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Cake day: Aug 08, 2023

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The “Forgetting How Your Own Code Works” is real. I’ve looked at code, thought to myself “what fcking idiot wrote this garbage”, only to see my own name next to it. It’s a very humbling experience


Sometimes I look at the memes around here and wonder wtf y’all are doing. Like, neither my code nor the code at the place I work at are perfect. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a merge do this. Maybe some of the most diverged merges temporarily had a lot of errors because of some refactoring, but then it was just a few find + replaces away from being fixed again. But those were merges where multiple teams had been working on both the original and the fork for years and even then it was usually pretty okay.


Oh I never knew, but it seems true. On his Wikipedia page both researches are mentioned. It’s so impressive how these researchers are behind so many different but interesting papers.


Machine learning and compression have always been closely tied together. It’s trying to learn the “rules” that describe the data rather than memorizing all the data.

I remember implementing a paper older than me in our “Information Theory” course at university that treated the creation of a decision tree as compression. Their algorithm considered sending the decisions tree and all the exceptions to the decision tree and the tree itself. If a node in the tree increased the overall message size, it would simply be pruned. This way they ensured that you wouldn’t make conclusions while having very little data and would only add the big patterns in the data.

Fundamentally it is just compression, it’s just a way better method of compression than all the models that we had before.

EDIT: The paper I’m talking about is “Inferring decision trees using the minimum description length principle” - L. Ross Quinlan & Ronald L. Rivest


My first experience with the Sims was jumping behind a random computer at some kind of event that was running the Sims 1. Most of the family had just died because the previous person behind the PC had let the house burn down. Needless to say, I was a bit confused. I’ve played the Sims quite a bit after that, and I honestly like messing around with it.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game without cheating a lot of money. I don’t like that the Sims that I made have to go off to work or school, so usually I just build a big fence around the property to keep them all there. From there on it used to devolve into chaos when I was younger. Building huge mazes to access basic necessities, launching fireworks indoors, etc. Nowadays im a bit more behaved though.

Imo the Sims 4 is the best nowadays. The older ones are showing their age. That being said, the Sims 4 is definitely in need of some competition. It’s inexcusably buggy sometimes, and I personally think there’s a lot more that can be done with a game like this. Hopefully the upcoming competitors can spark some fire into this genre.


I got randomly recommend “Kena: Bridge of Spirits” recently by Steam and decided to go for it. I just finished the story and it was definitely a good recommendation. Hard enough to make me work for it, which I always like. It is kinda short though, finished it in like 12 hours. It’s a bit janky at times with the camera and jumping, but overall a great experience.


True. Guess I misread. I’ve already switched to 36 hours and I totally aim to go lower once I earn more. Work to live, not live to work


Disagree. I used to spend time on more energy-intensive hobbies like programming and music production. But I’ve had mono and COVID in 2020 and I’ve never felt the same thereafter. Also working 40 hours a week drains a lot of energy


Yeah sports were my first attempt to solve it. I’m running twice a week usually and have done a few half marathons now. It’s helped a bit, but my energy is still not amazing. It’s probably related to having issues with mono and COVID in 2020, I’ve never been the same since then. Working 40 hours per week didn’t help either.


I’m supposed to have energy as an adult?! I have way more time than energy. Most of that time is spent doing useless shit like watching YouTube because I’m too exhausted to do anything useful


I’m not a hundred percent sure, but afaik it has to do with how random the output of the GPT model will be. At 0 it will always pick the most probable next continuation of a piece of text according to its own prediction. The higher the temperature, the more chance there is for less probable outputs to get picked. So it’s most likely to pick 42, but as the temperature increases you see the chance of (according to the model) less likely numbers increase.

This is how temperature works in the softmax function, which is often used in deep learning.


How is Spotify a scam? I can probably at most buy one CD per month for the same price as Spotify. Yet Spotify gives unlimited access to good quality versions of almost every song out there. Even with raised prices it’s still a way better deal for most consumers than buying music directly.

Personally I tend to also buy a few albums a year, because I like owning them and I like supporting the artists. But the convenience of having every track at your fingertips is hard to beat


Do people really constantly copy-paste code? If I don’t know something I’ll look it up, but then I’ll read the answer and apply it to the code I’m writing rather than copying it directly. I rarely see a piece of code that I can copy over directly into what I’m doing, and even if I can it’s usually not thr best idea because the naming etc would be inconsistent


I kinda suck at Tetris. We had a “LAN” last year where we played some battle royale Tetris game, and there was one girl who absolutely demolished everyone. After that I feel like a kid playing (and failing) with one of those block shape matching toys whenever I play Tetris. It’s a cool game though. Nice simple gameplay, but high skill ceiling. I respect people who absolutely destroy me at a game due to pure skill


  • Start with an ambitious project
  • Get stuck
  • Curse everything about said language or framework, “why did they do it like this”
  • Read the docs and find out why they did it like this
  • Feel stupid
  • Finish the project (or at least the part you actually cared about) with your new knowledge
  • Feel smart
  • Repeat until you know said language or framework

Don’t you just present the stuff yourself as dev? Our sprint review demo’s are done by us, not the PO or something. I thought that’d be standard


As a software engineer/data scientist who has spent quite a while to find some good AI work, this sounds like absolute bullshit. Most companies don’t need AI. Prompt engineer seems like a niche thing, I can’t imagine that most companies really need someone who does that. It really frustrates me that these bullshit articles keep coming out without any sense or reason. AI is cool technology (imo), but currently it’s just the latest bait for CEOs, managers, etc. Somehow these kinda people are just so vulnerable for hype words without ever thinking more than as second about how to use it or whether it’s even useful.


