Well you need sleeper trains only for long distances usually. Quite often you can buy more expensive cabin with 1-2 sleeping seats (eg if travelling with a friend/partner). All of Russia is travelling in country via a sleeper train because of distances, slower trains, and sometimes more expensive/less optimal flights (eg a lot of flights are routed via Moscow). So it’s very normalised; I traveled this way since childhood, even going to Ukraine for holidays before the aggression started, and it was pretty fine experience, a bit rough in 90s/00s, but better now.
Geez, what a comment. C is much much more simpler than Rust. You’re not supposed to be spending weeks fighting includes or compiler errors, that means you’re have some very basic misconceptions about the language.
Just read K&R “The C programming language” book.
It’s fairly small and it’s a very good introduction to C.
C syntactically is straight forward, but conceptually may be harder than Rust. You’re exposed to the bare computer (memory management, etc) far more than with a GC language or even Rust arguably, at least for simple programs.
Towards deployment is even harder. You can very easily end up writing exploitable, unsafe code in C.
If I were a Python programmer with little knowledge about how a computer works, I’d much prefer Go or Rust (in that order) to C.
This is true, but when you get something wrong related to the memory model in C, it just says "segfault". Whereas in Rust it will give you a whole explanation for what went wrong and helpful suggestions on how to fix it. Or at the very least it will tell you where the problem is. This is the difference between "simple" and "easy".
That applies only if you take "memory model" to mean modeling the effects of concurrent accesses in multithreaded programs.
But the term could also be used more generally to include stuff like pointer provenance, Rust's "stacked borrows" etc.
In that case, Rust is more complicated than C-as-specified. But C-in-reality is much more complicated, e.g. see https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2263.htm
The model you're referring to, a Memory Ordering Model, is literally the same model as Rust's. The "exception" is an ordering nobody knows how to implement which Rust just doesn't pretend to offer - a distinction which makes no difference.
I do sympathize with the parent: The language itself might not be that difficult but you also have to factor in the entire ecosystem. What's the modern way to a build a GUI application in C? What's the recommended way to build a CLI, short of writing your own arg parser? How do you handle Unicode? How do you manage dependencies, short of vendoring them? Etc.
Errors too. When, inevitably, you make mistakes the C might just compile despite being nonsense, or you might get incomprehensible diagnostics. Rust went out of its way to deliver great results here.
I am not arguing about how good or easy it is to use C in production, I’m merely stating that parent complaints about weeks of insolvable errors and issues with includes screams that he needs to read some good resource like book, because he is definitely misunderstanding something important.
THe thing is, if one is an expert it is incredibly difficult to understand the beginner perspective. Here is one attempt:
C is simpler than Rust, but C is also _much_ simpler than Python. If I solve a problem in Python I have a good standard library of data types, and I use concepts like classes, iterators, generators, closures, etc... constantly. So if I move to Rust, I have access to the similar high-level tools, I just have to learn a few additional concepts for ressource management.
In comaprison, C looks a lot more alien from that perspective. Even starting with including library code from elsewhere.
In my experience among young people sometimes homelessness is also just living with some friends, moving between friends places or some random locations, with most of your stuff being stored somewhere, without having permanent place to stay for long periods of time (like a year), and that’s usually because of affordability and availability.
That works for a bit but eventually friends get sick of it, and if they don't a baby is born and it suddenly becomes real weird and very obvious you are intruding on the baby. There is a timer ticking in this scenario. By the time all your friends have kids the chance you can stay anywhere reaches ~zero.
Problem is that it copies much more work than just harry potter, including yours if you ever shared it (even under copy-left license) and makes money off it.
Not quite that reductive. More of, I thought about what would be the exact page/article that, if it exists, would get me started, and used the description of that as a prompt to the LLM "Learning X for people that know Y". This is especially useful because X is now curated to what you're actually working on and Y is curated to what you already know.
AI encompasses a wide range of algorithms and techniques; not just LLMs or neural nets. Also, it is worth pointing out that the definition of AI has changed drastically over the last few years and narrowed pretty significantly. If you’re viewing the definition from the 80–90’s, most of what we call "automation" today would have been considered AI.
