Indeed. That’s my only interaction with AI coding.
Every time Visual Studio updates, it’ll turn back on the thing that shoves a ludicrously wrong, won’t even compile, not what I was in the middle of doing line of garbage code in front of my cursor, ready to autocomplete in and waste my time deleting if I touch the wrong key.
This is the thing that Microsoft thinks is important enough to be worth burning goodwill by re-enabling every few weeks, so I’m left to conclude that this is the state of the art.
Thus far I haven’t been impressed enough to make it five lines of typing before having to stop what I’m doing and google how to turn it off again.
I dunno, I don't find it so bad. I know what I'm about to type, and occasionally the AI guesses right, so it saves me some keystrokes. I don't bother reading/understanding what it suggests if it doesn't match what I had in mind exactly.
I don't even think it saves me much time, but it saves me some keystrokes, which I appreciate due to having arthritis in my wrists.
This seems like it would work nicely if you removed the concept of pipes and pumps, and replaced them with containers and gravity.
I imagine a barrel of air at the surface with an osmosis filter at the opening and a big ass rock tied to it. Kick it off your barge, let it drop to the bottom and fill with filtered water. Then cut the string and let it float up for collection.
You can use the hydrostatic pressure (about 60bar) with a simple hydraulic intensifier to lift RO permeate from ~600m to ~100m depth, then finish the last stretch with a small, diver-serviceable booster. Basically you only need power to pump the final 100m which isn't bad.
What is the energy expenditure of getting this rock there? The size of the rock is directly proportional to the amount of freshwater this container can hold right?
How much energy does the barge, or whatever pulls it, spend getting itself and the rock and the container into place and back out?
What is this container made of that it can be large enough for this to be feasible, it is full of only air, and it won’t just collapse under pressure at depth? How much does it weigh? We might be talking a much bigger rock than you are envisioning.
You’re glossing over all sorts of energy input and engineering issues, at some point it’s easier to just pump the remaining stuff up
If I ever create a trendy SaaS company (or an untrendy one for that matter), I'm definitely cribbing the 'pay more if you have accountants on staff' criteria... love it!
While you’re at it, can you find and punch the guy who thinks it’s a good idea to zoom the map to “actual size, 1cm = 1cm” mode for your entire trip?
I assume he’s also the one that taught it to spitefully let you drive off the side of the screen if you ever zoom out manually so that you can see more road on the phone than you can in real life. (With a “recenter” button that will zoom you all the way back in).
Also punch the guy that allows Google Maps navigation to flip back to a route that's been specifically rejected.
Earlier this week Google prompted me with "your route may be affected by tsunami warning". Indeed, so I chose the longer, inland route rather than the coast roads.
15 minutes later I realise it's rerouted me "due to traffic conditions" -- obviously the coast road isn't as busy!
(This has happened many times before, but this was the first time I had a safety reason not to take the faster route.)
Go back and read all those books you were supposed to have read in high school.
It turns out, they are actually really good. And now you're old enough and have had enough life experience to understand and relate to them.
I remember kinda liking "The Sun Also Rises" in highschool literature class. There were these people travelling around Spain and drinking a lot. I could relate. At some point in my late 20s, I came across a copy and read it again. Turns out it's an awesome book, and about more than just swilling wine.
So the thought occurred that since one of those terrible highschool literature books was good, maybe more of them would be. I grabbed The Great Gatsby. Awesome book. Whatever JD Sallinger thing they had us read. Awesome. Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Oscar Wilde. Hell yeah. And all those authors had tons of other great stuff they'd written. And there were lots of authors in the last hundred-odd years. It kinda kicked off a lifetime of seeking out the Good Stuff.
One minor downside, as long as we're doing a PSA, is that doing this will kill your ability to read Airport Bestsellers of any genre. You'll need actual good writing from here on out. Fortunately, there's lots of people still doing that so they should be able to crank out new good books faster than you can read them.
This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them, are they ideal for high school? Do they teach you what's good writing if you can't recognize it yet? Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school? I don't have the right answer, but the question seemed relevant.
>> Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school?
I guess it depends on the goal. My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely. If the reading is fun there's more chance students will carry on reading.
So if the goal is "teach kids that reading is fun. So they do it. Which means their ability to read goes up" , then yes, the books should be more fun.
(We read a Spike Milligan book, which certainly engaged the class more than Wuthering Heights did.)
