I mean… GitHub's uptime story has been getting worse…
I hear you and you're right that Codeberg has some struggles. If anyone needs to host critical infra, you're better off self-hosting a Forgejo instance. For personal stuff? Codeberg is more than good enough.
For the doubters replying here, Codeberg really is on average faster than GitHub. It's great. Objective measurements here: https://forgeperf.org/
Codeberg does suffer from the occasional DDOS attack—it doesn't have the resources that GH has to mitigate these sorts of things. Also, if you're across the pond, then latency can be a bit of an issue. That said, the pages are lighter weight, and on stable but low-bandwith connections, Codeberg loads really quickly and all the regular operations are supper zippy.
What I think after looking at these numbers is that we need to take the nuclear option - a native (no web stack at all) code review client. Seconds (times 100 or so for one larger review) are not in any way an acceptable order of magnitude to discuss performance of a front-end for editing tens of kilobytes of text. And the slow, annoying click orgy to fold out more common code, a misfeature needed just to work around loading syntax-highlighted text being insanely slow. Git is very fast, text editing is very fast, bullshit frameworks are slow.
I don't think that it would take great contortions to implement a HTML + JS frontend that's an order of magnitude faster than the current crapola, but in practice it... just doesn't seem to happen.
> “All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because gen AI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,” Joe Liemandt, Alpha School’s “principal” and the founder of Trilogy, the company that owns many of the apps used by Alpha School, said in a podcast interview published last year.
I wonder if this fellow has ever read a serious book. I'm skeptical.
I'm highly skeptical of someone bragging about barely reading a book year to then say AI is going to disrupt education as an authoritative voice. Do you honestly know any teachers or have children in public education? These takes are truly baffling. It's right up there with believing InfoWars as sound politics.
edit: to try and sound "nicer," would anyone seriously take any advice about software engineering from someone who uses a WYSIWYG editor? That's how the above comment reads.
>and it is infinitely better than a book or a teacher.
why do you think that?
>The student could move at his/her own pace and can ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.
You're assuming there's a driven student who already knows what they wish to pursue. Even in college I wasn't entirely sure what domain in tech I wanted to explore.
You're also assuming or dismissing the other factors a teacher offers. Networks, parental guidance, wisdom of how to navigate through college or a job market, or simply as emotional pillar in ways parents can't always be.
Most of all, teachers teach you to understand bias and expand your viewpoints past any one given source. That's why I read the parental review of this school on top of this piece. It seems against current coporate interests to offer that. There's no one clear answer to everything out there, but AI wants it to appear as so.
> Around 20 non-fiction and technical books in about 15 years
That's not lot, mate. Maybe more than the average American unfortunately, but I consider a year where I get through 2–3 books a slow one. And that's just reading I do outside of my job. What matters, of course, is both the quality and quantity of what you read. The short of it is, your attempt at building your ethos has fallen pretty flat here.
> AI is going to disrupt the whole academia [sic]
Yes, it has and it continues to. I'm not arguing against that. Joe Liemandt said that "all educational content is obsolete", which presumably includes not only textbooks like SICP or Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation (just listing some CS textbooks because I'm in CS) but also great works of literature and philosophy that are important texts like The Odyssey or A Tale of Two Cities. If he meant to exclude such texts from the umbrella of "all educational content", well, then that's telling too. :)
> …it is infinitely better than a book or a teacher.
Maybe for someone who struggles with literacy or who hasn't had the pleasure of a good teacher. If you really believe this I'd like to see you try to substantiate your claim.
> The student could move at his/her own pace…
The article is about a grade school kids who, most of the time, need a little pushing to reach their full potential.
> …ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.
… you're saying that LLMs are better than teachers because you can ask LLMs questions and not teachers?! Also, asking questions isn't the only component of learning. A good teacher will know when to not answer a question (or ask one!) and let the student stew and think about it.
I'm not saying AI can help with education. It can—it helps me!—but no hallucinating stochastic machine will have the human insight that a good teacher has. It's not a replacement.
