spicy noodles

It took maybe 10 minutes or so for a 256 GB hard drive for me, if I remember correctly.

That was an SSD, though, so yeah, mileage would definitely vary on an HDD.

Hmm, what does that full format do? Write zeros over everything?

Personally, I would run shred on the root filesystem. It’s a tool specifically intended for properly deleting data (overwrites it with random data multiple times).

I have my repos on Codeberg and one of the ‘disadvantages’ is that, well, it’s a non-profit, so I genuinely don’t want to waste their resources.
They ask you to only host open-source repos there, meaning that using it for backups of shitty personal projects, even if I would throw in an open-source license, is just out of the question for me.

And that has weirdly been a blessing in disguise. Like, if it’s not useful for humanity to see, do I really care to keep it around forever?

And I’ve had three projects now where I felt an obligation to push them over the finish line of actually making them a useful open-source project. Which had me iron out some of the usability shortcuts I took, made me learn a good amount of code quality stuff and of course, just feels good to complete.

I guess, the real question is: Could we be using (simplistic) LLMs on a phone for predictive text?

There’s some LLMs that can be run offline and which maybe wouldn’t use enormous amounts of battery. But I don’t know how good the quality of those is…

You’re in the No Stupid Questions community. Think about rule 7 in particular.

Normally, I would reply to the guy, because, you know, he’s a human being, but there’s so many replies, I doubt, he can actually read all of them and potentially someone else has already made that point.

Anyways, I feel like something he kind of misses here is that many of us do it from a heartfelt place. Like, we’re all techies. We’ve all used commercial software to a point where we’ve grown so frustrated with it that we decided it is a waste of time.

So, it’s not us saying “Why don’t you go and just have more time/money?”.
Rather, it’s us saying “This thing is wasting your time? Here is a solution that I felt wasted less time in the long run.”.

Yes, sometimes that does miss the mark, because not every complaint is looking for a solution. Or because we may be frustrated with restrictions of commercial software, which are not a problem for less techy people. Or even because we’re embedded in this tech world and are hoping to make it a better place, which someone just quickly visiting may not care about.

But other times, I do just happen to know a lot about technology and a non-techy genuinely did not know about the solution I suggested and is actually really appreciative of me bringing it up. It does happen. And it’s not easy to discern who would appreciate a suggestion and who won’t.

And you wouldn’t have to reverse causality to travel backwards in time. You would just have to travel faster than the speed of light.

If you can travel faster than the speed of light then you can arrive at a destination before you left.

I know practically nothing about all the wormhole theories, because I just don’t consider them relevant, but from a logical standpoint, the above does not feel correct to me.

The thing is, you would arrive at your destination before the light would arrive there from where you started. So, you could take out your telescope and potentially watch your own launch.

But that doesn’t actually put you into the past. It just looks like it when looking into the direction you came from. Light from the other direction will look like you’ve fast-forwarded through time, because you now get more recent imagery.

I don’t have another explanation why someone might think, this might put you into the past…

Hmm, but why do you think these things haven’t occurred yet?

As far as I can tell, the speed of causality means things can have occurred in a certain location in the universe, but it takes time until the effects have permeated into the rest of the universe.

So, it’s like a shockwave from an explosion. The explosion happens, but it takes a few seconds until you feel the shockwave.
Well, with the difference that you can see an explosion before the shockwave. When we’re at the speed of causality, literally no evidence will have arrived in your position until it does.

So, one could go meta-philosophical with basically “If a tree falls in a forest and no one has heard it yet, did it actually already happen?”, but yeah, I don’t think that’s terribly useful here.

And well, if we treat it like a shockwave, let’s say you detonate some TNT and step through a wormhole to somewhere 20 km away. You would know that the shockwave will arrive soon, but does that matter? The shockwave will still just continue pushing on.

And I guess, crucially, it did already happen, so you can’t do the usual time travel paradox of preventing that it would happen.

That’s actually not as obvious as it might sound. The thing is, as far as we know, light seems to have no mass¹. No mass means no inertia. So, if it accelerates at all, it should immediately be at infinite speed. But for some reason, it actually doesn’t go faster than what we typically call the speed of light. And we assume, that’s the case, because that’s actually the speed of causality.

