What? I’ve already written the design documentation and done all the creative and architectural parts that I consider most rewarding. All that’s left for coding is answering questions like “what exactly does the API I need to use look like?” and writing a bunch of error handling if statements. That’s toil.

Definitely depends on the person. There are definitely people who are getting 90% of their coding done with AI. I’m one of them. I have over a decade of experience and I consider coding to be the easiest but most laborious part of my job so it’s a welcome change.

One thing that’s really changed the game recently is RAG and tools with very good access to our company’s data. Good context makes a huge difference in the quality of the output. For my latest project, I’ve been using 3 internal tools. An LLM browser plugin which has access to our internal data and let’s you pin pages (and docs) you’re reading for extra focus. A coding assistant, which also has access to internal data and repos but is trained for coding. Unfortunately, it’s not integrated into our IDE. The IDE agent has RAG where you can pin specific files but without broader access to our internal data, its output is a lot poorer.

So my workflow is something like this: My company is already pretty diligent about documenting things so the first step is to write design documentation. The LLM plugin helps with research of some high level questions and helps delve into some of the details. Once that’s all reviewed and approved by everyone involved, we move into task breakdown and implementation.

First, I ask the LLM plugin to write a guide for how to implement a task, given the design documentation. I’m not interested in code, just a translation of design ideas and requirements into actionable steps (even if you don’t have the same setup as me, give this a try. Asking an LLM to reason its way through a guide helps it handle a lot more complicated tasks). Then, I pass that to the coding assistant for code creation, including any relevant files as context. That code gets copied to the IDE. The whole process takes a couple minutes at most and that gets you like 90% there.

Next is to get things compiling. This is either manual or in iteration with the coding assistant. Then before I worry about correctness, I focus on the tests. Get a good test suite up and it’ll catch any problems and let you reflector without causing regressions. Again, this may be partially manual and partially iteration with LLMs. Once the tests look good, then it’s time to get them passing. And this is the point where I start really reading through the code and getting things from 90% to 100%.

All in all, I’m still applying a lot of professional judgement throughout the whole process. But I get to focus on the parts where that judgement is actually needed and not the more mundane and toilsome parts of coding.

As far as I understand as a layman, the measurement tool doesn’t really matter. Any observer needs to interact with the photon in order to observe it and so even the best experiment will always cause this kind of behavior.

With no observer: the photon, acting as a wave, passes through both slits simultaneously and on the other side of the divider, starts to interfere with itself. Where the peaks or troughs of the wave combine is where the photon is most likely to hit the screen in the back. In order to actually see this interference pattern we need to send multiple photons through. Each photon essentially lands in a random location and the pattern only reveals itself as we repeat the experiment. This is important for the next part…

With an observer: the photon still passes through both slits. However, the interaction with the observer’s wave function causes the part of the photon’s wave in that slit to offset in phase. In other words, the peaks and troughs are no longer in the same place. So now the interference pattern that the photon wave forms with itself still exists but, critically, it looks completely different.

Now we repeat with more photons. BUT each time you send a photon through it comes out with a different phase offset. Why? Because the outcome of the interaction with the observer is governed by quantum randommess. So every photon winds up with a different interference pattern which means that there’s no consistency in where they wind up on the screen. It just looks like random noise.

At least that’s what I recall from an episode of PBS Space Time.

Unfortunately the horrible death would come long before you even reach the event horizon. The tidal forces would tear you apart and eventually, tear apart the molecules that used to make up you. Every depiction of crossing a black hole event horizon just pretends that doesn’t happen for the sake of demonstration.

He became a rogue scholar, huh? A dark path that leads only to evil scientist.

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I don’t think it’s working. LLMs don’t have any trouble parsing it.

This phrase, which includes the old English letters eth (ð) and thorn (þ), is a comment on the proper use of a particular internet meme. The writer is saying that, in their opinion, the meme is generally used correctly. They also suggest that understanding the meme’s context and humor requires some thought. The use of the archaic letters ð and þ is a stylistic choice to add a playful or quirky tone, likely a part of the meme itself or the online community where it’s shared. Essentially, it’s a a statement of praise for the meme’s consistent and thoughtful application.

