Similarly contrary: I don't know why people aren't talking more about Python. Am I interpretting the final vs. graph incorrectly?
I've got some education in materials engineering; it'd be trivial to drop a curve (line) for optimizing the language selection, and Python obviously comes out on top.
The author doesn't even mention it. That discredits the whole article as far as I'm concerned.
You are the one cherry picking perhaps the first two charts. Look at the various metrics at the end in the Zstd vs Pandoc charts. There is just no clear advantage for Python across those metrics which are the one you really want to know about! If anything F# seems like a better top of the line language?!
I'm exclusively using the third chart. The selection process would naively be y=mx+b with some reasonable variables. It would be a downward diagonal (you would move it right until only a few remained), and you would pick the one farthest from the line, which is obviously Python.
There was a good discussion yesterday on the DeepSeek Flash release thread about this.
There's a large market, very large, who want the best regardless of what it costs. Probably a large enough market to keep that domain of research afloat (as opposed to shifting research manpower to cost cutting).
The reasoning is just that the marginal cost of AI is very secondary to fixed costs of the businesses themselves; it's not an excuse to sacrifice performance.
I've never done it but would be interested because it cuts out the burden of worrying about costs. Maybe I'm mistaken on energy cost here. There's a constant raincloud that follows me around regarding limits, and it would be nice to shake that.
I've been able to accomplish incredible feats (for myself) since GPT-4, so model intelligence is secondary.
Difficulty settings, though. He mentions them only briefly (in this incredible article).
Normal varies so much.
As a "cozy" gamer, I want the standard setting to be something I can play without having to switch my context to to the internet for help or a guide. This was one of many triumps of Baldur's Gate 3: the difficulty settings make sense in how they translate to gameplay, and the default is fun.
What is ‘normal’ is unfortunately subjective and can mean a lot of different things to different people. Also often what is listed as ’hard’ is often normal, because most people will see ‘normal’ and decide they’re better than that and have a miserable old time.
This reminds me of UX. Seems like it could be a subdomain.
I think I disagree with your basic point, though what you say about normal vs. hard is funny. I'm fortunate enough to work with a UI/UX pro, and these things have right answers; they're incredibly obvious after they've been explained to you.
There's nothing wrong with opinionated design. The dev has set the bar this high and chosen this thing to represent difficulty levels, either you like it or you don't. Catering to everyone is impossible.
There are definitely patterns you can use against the scrapers. This maintainer just didn't have time for it, which is understandable.
We direct scraper traffic to a bot-specific server using Cloudflare's load balancer, slowly analyzing traffic and adding conditions one at a time. No accidental scraper DDoS in a long time.
Most scrapers are relatively honest in some way shape or form.
>We direct scraper traffic to a bot-specific server using Cloudflare's load balancer, slowly analyzing traffic and adding conditions one at a time. No accidental scraper DDoS in a long time.
What's the point of this compared to letting cloudflare handle everything automagically? Presumably whatever heuristics they come up with are going to be better than you can, given limited time and budget?
One, their functionality is bad, two, we don't want to block robot traffic. We're redicting it to a separate sever so that overly-large waves don't bring down our main servers. We definitely want to be scraped.
To your point: I think you're simply mistaken that they offer a good scraper-detection solution, but I'm all ears.
What kind of uptime/expectations/etc. are you working with?
Scraper "attacks" don't take down our robot-specific server very often; it's safe for us to take heavy-handed approaches that sometimes redirect users there. 99% (made-up high number) of the time, the misdirected users don't realize anything is amiss.
Start by analyzing your traffic, specifically user agents. Look for "robot" or even "bot" in the user agent and load balance those to a robot-specific server. This can all be done within Cloudflare. The only code is the user agent condition. Note: I'm very open to input here if anyone reading notices that we're shooting ourselves in the feet. Based on our analysis, the remaining traffic is a good picture of our human users.
We have loads of other conditions, mostly balancing specific IP ranges for entities when we know exactly who they are, but this is a good start.
