Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | a_brawling_boo's commentslogin

I am software engineer and I have certainly attempted use GPT for coding with mixed results.

But what I am really impressed using it for writing. I am writing the story of my abusive upbringing with a mental ill mother. I am not a writer, but this thing is awesome because I can ask it to give me prompts and it is jogging my memory more and more then I can give it rough outlines and thoughts and it will organize it into more of a literary style, then I can go through and update most of the wording to my own liking or leave as is as I see fit. I am easily able to produce much more and a better quality than without it.


I use GPT-4 for coding and technical tasks every day, its abilities to make ideas a reality which would otherwise take me days or weeks is astonishing.

I wanted to try to make real-world terrain in Unity - GPT-4 guided me to the USGS's LiDAR data, took me step-by-step through creating a mesh from a point cloud, and created several scripts to edit and filter the mesh programmatically.

There are some caveats and many dead-end conversation branches - GPT-4 seems to know 'about' more libraries than it actually knows how to use, so certain library choices tend to produce erroneous code.

GPT-4 sometimes picks a poor method, for example conflicting methods of moving an object in a single script, but can usually resolve the issue when notified.

Dozens of hours fiddling with technical details saved.


Very sorry to hear about your upbringing, btw. I hope writing your story helps.


It is an amazing book, not just for science fiction fans. The first story, "Tower of Babylon" somehow is like a science fiction story but based on ancient people's cosmology. Great book.


The stories are insanely creative and leave you thinking: Hell is the absence of God is a fantastic genre-bender I can imagine few other authors writing. Exhalation is also great, but it's in a different anthology.


Best story in the book, imo. The first and last story (about the angels) are the best. I was a little underwhelmed by _Story Of Your Life_ and _Understand_, given their reputation.


I've found that people you hang out with understand, if they are good people they will go out of their way to accommodate you; la croix or other carbonated drinks helps with the appearance of 'not drinking' but still holding a beverage in your hand. And a few times recently it actually felt good to say 'thanks, but I don't drink' or telling the doctor or insurance person you don't drink which ends the follow up questions regarding booze, feels great.

And don't hate yourself, try to think about what someone who loves you would say or think instead of yourself since you are your own worst critic, life is about the process not the goal, when you 'fail' try to be open and honest about the things that triggered you and actively try to avoid or replace those things in your life when you are not tempted.


Playing minecraft on switch vs my pixel 6 is night and day. I can't imagine performance is anywhere near what it needs to be for an end game base? But I'd be curious to see what they've come up with here.


Yeah, they cover performance too, but sounds like we will definitely see impact with mega bases:

One of the first questions you might ask is how does the game perform. We worked on many optimizations to make sure the game performs as well as possible. You should expect 30-60 FPS (both in TV mode and handheld mode). As for UPS, the average player should be able to go through all of the content and launch a rocket, while staying at 60 UPS. But don't expect to be able to build mega-bases without UPS starting to drop, sometimes significantly.


I see potential for playing with your Switch on a beefy community server, where the server is responsible for UPS.

Edit: I guess the client also has to run the simulation, never mind. It seems like overall, Factorio is well under-optimized though. For a game that has been out forever, it still has a huge ceiling.


Do base your believe that Factorio is under-optimised on anything specific?

The Factorio devs regularly put out blog posts on the optimisations they have done, like [1][2][3] (and many others), and they have done so for a long time. This gives me the opposite impression.

[1] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-322 [2] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281 [3] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209


I think specifically for multiplayer, you could handle non-visible chunks on the server and figure out a better way to update the client with what it needs, rather than requiring the client to handle the full simulation.

I know it’s a well optimized piece of software, but when you get into something like the space mod with multiple worlds, where chunks you might not deal with for a long time still tax you, you can see how there’s conceivably a lot that could be done.

So, yeah, wrong to say “under optimized”.

I’m also aware that they haven’t been optimizing for a massive multi-world server with tons of clients. I definitely don’t mean it as a dig or that they aren’t top class.


I'm curious if any of these improvements have/will trickle over into the PC space as well. Some of those I'm sure might be switch-only, though.


the switch is better?


I'm almost certain that the Pixel is better given that it's nearly double the price, and the Switch is 5 years old now.


