More than 20 years ago, in a Goodwill, I came across a "weird" record. The theme was that a guy multitracked and electronically altered his voice to be a choir of ~20 voices.
I almost bought it for the entertainment value, but when I flipped it over, it was all very religious themed songs. Stuff about the devil. I thought to myself that I just couldn't sit through that and put it back.
I wish I bought the record, though. I'm sure it was good for a laugh.
When I read the first part of Origin of Species, Darwin made predictions where, I thought, "oh, that's just genetics and DNA." (Of course, he didn't know at the time.)
> but I imagine you'll regularly have people wander on to your property
Well, that depends on how large and obvious your property is.
Assuming you have a typical suburban 1/2 acre or 1 acre property, the simplest thing to do is put up a fence, or otherwise make sure that there are no trails that go over the property you use.
Otherwise, you need some kind of bounds marking and obvious "no trespassing" signs.
FWIW: The site identified public lands near my house that have a lot of trails on it. There are trails that go right behind peoples' yards, and most of them either have fences or sheds that make it obvious where the bounds are.
> They told me I had 14 cavities, and 3 of my teeth needed crowns
A few years ago there was a story floating around about a young dentist who purchased a practice from a retiring dentist, and the practice wasn't making as much money as it should have.
He reviewed patient records and realized that the prior dentist was performing a lot of unnecessary procedures; and contacted the patients. Some patients had persistant pain from the unnecessary procedures, too.
There was at least one lawsuit, from what I remember. I think it had to do with the prior dentist misrepresenting the business's value.
The seller was performing the unnecessary procedures and the practice value was based on that revenue. The buyer was ethical and therefore revenue was lower than expected.
I think this is supposed to behave like HAL from 2001 or otherwise like 1960's sci-fi style AI where a house has a computer that people have conversations with.
Otherwise, I'm having trouble understanding why I would use something like this. Is it because it's too hard to pull my phone out of my pocket, so I just need to speak to an ever-present computer?
> That always felt a bit strange to me: you essentially have two web servers, and one of them is also responsible for your business logic. ... CGI gives you a single web server that calls your business logic directly. It's clear who does what.
Some of that is protecting your app by using pre-existing components that nothing to do with your app or business: Load balancing, DDOS protection, ect, ect. There's no need to write this kind of stuff from scratch unless you're in some kind of performance-sensitive niche or otherwise are large enough to justify getting into these weeds.
Yep, a reverse-proxy is supposed to handle all the stuff that would need handling in a production environment (as you stated: TLS termination, load-balancing, DoS protection, etc) that an application developer should not have to be concerned with when doing local development. Not only is this a good de-coupling of services, but it makes the developers' jobs much easier when they don't need to be concerned with such things.
Furthermore, the danger of backfeeding is if you do it in a power outage and you start to power your neighbors' houses. It'll overload your generator and create a hazardous situation for anyone working on the wires. (This is why you're supposed to install either a generator switch or interlock. I have one that only allows me to energize when my main breaker is turned off.)
> Across all creative industries, there is a concerted push to reject this technology. Yet, almost unique among creative fields, many experienced programmers remain convinced that it’s fine to use “AI” for programming.
How many artists claim that you must make your own paints and construct your own paintbrushes for it to be "art?"
A lot of "AI" in programming isn't replacing programmers or replacing making novel ideas; it's automating mundane tasks so that the programmer can pay closer attention to critical details. Otherwise, when a programmer is truly hands-off and just babysitting an AI, is the program really an expression of an original thought or just the equivalent of a custom-made paintbrush and a custom-made paint; for some other endeavor?
> However, code that is intentionally aesthetically designed tends to be important, both socially and technologically.
I spend a lot of time making sure that code is understandable; often times spending more time on the aesthetics than it took me for the original version. I've found AI very helpful with this, because a mindless refactor that would take me 30-90 minutes, I can have AI do in about 3 minutes.
> Berger reveals that the reality of this portrait is that a poor old painter needed some work, and some officials probably thought it might be nice to have an official portrait. So they paid some money to the poor old man, and he painted it, and then they had a painting.
Today this would be a photograph. Ironically, photography means that painted portraits are a lot more creative, because now we expect to the painter to take more liberties.
> It does make me a bit sad that we don’t have much of a critical reading tradition in the software community. Literate Programming is often praised, but rarely practiced.
Uhm, this is what code reviews are for! And, to be quite frank, I've found that AI code reviews are some of the best I've gotten, because the AI is able to do very deep dives that would take a human reviewer hours, or even days, to do.
> Programming isn’t special. It’s just Art, and Art is the most human — and thus, the most universal — thing that there is.
And this is where the author lost credibility. Programming is more like the inside of the statue of liberty. The art is the result, not the code inside of it.
The article explains it very clearly near the end:
> The US Justice Department gives the example that the entire catalogue of Taylor Swift received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams in April 2023., In the same month, Smith’s bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times.
Basically, the guy got very greedy and generated roughly 10x more streams than a widely popular artist.
It makes me wonder that, if he did significantly less streams, would he have been caught? Are there other fake streams flying under the radar?
I almost bought it for the entertainment value, but when I flipped it over, it was all very religious themed songs. Stuff about the devil. I thought to myself that I just couldn't sit through that and put it back.
I wish I bought the record, though. I'm sure it was good for a laugh.
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