It has a separate magnetically attached battery / charging unit. I have to charge 5-6 times per "tank" that's attached. The battery side also has a mini-led display showing animations and battery / juice left so it's actually communicating with the tank side. A kit with battery and tank runs me about $25, but the tank alone is about $20. So they add $5 to cover the battery / charging component. It's a vice, but at least with this brand I'm not throwing away batteries weekly.
> many people assume that the answer to “is x faster than C?” to be “no” for all values of X.
This is because C does so little for you -- bounds checking must be done explicitly for instance, like you mention in the article, so C is "faster" unless you work around rust's bounds checking. It reminds me of some West Virginia residents I know who are very proud of how low their taxes are -- the roads are falling apart, but the taxes are very low! C is this way too.
C is pretty optimally fast in the trivial case, but once you add bounds checking and error handling and memory management its edge is much much smaller (for Rust and Zig and other lowish-level languages)
In the real world the difference is rarely significant assuming great programmings implement great algorithms. However those two assumptions are rarely true.
This is not exactly correct. The fda approved named items require a prescription. However from the shortage years ago compounding pharmacies were allowed to sell alternative versions. Basically they add a B vitamin to the normal drug and boom non prescription GLP1.
With this one simple trick Denmarks GDP goes down by multiple % points.
This is patently false -- there is plenty to do besides consume junk media; the fact that our population is addicted to the dopamine associated with short-form video doesn't mean that there aren't other options.
I've made a concerted effort to consume less "junk media" in the last couple of years. In that time I've gotten an Amateur radio licence, I've built a couple of keyboards and speakers, I've started golfing (after a 20 year hiatus), I've learned to bake bread (from scratch, including grinding wheat!), I've read a lot of novels, and I'm happier for all of it.
Everyone has to work -- this is not unique to the United States. But outside of that, eating and living healthier is absolutely possible, it just takes some effort.
No, I want to tell that parent to spend the hour they use scrolling TikTok to do literally anything else, it'll improve their life. I understand my experience is not typical, but there are many things besides "junk media" that are not cost prohibitive.
it really doesnt have to be golf though lol. its all just excuses. i worked minimum wage (actual minimum mind you, no tips, nothing) for about 7 years and i didn't get obese, must be magic.
my hobbies included waking and running around, making stuff on an old laptop (I kept that one!), reading, making planes out of whatever material i could get my hands on that sort of stuff. i ate pasta, eggs, rice, water, tomatos. i never cared about eating the same thing everyday (i still don't but ive learned to eat a little better).
theres plenty more hobbies, obviously none of these being forbidden in the USA lol. and most make more money than I did, not to mention have food stamps and the like.
JFC you do understand that not everyone in America is a software engineer like you who is well compensated and has a proper work/life balance? There are tons of people in America that are just ground into the dirt day in day out with no end in sight. Have some empathy.
Sure, i'm not arguing against that. What I'm arguing against is the statement "there's nothing to do but eat and consume junk media"; That's simply not true, there is plenty to do, and a lot of it is not cost prohibitive.
I wish I could see you try to tell this to my father when he was working manual labor. I'd pay money.
Manual labor which was so grueling that he had sue his company in order to retire early because he could literally no longer walk and required surgery to remove the extreme bowing in his legs.
You could come in, look at the latest Creosote burns on his skin, and tell him that something-- anything! --would be better than watching an hour of Football.
And, while you're at it, you could try to convince him that smoking's bad too.
Another commenter twisting my words -- I'm not saying your father shouldn't be allowed to watch football. I'm saying he has other options, and he's not railroaded into only watching football.
Also, he should probably quit smoking (unclear if it's too late for that, if so I'm sorry)
> Making a game or professional software in it essentially equals to publishing full source and assets online, ripe for taking by any unscrupulous party.
How is this true? seems to me that webassembly looks kind of equivalent to the output you'd get from an x86 disassembler for an x86 native program -- sure it's editable, but it's certainly not equivalent to the original source used to produce it.
To put it another way -- Webassembly encourages theft exactly as much as any other kind of DRM-free publishing; and you can add anti-piracy measures to it in the same way you can with other software.
