That seems incredibly prescient for accounts created before even GPT-1. Obviously broad data scraping existed before then, but even amongst this crowd I find it hard to believe that’s the real motivator.
Third party app development must be a nightmare, based on how much of a nightmare it is even just to install and use those apps.
But I must say, I wish other appliances would be as intuitive as the built in fitness tracking apps and they controls. Somehow it's just consistent, does the right thing, and works reliably. With only 5 buttons.
Probably that's why we are learning about it in the "Control Theory" classes at university. :-)
Jokes aside, I graduated as "Computer Engineer" (BSc) and then also did a "Master in Computer Science"; I was (young and) angry at the universe why soooo many classical engineering classes and then theory I had to sit through (Control theory, Electrical engineering, Physics), and we never learned about the cool design patterns etc etc.
Today I see that those formative years helped me a lot with how I develop intuition when looking at large (software) systems, and I also understand that those ever changing best design patterns I can (could have) just look up, learn, and practice in my free time.
I wish a today-me would have told my yesterday-me all this.
I learned about it after I graduated with a CS degree - I mean in true university degree fashion we'd been taught about Laplace and Z transforms (and related things) but with no practical applications.
After graduating I joined an academic research team based mainly in a EE department who were mainly Control Engineers - we were mainly doing stuff around qualitative reasoning and using it for fault diagnosis, training etc.
To be fair (and because I've just remembered - it was ~40 years ago) we did get some practical stuff covered in the maths part of my CS degree in the application of group theory (groups, rings & fields) to coding theory.
I had this philosophical / existential crisis question lately about my project, and I think I'm at peace with it.
Yes. Gluing together stuff (AKA building on other giants' shoulders) can be done in a neglecting, "just hack it all up until starts to work" way, and it can also be done in a reproducible, "unit tested", documented way that enables you to eventually put even more "hacks" on top of it to deliver value.
Anything is "hacker spirit", as long as you make something _functional_ out of pieces that haven't functioning in a way you wanted before. Let it be witty, hackish, or beautiful, maintainable, as long as it holds up your business or gives you simply joy.
Yes, and I would even go as far as saying that even being functional isn't required. Trying to make something cool and failing counts as "hacker spirit".
It all boils down to getting your hands dirty, instead of passively consuming the products of others.
My understanding is, iterating on possible sequences (of codons, base pairs, etc) is exactly what LLMs, these feedback-looped predictor machines, are especially great at. With the newest models, those that "reason about" (check) their own output, are even better at it.
While you are being downvoted here, I would like to express how much I liked how this thought summarized some of the pain points I have to deal with: (regardless of AI):
> they’re faithfully mirroring the mediocrity of the organisation
This is happening with to technologies / tools / etc...
Besides that this was clearly a security f*ckup, in my mind it's almost equivalent to running those third party liters in our Internet-connection-enabled editors and IDEs. Other than one banking project, I don't think I ever had to sandbox my editor in any way.
My nightmare is that one of those auto updating vim/vscode/your-favorite-IDE plug-ins That many of us happily use on all the monorepos we work on, at one point invoke a "linter" (or as in this case, configure a linter maliciously) and we start leaking the precious IP to random attackers :-(
BTW Hbf is a München thing, we call our beloved Zürich Hauptbahnhof just HB :-)
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