People now “ChatGPT isn’t real AI because it says dumb shit all the time”. People then: “Prolog is AI because it can solve logic problems”.

Something with moving goalposts or something


Personally I still use Windows for gaming and some other programs that work better under Windows. I’ve tried to switch, but it was just a bit too unstable to depend on for me. For me none of this shit has happened tho. No forced Cortana, no sudden Candy Crush install, no Edge fucking with my browsing. I’d rather switch to Linux full time instead of dual booting, because M$ is still pulling all these moves on others, but sometimes convenience does win.


Because men in games are usually rough tough emotionless bricks. Designed to be “badass”. Playing Cyberpunk as a woman felt kinda freeing and different. Since then I’ve been doing it more and honestly it just feels fresh. It’s also easier to feel like I’m playing someone else. Women also usually have more interesting customization options imo.


Yep, I feel a bit more prepared now. I haven’t had the time yet today, but from what I saw the first one shouldn’t be too hard


Last year I decided to do it in Rust, in order to learn Rust. I found out pretty quickly that you can’t just jump from Java/Python/Haskell into Rust and expect to understand what’s going on. This year I feel more prepared, so if time permits I’ll make it right this time.


I bought Cities Skylines 2 under the premise that I’d refund it if it ran like shit. On my PC it runs about the same as the first game. Which isn’t great, around 30-60 fps, but also not unplayable. I haven’t played a lot yet, but so far I’m enjoying it. I did get into a fight with the UI thingy that lets you designate an area for landfills/farmland/etc. It feels very counterintuitive when you build the respective building and then try to mark the area. But when you finish the building and then edit the area again it suddenly works a lot better. Maybe my brain is just weird


Interesting how college ruined your love for programming and work got it back. For me it’s almost the complete opposite. Studying Computer Science constantly fed me with new interesting ideas, and I still had more time to play around with those ideas. At work I’m just implementing some button or some boring logic 40 hours a week and after that I’m too drained to explore any of my (many) ideas further.

I guess it’s a difference in incentive. I don’t care whether anyone will use what I wrote, I just want to learn something new and explore ideas.



This is why I use poetry for python nowadays. Pip just feels like something ancient next to Cargo, Stack, Julia, npm, etc.


As a developer, I feel absolute pain for the people who had to convert these. There’s quite some edge cases and sensitive topics to dodge here, and doing something wrong might piss people off. They must’ve had some lengthy meetings about a few emoji.


Something like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed? It’s been quite a while, but I remember having fun with it. It felt like a Mario Kart kinda game


After more than a hundred hours (and probably also 50+ crashes) me and my friends managed to finish our co-op Satisfactory session and completed the (for now) last stage of the space elevator. At the end of the game everything was slowly falling apart though. No means of transport was reliable anymore due to the lag. Trains were acting weirdly, hypertubes cannons were very dangerous, standing on drones was a quick trip to the void, and even normal hypertubes had random glitches where you’d randomly fall out of them and get completely desynced. But the factories were impressive, and it was a cool experience.

Now we’re kinda filling the void with some older games. Playing some Splitgate again, which was quite fun despite the low player counts. And also playing some Mario Kart etc via Dolphin. Yesterday we also played Barony for the first time. I didn’t have a full idea what was going on, but one friend had some experience already. We managed to get like 6 floors deep on our second run before saving the game and calling it a night, which felt quite good.

In single player I’m picking up Cyberpunk 2077 again in preparation for Phantom Liberty. My build seems completely messed up tho, and the SPT Grad sniper that I relied on seems to be nerfed and can no longer shoot through walls it seems. Nevertheless the changes seem like an overall improvement to the game, I had a lot of fun with the police already.


Oh yeah for scooters it’s better. But for bikes it’s only better if it leads to someone using a bike where they otherwise could not. Otherwise it makes stuff more dangerous and expensive and less healthy.


This article is obviously from an American perspective, in which case e-bikes are probably a necessary evil to give kids more freedom. But from the Dutch perspective I’m certainly a bit scared about them. I see more and more kids racing through the streets on those things. These kids often used to go by bike anyway, but their speed was still limited by their physical ability. Now they have to put in less energy, meaning they’ll gain weight, and they’re also going way too fast with a heavier bike that they don’t fuly control. It’s led to plenty of dangerous situations already. People obviously aren’t forced to buy an e-bike, but the kids without one often have a bit of a problem when they have to cycle 10km every day with friends who do have one. So it becomes a domino effect where we end up in a worse situation than before.


It’s not acting pro-anorexia in its own, it’s specifically being prompted to do so. If I grab a hammer to slam myself on my fingers, it’s not up to the hammer or the manufacturer of the hammer to stop me. The hammer didn’t attack me, I did. Now sure, it’s not that black and white, and maybe they could do more to make the chatbot more cautious, but to me this article is mostly just artificial drama. Specifically ask the AI to do stuff, then cry about it in an article and slap a clickbait title onto it.