>The value I've personally been getting which I've been valuing is that it improves my productivity in the specific areas where it's average quality of response as one shot output is better than what I would do myself because it is equivalent to me Googling an answer, reading 2 to 20 posts, consolidating that information together and synthesising an output
>And that's not to say that the output is good, that's to say that the cost of trying things as a result is much cheaper
But there's a hidden cost here -- by not doing the reading and reasoning out the result, you have learned nothing and your value has not increased. Perhaps you extended a bit less energy producing this output, but you've taken one more step down the road to atrophy.
Seeing the code that the LLM generates and occasionally asking it to explain has been an effective way to improve my understanding. It's better in some ways than reading documentation or doing tutorials because I'm working on a practical project I'm highly motivated by.
I agree that there is benefit in doing research and reasoning, but in my experience skill acquisition through supervising an LLM has been more efficient because my learning is more focused. The LLM is a weird meld of domain expert/sycophant/scatterbrain but the explanations it gives about the code that it generates are quite educational.
I think there's a potential unstated assumption here, though forgive me if it was made explicit elsewhere and/or I missed it.
LLM-assisted can be with or without code review. The original meaning of "vibe coding" was without, and I absolutely totally agree this rapidly leads to a massive pile of technical debt, having tried this with some left-over credit on a free trial specifically to see what the result would be. Sure, it works, but it's a hell of a mess that will make future development fragile (unless the LLMs improve much faster than I'm expecting) for no good reason.
Before doing that, I used Claude Code the other way, with me doing code reviews to make sure it was still aligned with my ideas of best practices. I'm not going to claim it was perfect, because it did a python backend and web front end for a webcam in one case and simultaneously on a second project a browser-based game engine and example game for that engine and on a third simultaneous project a joke programming language, and I'm not a "real" python dev or "real" web dev or any kind of compiler engineer (last time I touched Yacc before this joke language was 20 years earlier at university). But it produced code I was satisfied I could follow, understand, wasn't terrible, had tests.
I wouldn't let a junior commit blindly without code review and tests because I know what junior code looks like from all the times I've worked with juniors (or gone back to 20 year old projects of my own), but even if I was happy to blindly accept a junior's code, or even if the LLM was senior-quality or lead quality, the reason you're giving here means code review before acceptance is helpful for professional development even when all the devs are at the top of their games.
Yes, but I'm talking about more then code review -- there is a ton of value in discovering all of the ways not to solve a problem. When reading 25 forum posts or whatever in trying to write some function, you're learning more then just the answer. You're picking up a ton of context about how these sorts of problems are solved. If all you're doing is reviewing the output of some code generator, your mental context is not growing in the same way.
I'm curious if you think the same thing was lost with the transition from reading man pages and first-party documentation to going to stackoverflow or google first (at least, I assume the former was more common a couple decades ago)
What was lost in that transition was the required quality of that first-party documentation decreased; generally that first party documentation simply didn't contain enough information, so you needed to determine things empirically or read source code to get more information. I do think the culture of "copy-and-paste from stackoverflow" harmed the general competency of programmers, but having more third-party information available was only a positive thing.
Merely choosing lines to copy and paste from one file of your own code to another is a learning experience for your brain. AI is excellent for removing a lot of grunt work, but that type of work also reinforces your brain even if you think you are learning nothing. Something can still be lost even if AI is merely providing templates or scaffolding. The same can be said of using Google to find examples, though. You should try to come up with the correct function name or parameter list yourself in your head before using a search engine or AI. And that is for the moist simple examples, e.g. "SQL table creation example". These should be things we know off the top of our heads, so we should first try to type it out before we go to look for an answer.
I suppose the way I approach this is, I use libraries which solve problems that I have, that in principle understand, because I know and understand the theory, but in practice I don't know the specific details, because I've not implemented the solution myself
And honestly, it's not my job to solve everything, I've just got to build something useful or that serves my goals
I basically put LLM's into that category, I'm not much of a NIH kinda person, I'm happy to use libraries, including alpha ones on projects if they've been vetted over the range of inputs that I care about, and I'm not going to go into how to do that here, because honestly it's not that exciting, but there's very standard boring ways to produce good guarantees about it's behaviour, so as long as I've done that, I'm pretty happy
So I suppose what I'm saying is that isn't a hidden cost to me, it's a pragmatic decision I made that I was happy with the trade off :)
When I want to learn, and believe me I do now and again, I'll focus on that there :)
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