> I wouldn't dislike vim's modes so much if it just had one combination insert/append mode that worked like every other editor out there (including a couple other modal editors I've used), but even after adding various hacks to my vimrc to help unify the two modes, I still stumble over the behavior differences in other places.
To be fair, for most values of "every other editor out there," they came after vi (if not after vim), so it's not like vi was discarding existing wisdom.
Actually, there are a number of full-screen editors that pre-dated vi. They were for mainframe operating systems, or were confined to some university or other, or were commercial products for something like CP/M made by some tiny company somewhere, and are largely forgotten; with the last magtapes or floppy discs that had copies of them long since thrown away. Unix and vi, and what escaped UCB, got remembered. But there was other stuff around.
Certainly! I was intentionally hedging my bets with 'most' in "for most values of 'every other editor out there.'" I'd still argue that, for very large values of 'most,' most editors in widespread use today came after vi.
For sure, I'm saying that vi stuck with its design rather than follow the trend of other modal editors that converged on one insert mode, and so did its follow-ups like vim.
I just tried out helix and I'm really liking the features like its single insert mode. Still taking some getting used to, since it's selection-first, not command-first, so `dd` just deletes two chars and not the line. And shift-V doesn't select lines... grr.
> This starts to break down in college when the professors often at best only slightly ahead. (they have more knowledge and experience - but in a slightly different area and so it isn't relevant to the depth of whatever is under consideration)
I can't speak to the humanities, but this estimation is just not true at most universities in the sciences. (EDIT: As cycomanic emphasizes below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477683), the part of the original comment pertaining to graduate education is more reasonable. I am speaking here only of undergraduate education.)
It certainly is true in physics and engineering that a PhD student at least half way through their PhD should know more than there supervisor about their topic (and usually much earlier). Even a Masters thesis project student should understand the intricacies of their project better than their supervisor. I'm speaking as someone who has supervised a significant number of both PhD and Masters students.
The original post said “in college”. It might be true for PhD candidates halfway through their program, but that’s like 0.5% of college students. The vast majority of students are leagues behind their instructors in domain knowledge.
I wouldn't say leagues behind, but otherwise I think we are on the same page, though I guess I worded it wrong. It is common for a couple students in any class to know more than the instructor in some niche part of the field even though the instructor has much more knowledge overall.
Yes, I intentionally left out the next part of the quote about graduate school, since that seems more accurate. I was disputing only the part that I took to be pertaining to undergraduate education. The full quote is:
> This starts to break down in college when the professors often at best only slightly ahead. (they have more knowledge and experience - but in a slightly different area and so it isn't relevant to the depth of whatever is under consideration) Grad school is about advancing the state of the art - if you don't know more than your professor you are doing it wrong.
Ah apologies, that's what I get for skim reading and kneejerk replying. I completely agree with you, undergrads are highly unlikely to know more about a subject than their professor (obviously there can always be exceptions).
> Many people would feel safer in Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore than in the USA. Better housing and health policy, less graffiti and street violence.
Of all the things wrong with the USA, when picking just two, it seems strange for one of them to be graffiti. I have lived in the USA all my life, in some more and some less urban areas, and even from the people most afraid of cities I have never heard graffiti mentioned as a serious worry or complaint.
Eh, you're right. It's just a bugbear for me, tagging and social cohesion decline feels like a parallel, but it may be my projection. I'm in Crete right now and it's decaying beauty, no money for streetscape fixes, bad pavements and unending dissatisfaction written all over the marble walls.
I may be displaying my age. Feeling safe equates to being on the street, and unafraid. The tagging isn't the problem the social conditions which ignore it, maybe are.
In some places, graffiti means "gang activity" as local gangs tag their turf. If you are from such place, then it kinda makes sense to be afraid of graffity.
But where I am from, there are two kinds of graffity:
- Cool elaborate pictures, usually in "legal zones" walls city dedicated to it. They take time to create, hence preference for legal place and are made by artists.
- Less cool stuff created by skinny "edgy" teenagers, who are jerks to the owners, but also completely harmless.
Completely harmless needs contextualising. In gross sense, no: damage to property is not harmless, it has consequences, costs. In personal safety terms sure tagging isn't mugging.
