Some 15-20 years ago, it was common among Europeans to make fun of Americans for writing in block-style. These days, I imagine, most Europeans have trouble deciphering what they write, so they use a mix of block and cursive - aka cursive as taught to a toddler. I now wish I learned how to write block faster because I can't use cursive without it becoming mostly unreadable and I can't use blocks without slowing down too much.
In other developments, I see recursive coming out on a resurgence in some self-help circles - marketed as a tool to unlock your inner potential, relieve stress/anxiety - just shows that forget about something long enough and you can relabel it to make some money.
I now only google when I need to sometimes verify that what chatgpt is suggesting isn't BS and I'm immediately reminded that google is barely better between SEO content farms, SEO SO scrappers, legacy information from 10 years ago. And that's with ads blocked.
Between chatgpt+ for general guidelines and copilot for specific implementation details, programming feels very fun and alive. And I'm very skeptical to subscribing, but chatgpt provides so much mental relief getting some answers immediately that I'm ecstatic being able to use/pay for it.
Even though Google returns results instantly, for most things I still have to evaluate and click links and skim them for the information I want. Sometimes I have to do multiple searches (like one for retinol and another for beta-carotene in the following example).
Yesterday I heard about retinol (vitamin A) mentioned in a nutrition podcast. I know carrots are high in vitamin A, but I didn't think they had retinol, so I wanted to learn more about that.
I whipped out my phone and asked GPT-3 "retinol vs. the vitamin A in carrots" (something I know you usually can't ask Google).
A few seconds later, I learned that retinol is vitamin A's final form in the body, thus you get it directly from animal products, and beta-carotene—found in plants—is a precursor to retinol in the body.
I do these kinds of searches all day. One thing faster about GPT as well is that I don't have to consider the "query engineering" to make Google return what I want, I just ask GPT a question streamed from my consciousness.
Yeah for questions with absolute answers that can be summarized like that it's perfect. Basically what Wolfram Alpha offered with quant data.
Although my partner is a lawyer and she sometimes asks it to summarize cases (without providing the full source material manually) and it sometimes invents entire details in the cases in a very persuasive way. So you always have to be careful and double check if it's important.
Code and case summaries couldn't be much different. With code you get compile time validation, run time validation, (hopefully) test validation, and you can generally look at a block of code and say "seems like this should work" or "this makes no sense". You get none of that with facts of a case.
I've found Bard to be very responsive too. Though you could argue it's not getting the same amount of traffic ChatGPT is.
That said, I don't expect Google to rest on its laurels. Sure, OpenAI is executing swiftly these days, but I think they've been prepared far too long for this. I expect Bard to become much better very soon... then will the AI wars truly begin.
If you ask it to "write code to do X", then it will say that it can't write code. I think this was hardcoded.
But I asked Bard: "Can you implement fibonacci in Go", and it outputted valid code. And then I asked it "what if I wanted to avoid recursion", to which it replied with valid Go code that used a for loop. But it also suggested me another very bogus way of doing it, by using a "function pointer", which was very bad. F(x) would output x.
So, don't expect ChatGPT level of quality just yet, but I think it will get there pretty fast.
SEO garbage is such a problem these days that, if I were Google, more than using AI as a new frontend for search, I'd be trying to find a way to use it to defeat SEO.
SEO for AI will be worse. Their output is a probabilistic distribution conditioned on the text is has read, so you can place text that heavily biases the output. Usually figuring out what this is can be kind of hard, but since OpenAI lets you query GPT-4 for credits, you can just mine what these special phrases are.
Depends on whether you are facing a disinformation campaign on a social network or whether you need to crush Russian armor rolling over the border.
Technology is notoriously two-faced. Or zero-faced if you can't produce it. The medieval people didn't have to worry about Facebook memes influencing the clergy and triggering heresies.
There is no country called EU and there is no single market in that a startup could scale seamlessly in all 27 members - it'll still have to follow local laws. So it's mostly a matter of scale - if you can't outscale US/China/India, you can't compete with those that can.
That is somewhat of an indictment of the "single market" idea, or, more precisely, of its implementation.