On the other hand if the goal is to understand "literature", then books with themes and character development and so on is necessary. And of course can put some kids off reading for life.
>My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely.
The thing is, most of these books people are complaining about aren't actually 'hard books', especially when read at a chapter or two per week with a teacher guiding you through all the major themes. The goal isn't to teach kids that reading is fun, it's to teach them critical reading skills.
There is something to be said about reaching the students where they are, but we already dumb down things too much to allow the slower students to keep pace. They can learn about reading for fun in remedial reading classes.
It's probably good if the book requires you to stretch a bit, and even if you don't totally get it yet. My parents never put any limits on what I could read, so I stumbled over the Poe shelf at the library at a fairly young age. There was plenty I didn't understand, but plenty that I could, and some stories still stick with me.
But I remember when my niece told us they had them reading Nietzsche. Her main takeaway seemed to be that they were Very Smart because they were reading Nietzsche. She didn't have a clue what she was reading, so if any of it stuck with her, it was probably as likely to be misunderstood as understood.
They have to be able to reach high enough to get some of it. It has to repay their time in high school. It should also show them there's more to reach for, but they need to be able to get some of it.
For me, Gatsby was... not entirely terrible. It was mostly a waste of my time, but looking back I can see some of the themes were at least somewhat worthwhile.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an absolute waste of my time. If Joyce is worth an adult reading (which I doubt to this day), then don't make high school kids read him.
>This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them, are they ideal for high school?
Possibly, good books hit different at different ages and can be appreciated at each of those ages for different reasons.
Indeed. It's a giant, unrecognized problem with pedagogy. Things are taught from the position of already understanding them and the messy confusing process of actually grokking anything is mostly ignored and students are left to figure it out alone.
I agree with the suggestion to try it, because I've had similar experiences myself in a different area: history. Even reading the dry Wikipedia articles made the old topics seem much more interesting than I remembered them being in school, and did a better job at communicating the significance.
However, I wouldn't be so optimistic about your experience being universal. As an experiment, I just started re-reading The Great Gatsby. While it's much better than I remember, it still felt like a slog and failed to hook me in a way that such prized "you have to be familiar with this" literature should be. And I still think they could have done a better job communicating what's so good about it.
Relatedly, I only recently learned that some (most?) people actually like iambic pentameter, that it adds to the joy of hearing the lines read. This is a revelation, since it ... doesn't do anything for me. But that fact feels like it's important subtext that could have been communicated, and I could have been pushed in that direction -- that seems like the obvious move. And yet it just wasn't. Sure, they taught that Shakespeare used it, but only as a dry "oh hey this is one thing to note about his works" not in a "oh and this is a big part of its appeal".
There are a lot of missed opportunities for teaching appreciation of literature.
Couldn't agree more about history. I was a good student who couldn't stand history (called "social studies" in my school), did the minimum to get through it wth good grades, then never took a college history course that wasn't required. Then one day in the library I was looking for a big thick book to pass a chunk of time, and grabbed Shirer's "The rise and fall of the Third Reich." Not only was it fascinating on its own, but it referenced so much of the history that underlay the events of WWII that it sent me off on a hunt to fill in that missing background. And, well, now I'm hooked!
(I'm not sure if I didn't enjoy the grade-school stuff because of what I now recognize as its jingoism (it's so much more interesting to read the history of people making choices for human reasons, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just wrong, than of godlike heroes helming countries foredestined for greatness!), or just because I wasn't ready for it.)
I'm not sure I agree with this. People are different and not everyone has to enjoy so-called literature that is not pure entertainment.
I have shelves full of books I had read before finishing school, and 90% of what we read in English lessons (I am German) was ok, and yet I hated 90% of what we read (or supposed to read) in our German lessons. Maybe it was the selection, maybe it was implicit bias (I also liked English lessons and my teachers, and didn't like either for German). Just some from memory (annotated Shakespeare was ok, I liked Poe, I liked Huxley)
So no, except for a few you would not manage to convince me to give them a second chance.
And also no for your last point, some Dan Brown novels were ok and I didn't enjoy the rest in the first place ;)
Been a while, but yeah, we read shorter stuff in class, and had some books we had to read on our own to discuss and you also had to give at least one short talk on another book you read.
It's RUINED for me. I could never go back and read it. There's far too much else I'd rather have cross my eyeballs so many other stories in the library. By having a work unworthy of my experience and tastes wasted on me at a young age my emotional investment in it is already squandered.
