Just being open source doesn’t guarantee a project’s survival. If Google were to abandon it the most likely outcome would be a community fork that gets 100th of the development manpower it gets now, and most developers would abandon the platform leading to it’s effective death.

But I also think it’s unlikely Google will abandon it. It’s actually quite good and quite popular now.

Definitely a high usefulness-to-complexity ratio. But IMO the core advantage of Make is that most people already know it and have it installed (except on Windows).

By the time you need something complex enough that Make can’t handle it (e.g. if you get into recursive Make) then you’re better off using something like Bazel or Buck2 which also solves a bunch of other builds system problems (missing dependencies, early cut-off, remote builds, etc.).

However this does sound very useful for wrangling lots of other broken build systems - I can totally see why Buildroot are looking at it.

I recently tried to create a basic Linux system from scratch (OpenSBI + Linux + Busybox + …) which is basically what Buildroot does, and it’s a right pain because there are dependencies between different build systems, some of them don’t actually rebuild properly when dependencies change (cough OpenSBI)… This feels like it could cajole them into something that actually works.

Ah yeah I forgot about namespaces. I don’t think they’re a popular feature.

The other two only generate code for backwards compatibility. When targeting the latest JavaScript versions they don’t generate anything.

Ok decorators are technically still only a proposal so they’re slightly jumping the gun there, but the point remains.

No they don’t. Enums are actually unique in being the only Typescript feature that requires code gen, and they consider that to have been a mistake.

In any case that’s not the cause of the difference here.

Private or obscure ones I guess.

Real-world (macro) benchmarks are at least harder to game, e.g. how long does it take to launch chrome and open Gmail? That’s actually a useful task so if you speed it up, great!

Also these benchmarks are particularly easy to game because it’s the actual benchmark itself that gets gamed (i.e. the code for each language); not the thing you are trying to measure with the benchmark (the compilers). Usually the benchmark is fixed and it’s the targets that contort themselves to it, which is at least a little harder.

For example some of the benchmarks for language X literally just call into C libraries to do the work.

Their measurements include invocation of the interpreter. And parsing TS involves bigger overhead than parsing JS.

But TS is compiled to JS so it’s the same interpreter in both cases. If they’re including the time for tsc in their benchmark then that’s an even bigger WTF.

It has no memory, for one.

It has very short term memory in the form of it’s token context. Especially with something like Meta’s Coconut.

What makes you think that it does know its in a conversation?

I don’t really. Yet. But I also don’t think that it is fundamentally impossible for LLMs to think, like you seem to. I also don’t think the definition of the word “think” is so narrow that it requires that level of self-awareness. Do you think a mouse is really aware it is a mouse? What about a spider?

Ah this ancient nonsense. Typescript and JavaScript get different results!

It’s all based on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Language_Benchmarks_Game

Microbenchmarks which are heavily gamed. Though in fairness the overall results are fairly reasonable.

Still I don’t think this “energy efficiency” result is worth talking about. Faster languages are more energy efficient. Who new?

Edit: this also has some hilarious visualisation WTFs - using dendograms for performance figures (figures 4-6)! Why on earth do figures 7-12 include line graphs?

Your comment doesn’t account for the fact that LLMs can generalise. Often not very well but they can produce outputs for inputs not seen in their training sets. Otherwise what would be the point?

You would not ask a piece of cardboard so solve a math problem, would you?

Uhhh you know LLMs can solve quite complex maths problems? Including novel ones.

And how do you know LLMs can’t tell that they are involved in a conversation?

Unless you think there is something non-computational in the human brain, then you must accept that computers are - in theory - capable of thinking. With the right software and sufficiently powerful hardware.

Given that truth (which I think you can only avoid through religion or quantum quackery), you can’t just say “it’s only maths; it can’t be thinking” because we know that maths can think.

Do LLMs “think”? The definition of “think” is wooly enough and we understand them little enough that it’s quite an assertion to say that they definitely don’t.

This argument makes no more sense than trying to say that a plant is thinking because brains are made of cells and so are plants.