We still have shocking differences not just in tech, but in food quality across the EU. Whatever sells in Czechia, Croatia or Bulgaria tends to be a) more expensive than in Germany and b) less good. I can't imagine the same happening in the US; Mississippians wouldn't tolerate being fed with worse cheese than Newyorkers only because their different economic power.
To some degree, this is caused by the babel of languages and resulting cultural barriers. I am not parochial, and yet I am totally ignorant about who is a popular singer in Hungary or a popular writer in Belgium. The same barrier influences businesses and consumers.
> Whatever sells in Czechia, Croatia or Bulgaria tends to be a) more expensive than in Germany and b) less good.
I'm shocked that that is still the case. I remember recurrent news stories years ago on German TV about that exact thing, except with Poland. Poles who lived close to the border shopped food in Germany for that very reason.
I don't understand why food would be more expensive in countries with lower wages. The VAT rates are not that different.
It's still a thing. A lot of people in Croatia still buy specific food products in supermarkets like Lidl and Muller because they carry the same products as in Germany or Austria. So of much better quality of course.
The price at the time is generaly considerably higher than in neighbouring countries because VAT is just a part of the general taxation scheme. Whatever taxes companies get saddled with just get transferred to the general population via prices on the stuff they sell. And taxation in Croatia is crazy high unfortunately for everyone.
"I don't understand why food would be more expensive in countries with lower wages."
The multinationals do what they can get away with. A fine from a Bulgarian authority is likely to be trivial to them, and if it actually bites, they can always withdraw from the market as a retaliation.
No one wants to lose market access to Germany, but the smaller countries don't have as much leverage.
There's a similar situation between Czechia and Poland currently. Folks from .cz travel to .pl to buy food, cigarettes, medicine and even coal. I have no comparison of goods quality, but Poland is cheaper for Czechs.
Cross-border shopping used to be a big thing for Danes as well but mostly for soft drinks, alcohol, candy, and petrol. They all used to be a lot cheaper in Germany but that was because of our taxes in Denmark. It was our own bloody fault.
There are Danish supermarkets right across the border in Germany for the locals because things are still a bit cheaper there but most of us no longer bother driving all the way to Germany with a trailer on the car just to buy stuff. It used to be common to do that a couple of times a year.
>Mississippians wouldn't tolerate being fed with worse cheese than Newyorkers only because their different economic power.
And yet, it's the case ? Sure, you can find the same products if you go looking, but the average food quality between those two states will be wildly different. And that's without taking into account that the average food quality in the US is awful.
1. Microsoft is a pretty big contributor to Linux at this point. Their cloud arm pretty much forced their hand and I don't see that story changing anytime soon. .NET on Linux has been great in my experience.
2. Some libs are, others are decidedly _not_ enterprise driven. The ecosystem is pretty large so there tends to be a lot of options with most packages. Just take a look here, https://github.com/thangchung/awesome-dotnet-core, the ORM section has things as big as nhibernate, which is about as heavy-handed as it gets, to things like Dapper which is about as lightweight as you can get.
Pascal killed my interest in programming for a while as it was force fed in both high school and earlier collage years. Reflecting back, it was the pessimistic approach to teaching of just pushing math problems via programming.
Ca. 1994 we had Pascal as the language for AP computer science. Later, they started adding other languages. In my school the options were Basic (TrueBasic) which was offered as a stepping stone to APCS and pascal. I also had the opportunity to study Scheme through CTY's excellent summer class.
At the time, I remember pascal feeling like "real programming". The programs were compiled and they operated at various levels of abstraction, from pointers up through advanced data structures and interfaces/ADTs. I didn't see Scheme as more than a toy, which was partly because the MIT Scheme implementation was just an interpreter. And I hated Basic and still do.
Pascal was great because it was pretty easy to learn and somewhat consistent. Its most annoying feature, semicolon-as-separator, was easily handled by the terrific Think pascal editor.
In its time, Pascal was a great choice. There were real-world things that you could do immediately using Think Pascal and Turbo Pascal. Making the switch to C and Unix wasn't simple but probably easier than starting with Basic. However, I was left with a bias towards wordy languages like Pascal, Ada and Modula-3 that took a while to get over :)
Free Pascal was originally derived from Object Pascal and later Delphi, both of which added more object oriented programming features to Pascal. Additionally, it supports some of the more advanced features introduced to Pascal with later releases of Delphi including managed types, interface types, operator overloading, generics, implicit and explicit conversions, extension properties and methods, as well and user defined initializers and finalizers for your custom types, and more.