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Oh look what was just posted today: https://youtu.be/Cp5oajtBbtg

TLDW: It’s been proposed. Turn’s out it’s really hard to even do that.

Our recipes rarely use weights except for maybe meats. We’ve got a scale in my kitchen but it hasn’t been touched in a while.

The ratios of ingredients matter more than the exact values so for the recipe you’re talking about, it’d be like 2 cups of milk, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup of oil, 1/8 cup of sugar (or 2 tablespoons, which is a pretty common size so most people probably have a scoop for that).

But having industrial quantities is like most of the argument for using metric! You mean to tell me you’re not converting between kL and mL all the time and reaping the benefits of being able to just slide the decimal over? That’s a shame. I’m not sure that doing your everyday cooking in increments of 125g is all that useful then. The cup is sounding better and better.

We have the same measuring cups I’m sure you use for liquids. They have mL on one side, cups on the other and a scale for sub-sizes. We do have individually-sized scoops which are nice for over-scooping and just sliding your finger across the top to push off the excess and get the amount you need. It’s not strictly necessary though. They come in a set where each smaller scoop fits inside the larger ones in a tight stack that can sit in a drawer.

The infinite granularity is ultimately unnecessary. Recipes don’t call for 0.397 cups. I’m sure you don’t see any that ask for 438 grams. If you do the math on a lot of recipes listed in both metric and imperial, you’ll find that they’re not even using the exact same amounts. The convenience of using standard measures tends to outweigh the flavor difference with plus or minus a percent of ingredient.

You guys have to weigh your flour? We just grab a cup and scoop it and then dump it in the bowl. You’re busting out the scale? You’re not exactly selling me on metric here.

Well then you’ve lost the whole advantage of base 10. You’re buying 2L or 4L containers and dividing them up into 250ml increments, having to do divisions of 8 or 16 like some common imperial peasant, only you’re doing it with numbers that have no real relationship with your daily life. I mean, ultimately it’s all arbitrary anyway. But when someone says use 2 cups, that’s 2 scoops, which seems better to me than having to know that 500ml is 2 scoops.

A useful size to package and sell ingredients in, such that the person following a recipe can halve or double the recipe as needed and still use the entire package with no waste.

Would it help if I told you that it was defined as the volume contained in a cube whose length is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/166219513th of a second? I imagine it wouldn’t. Obviously the litre is superior, it’s a much less arbitrary cube defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/2997924580 seconds.

The whole point of cups is that you can buy an ingredient by the gallon and it’s very likely that you can double or halve the recipe to your heart’s content and eventually use up the entire package with no waste.

The observable universe is constantly expanding as the passage of time allows light to reach us from more and more distant parts of the universe. So it’s less “we don’t know what’s outside” and more like (to a certain extent) “we have to wait and see.” And there’s nothing we’ve seen to indicate that these external regions that are being revealed are anything but more of the same kinds of things in our inner region of the observable universe.

The important thing in the balloon analogy isn’t what the balloon is expanding into, it’s just that every point on the balloon is drifting away from every other point.

One thing to consider, though, is that space may not even be a real physical thing. Maybe location is just a property of things, like mass or electrical charge. It could just be an inherent value that adjusts and influences other things according to the laws of physics. Maybe it’s less that “space is expanding” and just that “the location property of everything is constantly diverging.” There’s no need to worry about what anything is expanding into because our conception of space may just be a mental construct.

I would think you’d have to instantaneously accelerate because incremental acceleration doesn’t work the way we typically think it does at high speeds.

If you’re moving at 99.999% the speed of light relative to Earth, anything close to your speed is going to be moving quite slowly relative to you. When you accelerate some more, the change in speed relative to those close things is much larger than the change in speed you experience relative to Earth (it gets smaller and smaller as you approach light speed). But as far as I understand, there’s no such thing as moving at light speed relative to Earth but not relative to other sub-light speed things. You’d have to instantaneously move at light speed relative to everything (every sub-light speed thing).

It’s still an unsettled question if we even do