Have a big list of OK books. Have some representative excerpts from them, and let the kids pick books they're going to enjoy. The point surely is NOT to haze / torment the kids with 'bad' books that discourage reading generally.
We read selections from The Canterbury Tales, in translation, as high school freshman. Our genius history teacher made us promise not to tell our parents, and let us read one of the dirty ones. I was sold.
Later, I learned Middle English, and read the entire Tales. He's brilliant. Reliably funny and engaging (except for one chapter, obviously written in spite after being swindled IRL!).
I read The Great Gatsby outside of formal education, for my own benefit, during my college years, in a non-U.S. country. I thought it was the opposite of "actually really good", I found it to be a resolutely mediocre experience. At no stage did I get any inkling as to why it might be considered "a great book".
Another that baffles me is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
People can read it if they want, but if they find it dull four chapters in, just walk away, sometimes "the greats" are just culturally significant, or not your style, or whatever.
There are lots of good books out there though, and I'm glad you discovered something above the airport bestsellers. May I suggest to absolutely anyone
Haven’t read Dickens, but Melville was a revelation for me. His short stories are great, but Moby Dick is a work of glory. It’s hard to explain why, but Moby Dick basically bifurcated my life: there was the time before I read it and the time after. That being said, I would have hated it in high school and am glad it wasn’t assigned. It was something I could only appreciate in my 30s.
>Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through.
If you're reading for just funsies, sure. But none of their works are particularly long, even reading a few chapters here and there, it'd take a week for each at most.
In the YouTube comments for the song "Informer" by Snow ("Informer, <lots of words>, a licky boom-boom now"), someone refers to it as "the final boss of learning English".
Do you have a list of books you can recommend? (I was born and raised in Russia, so I imagine my school books list is quite different from yours; I would, of course, like to read from both.)
100% agree with you that it's worth going back and reading The Books You Should Read as an adult who can just read them as books and not some sort of obligation. That said. some of them are still stinkers that only a weird boomer could love. I'm looking at you, A Separate Peace & fucking anything by Joseph Conrad (sorry).
Half the pleasure of reading these books as they were meant to be read (as books, and not at frogs to be dissected in class) is that you get to discover it for yourself--a mix of life-changing gems and I-guess-you-had-to-be-there meditations on being a failson in the twilight of British imperialism
Childhood me hopes this will play out exactly like the Six Million Dollar Man episode. That it will roam around terrorizing rural California, and we’ll have to team up with a pretty young Russian scientist and Bigfoot to stop it.
I wonder if the producers of that show knew about that failed mission, and that this was actually really in earth orbit, when they wrote that episode.
“Oscar: Irina, you know that Steve is bionic. If he's careful ...
Irina: You don't understand. I designed that probe for Venus. Venus Oscar. A planet with temperatures of 900 degrees, 300 mile per hour winds, pressures up to 90 earth atmospheres. Even a bionic man couldn't survive under those conditions.”
I notice that I have a form of Gell-Mann amnesia for this sort of thing. Do we need a new term, or does that cover it?
Because I find myself nodding along with optimism, having two grandfathers that died from this disease. It’d be great if something could sift through all the data and come up with a novel solution.
Then I remember that this is the same technology that eagerly tries to autocomplete every other line of my code to include two nonexistent variables and a nonexistent function.
I hope this field has some good people to sanity check this stuff.
"I was optimistic when my friend told me about his new hammer and how much it helped him assemble a cabinet he was working on.
Then I remember that this is the same technology that failed to drive in screws for a project I was working on a week ago."
The AI that's being used in applications like this is not generative AI. It really is just "sparkling statistics" and it's tremendously useful in applications like this because it can accelerate the finding of patterns in data that form the basis of new discoveries.
Indeed. So the visitor need only wait for the 20mb javascript bundle, but not the 600kb of images, before he can see the 1kb of text that he visited the site to read.
Every time Visual Studio updates, it’ll turn back on the thing that shoves a ludicrously wrong, won’t even compile, not what I was in the middle of doing line of garbage code in front of my cursor, ready to autocomplete in and waste my time deleting if I touch the wrong key.
This is the thing that Microsoft thinks is important enough to be worth burning goodwill by re-enabling every few weeks, so I’m left to conclude that this is the state of the art.
Thus far I haven’t been impressed enough to make it five lines of typing before having to stop what I’m doing and google how to turn it off again.