If you're down Proudhon's "all property is theft" then graffiti is a kind of tragedy of the commons. Go ahead. Graffiti the Uffitzi, Nelson's column, the Plaka. Stick it to the man!
My point was that there is nothing to fear of. And yes, I said there that they are jerks to owner. Which they are. But, it is not putting anyone in any kind of danger and there is no reason to be scared.
> If you're down Proudhon's "all property is theft" then graffiti is a kind of tragedy of the commons. Go ahead. Graffiti the Uffitzi, Nelson's column, the Plaka. Stick it to the man!
I honestly don't get what are you on about here. I never seen anyone interpret graffiti as some kind of political statement, unless it is swastika or some such. I genuinely doubt any teenager doing graffiti has any kind of idea about any of those names.
An immense amount of graffiti in Europe is overtly political. And in south America. I know from personal experience. Crete is a hotbed of radicalism and has a massive amount of antizionist graffiti. South America has anti junta statements and support for shining path.
I'm with you. Graffiti is property destruction. It shows lack of respect for property rights. Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property.
> Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property.
I think that this sounds good and is a sensible hypothesis, but it's far from clear to me that the corollary of prosperity for those without property is true in practice.
> Why? Do the riches cities have the poorest poor or is it generally the richest cities have the both the richest poor and the most support for them.
I don't know. Do you? If the latter answer is correct and it's backed up by quantitative evidence, then I guess that I have to accept at least some form of the corollary, although there are still games that one can play with measurement (for example, it's possible that being numerically richer in those richer settings can still result in poorer overall quality of life).
From that perspective, the problems are lawlessness and petty crime, not the graffiti. I would not feel safer in a place just because it had reduced the symptoms of those things, unless it had also reduced those things themselves, in which case the latter is the accomplishment.
> LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.
How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged? If by other LLMs, then we run into a problem of infinite descent. If by humans, then you'd need some way to motivate expert or semi-expert humans (so that their ratings are themselves correct) to participate in a massive project of evaluating the correctness of a constant stream of content from content-generators that never sleep.
> How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged?
By LLMs. I think it's possible for agents to infer whether the user was satisfied or not, at least with my usage pattern.
For example if I end the discussion it's a good sign. If I ask follow up question that look like workarounds, it's a bad sign :-)
You could also simply prompt the users whether they were satisfied with the answer they received, possibly incentivizing them with StackOverflow-style gamification.
I think it probably depends on what communities you frequent. I am not familiar with the culture at stats.SE, but math.SE has a (semi-?) explicit mission of being more friendly to beginners than MO. I think that many communities aren't so friendly, and don't have beginner-friendly analogues.
> Why are we having computer programs generate source code in the first place? Shouldn't they generate something lower level, like an AST or some computational graph or something? Source code is made to be written and read by humans, and is then translated into machine code via various transformations. In theory a program should look the same to a computer no matter which language it started out as.
Presumably because LLMs are trained on corpora read, and for now still probably mostly written, by humans, rather than on corpora consisting mostly of ASTs or graphs?
> The cosmic ray hypothesis has been dominant for a few years now.
> This magazine…
I think saying "This magazine…" as if the flaws of Quanta are well understood and agreed may need additional elaboration. If you mean that experts have known this—well, the role of Quanta is to disseminate and explain expert research to scientifically literate non-experts; it is not meant to be distributing the latest research itself.
> the role of Quanta is to disseminate and explain expert research to scientifically literate non-experts; it is not meant to be distributing the latest research itself
Quanta articles are invariably horribly written, horribly explained, and constantly do this thing whether they simultaneously are pretentious and over complicate things while also belabouring simple, elementary concepts. Essentially it’s the worst of every world.
And that’s to say nothing about how they click bait everything.
Not the guy you’re responding to but Quanta articles are invariably horribly written, horribly explained, and constantly do this thing whether they simultaneously are pretentious and over complicate things while also belabouring simple, elementary concepts. Essentially it’s the worst of every world.
To be fair, for most values of "every other editor out there," they came after vi (if not after vim), so it's not like vi was discarding existing wisdom.
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