Django Wexler

Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:25 UTC

No spoilers, but it definitely returns

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:24 UTC

Nice! Hope it scratches the isekai itch =)

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 00:25 UTC

Yay!

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 21:11 UTC

Hmm I should send you DARK LORD, our heroine (after a millennium in a time loop trying to save humanity) joins the monsters who are trying to wipe out an invasive species...

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:51 UTC

I like the former because we don't have another short construction that carries the connotation of estimate or plan, "has been analyzed and will probably cost"

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:50 UTC

The latter is a mistake in the usual "irregular to standard" mode we often associate with little kids -- "I runned", "we goed", etc. They assume English is logical and have to be taught that it's crazy.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:45 UTC

"Costed" does have a pretty standard usage already in the sense of "estimated the cost of", as in "The accountants costed the project at $9 million."

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:43 UTC

I will always support language changes making English *more* regular, our irregular verbs are nonsense.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 02:16 UTC

Hahaha, nice

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 21:15 UTC

The chief lesson I learned from working in documentation is that to a first approximation, *nobody ever reads anything.* Not just docs but also warnings in giant flashing red letters.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 21:14 UTC

Back when I was in docs we were forbidden from doing certain things in sample code, like make up default login credentials, because no matter how much we told people not to they'd just get copied into production code and become security holes.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 21:12 UTC

Yeah the problem is this is presented like an example in a textbook, but people are just copying it over verbatim.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 20:44 UTC

Now you know who to blame when Word opening a 100,000 word doc takes, not twice as long as a 50,000 word doc, but ten times as long.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 20:41 UTC

(It actually tells you this if you ask about performance!)

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 20:40 UTC

Note that ChatGPT, asked to write its own StrCat and concatenate some strings, *makes exactly this twenty year old mistake*! This code will run, but silently perform far worse than it should. Again, for a one-off, who cares? But better hope it's not deep in some core loop...

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 20:31 UTC

gah one score

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 20:31 UTC

It's one thing to hand that off to a compiler that's been optimized and so on to produce fast code; it's quite another to hand it to ChatGPT, because why would it know how to produce fast code? That's not something tagged in the training set.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 20:29 UTC

-> because performance is a thing that's often baked in at the lower levels by the choices made by lower-level devs. (In the modern world, less by literally writing C code and more by choosing the right tools for a given task rather then the most familiar/easiest.)

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 20:28 UTC

That post, incidentally, gets at some of the reasons why the idea of AI coding in any serious capacity gives me hives. It's fine for like one-off scripting or toys, if it makes mistakes then you just debug it. But for a real application that needs to be performant its a nightmare ->

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 20:26 UTC

If you're curious what a Shlemiel the Painter algorithm is, I learned the term from this Joel Spolsky post lo these two score and three years past. Basically it means any algorithm that clearly should be O(n) but in practice is inexplicably O(N^2).

www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/b...

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 20:09 UTC

The problem is that's not enough if the doc goes through someone ELSE who hasn't

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 17:39 UTC

Finally, after an hour

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 17:37 UTC

Made worse by the fact that I only do this every six months or so, so every piece of software at every step needs to update itself

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 17:35 UTC

In sum, the operation of "load several sets of commentary into a file on my notebook so I can read through them" has taken me most of the morning. Sadly I've come to consider that about par for the course

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 17:30 UTC

This is all enhanced by the fact that Word is not actually designed for editing novels and is full of "Shlemiel the painter" algorithms so when the doc gets really long it gets slower and slower and sometimes crashes

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 17:25 UTC

I feel like Word should at least warn you if its about to make thousands of changes for no reason

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 17:24 UTC

And it does this automatically, by default. So if I write without smart quotes, and someone marks up the doc in a computer that DOES use them, EVERY SINGLE QUOTE gets marked as a "change" in a way that's very hard to filter out

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 17:23 UTC

In particular, the fact that MS Word doesn't just DISPLAY smart quotes like anyone halfway sensible would do, but actually replaces the quote characters with new characters

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 17:21 UTC

A lot of things competing for "worst thing in the world" right now, but I would like to nominate "smart quotes" as being in the running

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 19:52 UTC

I already ship the two cyberpunk girls

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 03:27 UTC

Thanks so much =)

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 02:59 UTC

It's true! A duology. Second one will get out next year.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 01:40 UTC

I just think that the UK shares the flaw you point out with the US -- it's an old hodge-podge of a system that's hard to meaningfully change.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 01:39 UTC

I mean, that's great! But the party leaders system makes it impossible to get rid of people; imagine if Democrats winning in 2008 meant that Bill Clinton was back. And the FPTP-by-district arrangement is bonkers.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 00:10 UTC

Dunno about UNIQUELY, I think the UK is even worse

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 00:07 UTC

Yes! It's got surprisingly little actual poker. So much fun

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 22:12 UTC

Oof! No, she's just hoarse from a little cold.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 21:57 UTC

The baby has a cold that has lowered her voice by an octave, and the effect is quite distressing

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 20:28 UTC

But the greatness of these stories isn't in the things that *happen* in them, is what I'm saying. The language IS the greatness. It's like saying the Mona Lisa is great because it's a picture of a lady. The plots in Shakespeare aren't anything special or even particularly original, f.e.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 19:45 UTC

But like ... why? To what end? This is art, not important facts. Why have simplified classics instead of just other books written at the appropriate level?

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 19:29 UTC

Yeah, the problem is that once it acquires that meaning it's self-reinforcing. I don't put one on MY car because I don't want people to think I'm THAT guy.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 18:35 UTC

I'm also boycotting Olympic swimming, over let's say corn subsidies

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 18:32 UTC

Breaking: I also am boycotting, under no circumstances will I appear on the BBC and answer questions about politics

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 18:31 UTC

(Remember kids, every query to the free version of ChatGPT is another few cents toward bankrupting Sam Altman)

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 18:30 UTC

I was looking for an AI anime Mona Lisa to make a joke about reducing all great art to sludge, but ChatGPT gave me this instead. First response: "Sure, here it is!" *nothing* Try again: "Oh right, I can't do that! Have you tried Googling for it?"

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 18:00 UTC

I'm Ishy. I'm gonna sail on a boat a little, it helps when I get mad.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 17:57 UTC

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." -> "Things were kind of meh."

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 17:52 UTC

But making Gatsby the example shows, again, the problem with making the focus of English education be on *learning the canon* instead of interpretation and argument. I'm begging teachers to do their "Intro to Critical Analysis" with Goosebumps and James Patterson.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 17:50 UTC

Though I wonder whether the AI is up to translating postmodern analysis or medical jargon.

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Django Wexler @djangowexler.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 17:49 UTC

I mean realistically this is for students cheating on readings. And there are times when it might be genuinely useful -- I have read some dense-ass academic prose that could do with being run through an "actual English" translator.

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