I could write an article about each of these features, but in summary they each are powerful and help users write more useful programming code when leveraged correctly.
I also had mandatory pascal during my high school years. Although I knew a little of C, C++ and python at that time and felt a bit obscured about learning pascal, today, I deeply admire my teacher's choice of pascal. Pascal has a nice beginner terminal IDE with a debugger and breakpoints; it has types, stack allocation and memory planning before the program is being run; recursion is possible, and it does not have many obscure features like pointers and OOP obscurities. Today, perhaps I would suggest Julia as the first language to teach, but pascal is still at the top.
Luckily for me I've never received any formal training in programming back in school. My introduction to programming happened in University and research labs in a very simple way - I needed to process and interpret some experimental data live and the only way I could do it was a computer. So I got me a user guide for particular one and bunch of books. In a few days I was already coding away. In exactly the same way I was introduced to electronics. Had to make some equipment for my research as you could not by one. Started with machine codes but over the time I've used many languages including Pascal from Borland. Programming was far from my main job but at some point I switched from science to creating commercial products as I was good at it. Some products I own and some I develop for clients. Most of products are ether pure software or contain some good chunk of it so I am still happily coding away even though I am 60 already.
Pascal is great as a teaching language because of its simple syntax. It is also a pre-OO language, so you don't need to spend time explaining what classes and objects are. For an introductory programming course it is a very good language.
This was all people knew. Most people saw programming as a branch of math. When a high school offered a programming class, it was often taught by a math teacher. The smaller colleges in my state, that were beginning to add computer science, did so by combining it with the math department.
My mom taught programming in the early 80s. She took a course at the nearby community college, and a year later, was teaching the course. Her background was... high school math teacher. She said: "Programming is just math, a program is like a proof." Fortunately I loved math and proofs, so that way of thinking wasn't an obstacle for me. Clearly we know differently now.
they could approach the same math from the other side, by starting to write games. and gradually come to game math. that would be more interesting, and then it would become obvious why one may need some math while programming.
Back Then. When was that? At University (1978) we used Pascal as the first language to learn (if you exclude CDC Cyber 6600 assembly). Yes we did the Discrete math problems common in CS (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Floyd-WarshallAlgorithm.html). We did other things as well. The professors were a mix of hippies, math geeks, and the Doctors from Doctor Who. Most knew both the academic and fun side of programming.
I guess it depends on the school and people there to create a fun but educational culture.
Heh, now you've made me consider an "abstract algebra for kids" tutorial, with data representations for simple games as the overarching conceit. Unfortunately, as a cishumanist, my finite lifetime expectation means I'll leave this project for some other interested party?
Google search is arguably dead already if I have to prefix every query with reddit or stackoverflow. Certainly it's only a matter of time before those go down the drain too. Using chatgpt definitely feels like living in the future.
How is Google Search dead? When by your own admission you still use it with a "prefix", instead of searching directly on Reddit or SO.
Not only is Google Search not dead by any measure, but 1/ most websites are completely incapable of implementing a local search function that actually works, and 2/ all of Google competitors try to copy its features (and do a bad job at it).
I don't work for Google, I don't own Google stock. But Google's dominance is hard to not see.
Because they can't monetize only results from those sites. If I don't prefix "reddit" I'll get dozens of websites I've never even heard of, before an actual answer. Even wikipedia is sometimes on the second or third page, everything else is spam.
bing/DDG is unusable for me since I realized it’s constantly ignoring words in my query. Google is better with this but its results are cluttered with SEO crap not to mention the creepiness factor of Google. I switched to a paid Kagi subscription. Let’s see how it goes.
Agreed. Everyone here is laughing about Google’s tech being more advanced and maybe it is, but at the end of the day ChatGPT produces answers while Google produces blog spam.
At present I’d consider them tied in terms of accuracy, but I have more faith in ChatGPT’s ability to improve its AI than Google’s ability to ship a good product.
In other developments, I see recursive coming out on a resurgence in some self-help circles - marketed as a tool to unlock your inner potential, relieve stress/anxiety - just shows that forget about something long enough and you can relabel it to make some money.