Autopilots were a thing before computers were a thing, you can implement one using mechanics and control theory. So no, traditional autopilots are not AI under any reasonable definition, otherwise every single machine we build would be considered AI as almost all machines has some form of control systems in them, for example is your microwave clock an AI?
So I'd argue any algorithm that comes from control theory is not AI, those are just basic old dumb machines. You can't make planes without control theory, humans can't keep a plane steady without it, so Wrights Brothers adding this to their plane is why they succeeded making a flying machine.
So if autopilots are AI then the Wrights Brothers developed an AI to control their plane. I don't think anyone sees that as AI, not even at the time they did the first flight.
Uh, the bellman equation was first used for control theory and is the foundation of modern reinforcement learning... so wouldn't that imply LLMs "come from" control theory?
Ah yes the mythical strawman definition of AI that you can never seem to pin down, was never rigorous, and never enjoyed wide expert acceptance. It's on par with "well many people used to say, or at least so I've been told, that ...".
That’s the point: AI is a marketing term and always has been. The underlying tech changes with every hype wave.
One of the first humanoid robots was an 18th century clockwork mechanism inside a porcelain doll that autonomously wrote out “Cogito Ergo Sum” in cursive with a pen. It was considered thought provoking at the time because it implied that some day machines could think.
It certainly sees use as an ever shifting marketing term. That does not exclude it from being a useful technical term. Indeed if the misuse of a term by marketers was sufficient to rob a word of meaning then I doubt we'd have any means of communication left.
> It was considered thought provoking at the time because it implied that some day machines could think.
What constitutes "thinking"? That's approximately the same question as what qualifies as AGI. LLMs and RL seem to be the first time humanity has achieved anything that begins to resemble that but clearly both of those come up short ... at least so far.
Meanwhile I'm quite certain that a glorified PID loop (ie autopilot) does not qualify as machine learning (AI if you'd prefer). If someone wants to claim that it does then he's going to need to explain how his definition excludes mechanical clockwork.
What do you think an executing LLM is? It’s basically a glorified PID loop. It isn’t learning anything new. It isn’t thinking about your conversation while you go take a poo.
And I think the point is that the definition doesn’t exclude pure mechanical devices since that’s exactly what a computer is.
To claim that an LLM is equivalent to a PID loop is utterly ridiculous. By that logic a 747 is "basically a glorified lawn mower".
> It isn’t thinking about your conversation while you go take a poo.
The commercial offerings for "reasoning" models can easily run for 10 to 15 minutes before spitting out an answer. As to whether or not what it's doing counts as "thinking" ...
> the definition doesn’t exclude pure mechanical devices since that’s exactly what a computer is.
By the same logic a songbird or even a human is also a mechanical device. What's your point?
I never said anything about excluding mechanical devices. I referred to "mechanical clockwork" meaning a mechanical pocket watch or similar. If the claim is that autopilot qualifies as AI then I want to know how that gets squared with a literal pocket watch not being AI.
> The commercial offerings for "reasoning" models can easily run for 10 to 15 minutes before spitting out an answer. As to whether or not what it's doing counts as "thinking" ...
Tell me you don’t know how AI works without telling me you don’t know how AI works. After it sends you an output, the AI stops doing anything. Your conversation sits resident in ram for a bit, but there is no more processing happening.
It is waiting until you give it feedback... some might say it is a loop... a feedback loop ... that continues until the output has reached the desired state ... kinda sounds familiar ... like a PID loop where the human is the controller...
>To claim that an LLM is equivalent to a PID loop is utterly ridiculous.
Is it? It looks like one to me.
> By that logic a 747 is "basically a glorified lawn mower".
I don’t think a 747 can mow lawns, but I assume it has the horsepower to do it with some modifications.
AI is a marketing term for various kinds of machine learning applications.
AI is an academic field within computer science.
AI is the computer-controlled enemies you face in (especially, but not solely, offline) games.
This has been the case for decades now—especially the latter two.
Trying to claim that AI either "has always been" one particular thing, or "has now become" one particular thing, is always going to run into trouble because of this multiplicity. The one thing that AI "has always been" is multiple things.
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