By that logic we also conclude that the human brain doesn’t “think” about what it is saying.

It’s really amazing the number of people trying to argue that LLMs are useless, while simultaneously so many people are using them successfully. Makes me wonder if they’ve even tried them.

Well… isn’t it? If one’s daily or most frequent back-and-forth journeys don’t exceed 100 ㎞, then a 160 ㎞ range is indeed fine.

Uhm… No. Most people only have one car so if you get one that only works 95% if the time it’s going to be super inconvenient when you have to hire a car every time you go on holiday or visit your family or go to a distant concert or whatever.

That’s why low range electric cars are not very popular.

Ah yes the old pointless vague anecdote.

If your argument is “LLMs can’t do useful work”, and then I say “no, I’ve used them to do useful work many times” how is that a pointless vague anecdote? It’s a direct proof that you’re wrong.

Promoting pseudo-science.

Sorry what? This is bizarre.

Because most users simply use the browser

This is the same problem as saying “an electric car with 100 mile range is totally fine because most journeys are well under 100 miles”.

Most of the time I’m only using a browser (or VSCode). The annoying thing is the 1% of times when I want to print something, create a shortcut, use bluetooth headphones, configure a static IP, etc.

Use Photopea instead. It’s practically a copy-paste of Photoshop but in the browser, created by one person. Or if one has never used Photoshop before, try GIMP first.

Saying Photopea or GIMP is “practically a copy-paste of Photoshop” is laughable. Paint.NET, maybe.

LLMs can’t think - only generate statistically plausible patterns

Ah still rolling out the old “stochastic parrot” nonsense I see.

Anyway on to the actual article… I was hoping it wouldn’t make these basic mistakes:

[Typescript] looks more like an “enterprise” programming language for large institutions, but we honestly don’t have any evidence that it’s genuinely more suitable for those circumstances than the regular JavaScript.

Yes we do. Frankly if you’ve used it it’s so obviously better than regular JavaScript you probably don’t need more evidence (it’s like looking for “evidence” that film stars are more attractive than average people). But anyway we do have great papers like this one.

Anyway that’s slightly beside the point. I think the article is right that smart people are not invulnerable to manipulation or falling for “obviously” stupid ideas. I know plenty of very smart religious people for example.

However I think using this to dismiss LLMs is dumb, in the same way that his dismissal of Typescript is. LLMs aren’t homeopathy or religion.

I have used LLMs to get some work done and… guess what, it did the work! Do I trust it to do everything? Obviously not. But sometimes I don’t need perfect code. For example recently I asked it to create an example SystemVerilog file for me utilising as many syntax features as possible (testing an auto-formatter). It did a pretty good job. Saved some time. What psychological hazard have I fallen for exactly?

Overall, B-. Interesting ideas but flawed logic.

No, I said that some important features don’t exist. They said “well I don’t use them”, as if that somehow negated the point that they don’t exist. It’s typical “works for me” nonsense. You get these replies whenever anyone says anything is suboptimal about Linux. It’s so tedious.

Good for you I guess?

These are probably the biggest reasons, but I think even after literally decades of development the actual desktop is still far behind Windows XP in many respects.

For example today I wanted to add a “start menu” shortcut to a program I had downloaded. The most popular answer is to *manually create a .desktop file and copy it to some obscure dot directory! Hilarious. Even Windows 3.1 had a built-in GUI for this.

Ok so there is a GUI to do it, but it isn’t actually integrated into desktops and isn’t installed by default. You have to install it separately.

It’s the same for things like WiFi settings! There are some settings in GNOME but most are hidden in the third party nm-connection-editor (from memory) and of course GNOME doesn’t have an “advanced settings” button to open that.

There are so many of these paper cuts I think Linux would be quite a frustrating experience for many people even if if had Windows-level hardware support.

I also can’t see this changing any time soon. Not that many Linux devs actually care about this sort of thing and many of them don’t even understand that it is a problem in the first place. Cue replies.