My assumption is the poster wants to imply Oracle destroyed the good will and interest for people to start new Java projects after the licensing changes and subsequent shakedown. Java clearly still runs all over the place and will for a while (although plenty of people trying to keep java but get away from oracle).
Countable is a relative term in microbiology. I like that the author stuck to the phrase "countable colonies", since colony forming units are not really "countable as cells".
Ah, brings me back to the countless nights I spent counting plate after plate of HEK293 cells using a Haemocytometer [0], a light microscope, and a mechanical counter [1].
At least with HEK293 cells you could mostly tell if they were dead through the microscope (dead cells are darker).
> For a long time I wanted to find some sort of litmus test to measure this and I think I found one that is an easy to understand programming problem, can be done in a single file, yet complex enough. I have not found a single LLM to be able to build a solution without careful guidance.
Plan for solving this problem:
- Build a comprehensive design system with AI models
- Catalogue the components it fails on (like yours)
- These components are the perfect test cases for hiring challenges (immune to “cheating” with AI)
- The answers to these hiring challenges can be used as training data for models
- Newer models can now solve these problems
- You can vary this by framework (web component / React / Vue / Svelte / etc.) or by version (React v18 vs React v19, etc.)
What you’re doing with this is finding the exact contours of the edge of AI capability, then building a focused training dataset to push past those boundaries. Also a Rosetta Stone for translating between different frameworks.
I put a brain dump about the bigger picture this fits into here:
I really hate when people put cat images and memes in a serious article.
Don't get me wrong, the content is good and informative. But I just hate the format.
That reminds me when SideFX started putting memes into their official tutorial youtube channel. At least this is just a webpage and we can scroll through them...
I was a huge Gitlab fan until their pricing change. I don't remember the pricing specifics, but the tier breakdown was such that you could introduce GitLab for free to a company that used Github, use it alongside Github, and slowly switch repo by repo, which was a very effective strategy (I used it in a few companies I joined).
After the pricing change, you had to start paying immediately (from the 6th user onwards or something), which made it a nonstarter because no company would start immediately paying for a Github replacement they didn't even know they wanted.
Together with Github being priced very cheaply, plus having free private repos, plus having the entire OSS world on it (for my OSS projects), I switched to it and never looked back.
Hi Li, appreciate your work. How do you feel the state of Scala is these days? I took the EPFL intro on Coursera years ago, but I was always disappointed by two things: the community feels very fragmented outside of IDEA (RIP ENSIME — oh, is it back now?), and it seems like Spark completely overwhelms the rest of the Scala ecosystem. I’ve mostly moved on these days but still think fondly of it from time to time.
If your son was using any of the Turtle languages (Logo) before, he might be interested in NetLogo and NetLogo3D which are very much the grown-up versions of Logo, but just as easy to learn as the more educational versions.
It's used in agent based modeling, so there are layers of education possible in learning the language and the many models that come with it.
Another thing I totally recommend is a Raspberry Pi Pico (very inexpensive), a Pico Explorer Base, and a handful of electronic components which are easy to find in kit form. There he can learn electronics and the Python programming language at the same time. I have one and I really enjoy jamming on it.