So, it’s reversed. It’s not that light is just the fastest thing and as a consequence of that, nothing can be transmitted faster. No, it’s actually that there appears to be a genuine universal speed limit and light would be going faster, if it could.

¹) Light is still affected by gravity, e.g. can’t escape from black holes. We do assume that gravity is just a ‘bend in spacetime’ because of that, meaning even any massless thing are affected by it, but yeah, we’re still struggling to understand what mass actually is then.

Well, I’m going to give the party-pooper response, even though science fiction and pop-science love to fantasize differently:

The past and the future are theoretical concepts. They don’t actually exist in the sense that you can ‘send’ something to them.
Obviously, you can write data to a hard drive and then read it out after a week has passed, but presumably that is not what you had in mind.

But that’s also the essence of the time travel that the theory of general relativity allows. You can travel forwards more slowly along the time axis by travelling more quickly on the space axis (close to the speed of light), which means you might just need to spend 5 perceived years to end up in the year 2200.
Similarly, you could take a hard drive onto this journey and it wouldn’t have fallen apart in that time.

Travelling back in time makes no sense in general relativity. You would need to reverse causality for that, which is on an entirely different level from merely slowing causality down.

General relativity would mathematically allow for the existence of wormholes, but that’s pushing the theory to extremes where it might simply not be applicable to reality anymore. We certainly have no actual evidence for wormholes.

So, what’s the yellow stuff for? To keep the bags from sticking together?

Yeah, and from what I understand, learning the language itself isn’t the hard part. It actually has rather few concepts. What’s difficult, is learning how to program a computer correctly without all the abstractions and safety measures that modern languages provide.

Even structured programming had to be added to COBOL in a later revision. That’s if/else, loops and similar.

I don’t think, the human brain is special either, but we are still two big steps ahead IMHO:

• We can perceive what we’ve generated, to judge whether it’s good or bad.
• We perceive many, many inputs throughout our lives. Not just text, visuals, audio, but also taste, smell, touch and more. To be simultaneously creative and relatable to humans, AIs would need to be equipped with these concepts and would need to be given ‘memories’, which are fleshed out with all these kinds of input.

I find it cool to see a street which isn’t lined with parking cars. It’s a rare sight here and always feels rather depressing, because I don’t even know where kinds could play ball around here…

I genuinely just thought that’s what it was. I had not heard of them rebranding…

Very weird example to me, with the LLM chatbot video. Like, yeah, interacting with an LLM can be interesting, but you’re not going to learn anything meaningful about it.

And when I jumped into the middle of the video, that looked pretty much exactly as I expected, too. The guy was tweaking the pre-query and then chatting with the chatbot to see how it turned out. So, they didn’t do/learn much coding either.

There is all that surrounding technology, which you are inevitably going to learn something about, but ultimately this is what I find so tiring about LLMs. I can learn something about the surrounding technology and tackle a topic which is meaningfully interesting at the same time. Unless I had a problem which a custom adaptation of an LLM could solve, why would I choose to play with it?

Yeah, it’s especially bad, when a library doesn’t provide type hints itself. It can be comically difficult to find out what the return type of a function is, because every if-else-branch might have a different return value, so you may need to read the function body in full to figure out what the type might be.

Add to that, that lots of the tooling around type hints isn’t as fleshed out / useful as it is in fully typed languages and I can definitely understand why someone might not immediately feel like it’s a valuable use of their time.

I imagine what they mean is e.g. that TypeScript can tell you something is a Date, but it doesn’t attempt to fix some of the confusing, quirky behaviour with that: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date#interpretation_of_two-digit_years

So, yes, it’s generally better than JS, but it doesn’t actually make it good/attractive, if you’re used to the sanity of backend languages. It very much feels like lipstick on a pig.

Hmm, interesting. Here in Germany, power companies are partially privatized and I always thought, whomever came up with that nonsense took inspiration from the turbo-capitalism in the USA. Apparently not.

Do they need to be profitable, though, in your model? It mostly sounds like a traditional public service, where the government could just tell them to use the money for solar…