is based on. The fact that they are ever correct is a happy coincidence.
You can reduce the likelihood of incorrectness by adding the real facts to the context, which is what LLMs do. But that in and of itself is not a guarantee that the LLM will be correct. Because its fundamental process of reasoning is probabilistic word-by-word hallucination.
And it would be an odd way to describe all the extremely useful things they discover. Are you suggesting they're taking "magic" mushrooms of some kind?
On the balance of probabilities, the CRISPR thing is a hack job. AI did not do it. It's likely the AI-assisted work of researchers white labeled as AI.
Do you just believe every bit of press release that you read? These companies have an enormous amount of pressure on them to make profit. They can and will lie to try and convince you that AI is better than it is.
Is there any evidence outside of these companies that AI is breaking new ground on literally anything? No. It can help a little with a lot of different types of work– none of it novel.
Absolutely agree. If a JS developer doesn't know Rust, Go, Zig, or something, then they probably aren't going to do a good job at maintaining critical infrastructure, even if it were written in JS.
Why are people writing "critical" infrastructure in JS anyway, it is the wrong tool for the job.
Why are people writing critical infrastructure in [any language]?
In reality, the tools this article is referring to were written in javascript because they could be and it was the best tool for the job (according to the people who matter: the people who did the work).
If someone wants to rewrite them for speed and/or to chase the next shiny language, that's fine with me, but let's not kid ourselves that there was something wrong with using javascript in the first place.
Using the right abstractions (including the right number of abstractions) and the right data structures and algorithms is always going to trump the constants language choice can optimize.
> Using the right abstractions (including the right number of abstractions) and the right data structures and algorithms is always going to trump the constants language choice can optimize.
I was with you until this paragraph, which is straight up incorrect. Language choice absolutely matters if your goal is performance.
The most obvious counterexample is that the TypeScript team pretty much did a direct port from TS to Golang, without significantly rewriting their core algorithms or changing their data structures, and it sped up the TS compiler by 10X, which is an enormous performance improvement that would be silly to dismiss as just a "constant." This is because JS is a bad choice of language for implementing a fast compiler, primarily due to its poor support for multithreading.
How fast could the TS compiler have been made without changing languages? We don’t know, they didn’t do that. It sounds like the main increase was from parallelism. While not exactly ergonomic, you can accomplish that with worker threads in js, and they are a good fit for a tool like the typescript compiler. They chose to change languages and parallelize, which is fine, but a lot of that performance was on the table for javascript as well.
I still think that rewrite was ill-advised. Yes they got a 10x speedup, but now it's unclear whether the JS tooling ecosystem lives in Go or Rust or JS.
Given that we've now got a three way language schism, the story for sharing data between processes isn't really solved. Data can move nicely within Go, but not between Go and Rust or JS. Tools like ts-morph also got left behind with no replacement.
I think that in retrospect the power of the JS ecosystem was all about plugins. It's plugins that make ESLint such a powerful platform that it still can't be replaced.
From the perspective of making a efficient platform for running plugins, JS actually is the most theoretically efficient implementation language! That's why, for example, VSCode put a bunch of work into moving its core state from C++ to JS, a change which brought them big perf wins and helped them beat out Atom: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...
What do you mean when you say the "story for sharing data between processes isn't really solved"? My understanding of this is mostly academic because I don't personally mix languages all that often, but aren't there many established ways of communication between languages. You have IPC, unix sockets, FFI, protobufs, and other serialising/deserialisation formats. Not to mention the classic (but probably slightly overkill) move of spinning up a local HTTP server and using REST endpoints.
Yes, all those ways exist. I was more saying that if copying between structures processes using serialization is all you need, the JS ecosystem already has that.
The thing is if you need to do big expensive copies on the input or output it forces you towards a batch processing model, which is the opposite of incremental computation.
I don't understand your reasoning. Why should they quit git and Linux (and presumably all applications written in C) if they believe Rust is more secure than C?
It's the classic "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" response. You don't get dislike the current state of the world if you exists in it, apparently.
AI is incredible for consumption. Using it as an assistant for summarisation and learning I think is fine. But it should stay very far away from creation of anything.
I also have ADHD-driven blah blah blah. I find achieving brevity laborious, but find LLM results to be unacceptable. A journalism class taught by a well-known professional food critic helped most, but consistently using the free “Hemingway App” editor was almost as beneficial. Blindly following every suggestion pares your writing down to a nub, but it’s great at highlighting sentences you need to rethink without blurring your voice and ideas with bland suggestions.
That's a solid recommendation, thanks. I also did journalism. So I can write succinctly, I just have to put effort in like you. Which is much more than I'm willing to put in after I just wrote a treatise on the human condition to send to the lead developer at 07:30 on Monday.
Peace.
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