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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Hackers and hobbiests will persist despite any economics. Much of what they do I don’t see AI replacing, as AI creates based off of what it “knows”, which is mostly things it has previously ingested.

    We are not (yet?) at the point where LLM does anything other than put together code snippets it’s seen or derived. If you ask it to find a new attack vector or code dissimilar to something it’s seen before the results are poor.

    But the counterpoint every developer needs to keep in mind: AI will only get better. It’s not going to lose any of the current capabilities to generate code, and very likely will continue to expand on what it can accomplish. It’d be naive to assume it can never achieve these new capabilities… The question is just when & how much it costs (in terms of processing and storage).






  • A bit of an elaboration on why water towers are used in combination with pumps. Pumps are great for moving a constant amount of water around at whatever rate the pump is designed for (e.g. a small pump will move something like 1 gallon per minute). a big enough pump (or series of smaller pumps) can cause that pumped water to consistently flow at that rate.

    The problem is that people don’t use water at a constant rate. In the morning, several residents probably all run the shower at the same time. if too many people open the water tap at the same time, a pump will give each just a fraction of what they expect.

    But a water tank high up supplies water by gravity, you could open a large number of water taps, and as long as the pipes from the tank are big enough they’d all have the same pressure as if just one opened.

    The water is gradually pumped up to the tank no matter if people are using it or not, then when many people want water, they all get it at expected pressures and the tank start to empty. Eventually people close the taps, the tank will slowly start to fill again from the pump.

    This same basic design is also how water towers supply water to many single story buildings, it’s not a unique engineering feat for skyscrapers, but an adjustment to fit somewhere within the building’s footprint.