I did. You just don’t read enough to be able to understand. Up the count a little this year since there’s still a lot of time and you might reach comprehension.
I still find books valuable because they give you a structure and physical location to anchor learning. They give you an overview of the whole topic you're interested in.
Whenever I need to learn a new topic I always try to buy a book on the subject because it so much faster to have someone do the scaffolding for you than trying to be 'self-directed' about it. It also give some confidence that you aren't leaving big holes in your understanding.
What? The textbook+teacher combo literally provides exactly that.
The textbook allows you to move at your own pace, acting as a structured reference and practice tool that you can review endlessly outside of class.
And the teacher can answer any questions you've confirmed you're not able to resolve on your own with the textbook. Some in class, some during office hours/before or after class, and some via email.
I have long conversation threads on highly specialized topics and I’ve never found learning about something so easy. He’s right but it has to not be self directed in some way because that takes motivation and you cant expect that from every student.
> I need to know there was intention behind it. That someone wanted to get their thoughts out and did so, deliberately, rather than chucking a bullet list at an AI to expand.
> Then again, if this is the case, why would you risk your own reputation to vouch for anyone anyway.
Good reason to be careful. Maybe there's a bit of an upside to: if you vouch for someone who does good work, then you get a little boost too. It's how personal relationships work anyway.
----------
I'm pretty skeptical of all things cryptocurrency, but I've wondered if something like this would be an actually good use case of blockchain tech…
> I'm pretty skeptical of all things cryptocurrency, but I've wondered if something like this would be an actually good use case of blockchain tech…
So the really funny thing here is the first bitcoin exchange had a Web of Trust system, and while it had it's flaws IT WORKED PRETTY WELL. It used GPG and later on bitcoin signatures. Nobody talks about it unless they were there but the system is still online. Keep in mind, this was used before centralized exchanges and regulation. It did not use a blockchain to store ratings.
As a new trader, you basically could not do trades in their OTC channel without going through traders that specialized in new people coming in. Sock accounts could rate each other, but when you checked to see if one of those scammers were trustworthy, they would have no level-2 trust since none of the regular traders had positive ratings of them.
If we want to make it extremely complex, wasteful, and unusable for 99% of people, then sure, put it on the blockchain. Then we can write tooling and agents in Rust with sandboxes created via Nix to have LLMs maintain the web of trust by writing Haskell and OCaml.
A 100% useful heuristic for "is blockchain useful here" is to understand that blockchains can be completely replaced, at much lower cost, with a database hosted by a trusted party.
If there is literally anyone that can be (or at least must be) trusted by all potential users of a system, then it's better to just use a database controlled by that person/entity. That's why blockchain-based solutions never pan out when it comes to interacting with the real world: In real life, there is a ton of trust required to do anything.
I'm unconvinced, to my possibly-undercaffeinated mind, the string of 3 posts reads like this:
- a problem already solved in TFA (you vouching for someone eventually denounced doesn't prevent you from being denounced, you can totally do it)
- a per-repo, or worse, global, blockchain to solve incrementing and decrementing integers (vouch vs. denounce)
- a lack of understanding that automated global scoring systems are an abuse vector and something people will avoid. (c.f. Black Mirror and social credit scores in China)
I don't think that trust is easily transferable between projects, and tracking "karma" or "reputation" as a simple number in this file would be technically easy. But how much should the "karma" value change form different actions? It's really hard to formalize efficiently. The web of trust, with all intricacies, in small communities fits well into participants' heads. This tool is definitely for reasonably small "core" communities handling a larger stream of drive-by / infrequent contributors.
> I don't think that trust is easily transferable between projects
Not easily, but I could imagine a project deciding to trust (to some degree) people vouched for by another project whose judgement they trust. Or, conversely, denouncing those endorsed by a project whose judgement they don't trust.
In general, it seems like a web of trust could cross projects in various ways.