There's a well-known book that labels programmers as a specific type of pointless job. "Duct tapers" is the category. Also task masters, who would have a foot under the software development umbrella, have space in the book.
We are socially punished for our extremely cushy jobs
SWE has negative social value. Saying you’re a SWE or god forbid anything in AI in a dating/courtship context is basically suicide.
We are paid so well as compensation for debasing ourselves socially. A lot of normies intuitively understand the concepts in that book even without reading it and either see you as evil or a grifter, maybe both, when you say you work in tech/AI.
A lot of people are going to have extreme schadenfreud as they watch tech workers take L after L. They really hate us, they want us bullied or dead or wishing we were.
Still, it was totally worth it because the blue collar pricks that dislike tech workers are even worse in so many ways. At least I’m not a shitty construction worker responsible for contributing to the pathetic state that our housing industry is in.
I've noticed or experienced absolutely none of this. The closest thing I can relate to is that I operate on a different intellectual plane from some of my blue-collar friends. This causes a divide and probably limits intimacy, but does not result in negative relationships.
Regarding the dating world, it impresses people that I'm an SWE. My role is a boon, maybe because it signals intelligence; I'm not sure.
Strongly disagree here. Would encourage you to try to reframe some of that. Sorry if that comes across as patronizing.
This hasn’t been true for me. Not only are the majority of software engineers I know married but also looking at the marriage rates in high-income in the Bay Area, it’s quite high, so I don’t think it’s specific to my group.
There are angry people on the Internet but real life has rarely reflected them.
It sounds like you are describing a problem with the San Francisco dating scene, which does relate to a small subset of the SWE experience, but hardly covers anything close to the totality of being an SWE.
Is it just possible that your dating problems come from somewhere else? I personally haven't experienced the negative social consequences you're describing, but I'm also not dating in SF.
Well, I certainly was not trying to 'gaslight' you considering I repeatedly anchored my view in "for me" and "engineers I know" and then used a statistic to say that my experience seems pretty standard.
To gaslight you would be to try to convince you that your experience is not what it was. I have no doubt that one's social context determines the outcomes here a lot.
That has not been my experience at all. Usually people aren't interested in the career as a conversation topic ("Oh I don't understand anything about computers! Anyway,") but I've never seen anything like what you're describing.
Maybe AI people specifically get that kind of reaction, but that's a pretty hot topic at the moment.
I haven't found that to be true at all. So I suppose there's a personal component to it and your observation doesn't apply universally? If so, though, that's possibly good news: it means there may be factors that are yours to evolve for better prospects.
There isn’t a word in the comment that I can relate to. Might be a US thing, I’m in Europe.
My [very normal although otherworldly beautiful] wife thinks my job is interesting and talks about me with pride.
When I tell people that I work in IT, they almost never think of FAANG, because these companies aren’t really considered that interesting or important over here. I think it’s uniquely a US thing to conflate “IT” with “SV sociopaths”.
I host a webserver for a living, so I might be too far removed from the problem; I don't see anything that 1 minute of effort as part of a less-than-10-minute session with an agentic AI tool can't solve safely. A decent README and project structure is all Codex/CC/Pi needs. I mean this even for the least-technical person who would be self-hosting something.
I guess that breaks the plug-and-play nature, but you can't expect something internet-facing to be plug-and-play. (Maybe that's the real travesty here.)
The mushroom smell isn't from either the substrate or respiration. That distinct odor is 1-octen-3-ol. Biochemists call it "mushroom alcohol." It's caused by enzymatic breakdown of their cell walls, and it thought to be related to signalling.
I doubt it would be strongly present here. The article says the mycelium are close to dormant.
You can actually purchase mushroom alcohol commercially as a food additive.
I've done cultures on agar agar and mycelium definitely does have a distinctive smell. To me it's reminiscent to the damp smell of a concrete basement, though less stale and unpleasant.
I've got some education in materials engineering; it'd be trivial to drop a curve (line) for optimizing the language selection, and Python obviously comes out on top.
The author doesn't even mention it. That discredits the whole article as far as I'm concerned.