Ethos is already building something similar, but starting with a focus on reputation within the crypto ecosystem (which I think most can agree is an understandable place to begin)
Reminds me of the reputation system that the ITA in Anathem by Neal Stephenson seem to have. One character (Sammann) needs access to essentially a private BBS and has to get validated.
“After we left Samble I began trying to obtain access to certain reticules,” Sammann explained. “Normally these would have been closed to me, but I thought I might be able to get in if I explained what I was doing. It took a little while for my request to be considered. The people who control these were probably searching the Reticulum to obtain corroboration for my story.”
“How would that work?” I asked.
Sammann was not happy that I’d inquired. Maybe he was tired of explaining such things to me; or maybe he still wished to preserve a little bit of respect for the Discipline that we had so flagrantly been violating. “Let’s suppose there’s a speelycaptor at the mess hall in that hellhole town where we bought snow tires.”
“Norslof,” I said.
“Whatever. This speelycaptor is there as a security measure. It sees us walking to the till to pay for our terrible food. That information goes on some reticule or other. Someone who studies the images can see that I was there on such-and-such a date with three other people. Then they can use other such techniques to figure out who those people are. One turns out to be Fraa Erasmas from Saunt Edhar. Thus the story I’m telling is corroborated.”
“Okay, but how—”
“Never mind.” Then, as if he’d grown weary of using that phrase, he caught himself short, closed his eyes for a moment, and tried again. “If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.”
“Asamocra?”
“Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction. Don’t even bother trying to parse that. The acronym is pre-Reconstitution. There hasn’t been a true asamocra for 3600 years. Instead we do other things that serve the same purpose and we call them by the old name. In most cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase transition to occur in the reputon glass—never mind—and another day after that to make sure you aren’t just being spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation. The point being, I was not granted the access I wanted until recently.” He smiled and a hunk of ice fell off his whiskers and landed on the control panel of his jeejah. “I was going to say ‘until today’ but this damned day never ends.”
“Fine. I don’t really understand anything you said but maybe we can save that for later.”
“That would be good. The point is that I was trying to get information about that rocket launch you glimpsed on the speely.”*
Oh for sure. To be fair, that excerpt I posted is probably the worst in the entire book since Sammann is explaining something using a bunch of ITA ~~jargon~~ bulshytt and it’s meant to be incomprehensible to even the POV character Erasmas.
Xkcd 483 is directly referencing Anathem so that should be unsurprising but I think in both His Dark Materials (e.g. anbaric power) and in Anathem it is in-universe explained. The isomorphism between that world and our world is explicitly relevant to the plot. It’s the obvious foreshadowing for what’s about to happen.
The worlds are similar with different names because they’re parallel universes about to collide.
I wonder how effective that might be as a language-learning tool. Imagine a popular novel in the US market, maybe 80000-100000 words long but whose vocabulary consists of only a few thousand unique words. The first few pages are in English, but as you progress through the book, more and more of the words appear in Chinese or German or whatever the target language is. By the end of the book you are reading the second language, having absorbed it more or less through osmosis.
Someone who reads A Clockwork Orange will unavoidably pick up a few words of vaguely-Russian extraction by the end of it, so maybe it's possible to take advantage of that. The main problem I can see is that the new language's sentence grammar will also have to be blended in, and that won't go as smoothly.
Location: Salt Lake/Utah Valley, Utah
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Possibly
Technologies: Elixir, Ruby, Julia, Haskell, Rust
Résumé: https://lambdaland.org/resume.pdf
Email: mail@wiersdorf.dev
I am a PhD student looking for a summer gig. I don't require benefits—I'm happy to hire on as a contractor. I have worked as a back-end software engineer for a variety of companies throughout my schooling, so I've got the experience of a mid-level engineer. I specialize in building interpreters & compilers and I have experience with formal verification tools and techniques. That said, I won't turn down a job working on the back-end of whatever your SaaS project may be. :)
I hear you and you're right that Codeberg has some struggles. If anyone needs to host critical infra, you're better off self-hosting a Forgejo instance. For personal stuff? Codeberg is more than good enough.
reply