Plus the Tegra in the Switch wasn’t even new when the Switch launched.


Minecraft is slower on the switch than an android device though its most noticeable when on the market place once the game is loaded its not much different


I'm useless after 6pm or 7pm, 7am - 11am is more my sweet spot.


I'm not saying Bush didn't say that because I don't know, I can believe it. But it seems odd because 1) Gog and Magog are a somewhat well know part of Islamic eschatology, and 2) I pretty sure Google existed at that point in time, but without it I am sure his staff had access to dictionaries and encyclopedias which would have led them to 3) Encyclopedia or web entries on Darbyism or Dispensationalism, easily answering their questions.

France's Ministry of Foreign affairs isn't advising the President on things like this, they don't have subject matter experts? Forgive me, maybe I give governments too much credit or, but seems like an odd article.


I'd be very worried if international diplomacy fell down to a cabinet member who happened to be well versed in Islamic eschatology or worse, that cabinet members would rely on dictionaries or Wikipedia to understand words or cultural references they don't know.

Calling an expert was the right call.

> France's Ministry of Foreign affairs isn't advising the President on things like this, they don't have subject matter experts?

Seems pretty obvious to me that they wouldn't have experts on every subjects, especially on things like that.

> I'm not saying Bush didn't say that because I don't know, I can believe it. [..] Forgive me, maybe I give governments too much credit or, but seems like an odd article.

There's healthy skepticism and there's something else.


Thanks for saying this. I spent years worried if I took an hour or two or a day during 'busy' times, and it turned me into a liar, because I said I do things or be somewhere and often times I did not because of work. It is always a 'busy' time.

It took years, several jobs, and therapy before my eyes were open. Nobody cares, you are a human and have a life, if your employer does not understand that you need a new one.


I see my friends do this all the time and I just want to slap them in the face and tell them to snap out of whatever trance they are in. They work long hours, they are no longer making the time to take care of themselves, or keep up with people they love. They complain how terribly they hate their situation and how depressed it is, but they continue working those 60 hour weeks and bending over backwards to terrible bosses as if that is how it simply is and there is nothing better. It's making me depressed just seeing them slide off like this, all because of these shit jobs they put themselves into. And its not like they can't find other work either, they have good experience, but are so beaten down by the current job that they can't muster energy to commit to a job search on top of that 60 hour work week. You almost have to rip the bandaid off and just quit with nothing lined up.


I'm in my notice period with nothing concrete lined up right now. (I'm job hunting - in the middle of several interview processes - but no offers yet.)

I am lucky enough to have savings and a very supportive partner, and even so it is stressful. Certainly without either or both of those things I would likely still be sticking it out at the current job (especially with the various things that were offered when I handed in my notice). I sympathise with those that feel trapped.


It's a challenge to recognize those times that your need to work constantly is what you want to do (excited about a technical challenge, avoiding something at home, on an ambition kick), and your boss wouldn't blink an eye if you took the week off rather than work 80 hours.


This hit me when moving from a start-up to a FAANG. There is effectively an infinite amount of work for me to do on any given day, so at some point I just have to decide to stop - if I don't, I'll just end up tired tomorrow with an equally infinite amount of stuff still to do.


Here is a related story. I should mention Tines or OP has no relationship I know of with Salesforce, for background Mulesolft is a cloud focused integration platform owned by Salesforce, who's big feature is visual mapping, visual workflows, etc. (of course it is more complex than this, read up if you are interested):

I attended another meetup/training, Mulesoft was really pushing their web only visual workflow/mapping tool. And the instructor goes over the entire song and dance, and I said to him, that I was having real difficulty even understanding what type of problem this tool would be good for in a real-world situation. And he takes his glasses off and says to a room full of maybe 30 or 40 developers, that this tool they had been pushing so hard should NEVER be used in production, its only real use was for sale demos and maybe, maybe, doing some sort of POC which would need to be reproduced in 'code' at a later time. He used weasel words to say all of this of course, but his meaning was clear. This was 2018~2019, not the stone ages. So, I wasted that evening (there would be more) going to a sales enablement seminar billing itself a developer learning workshop.


For me it isn't so much being a 'nerd', which I am, as being very much an introvert as well. And most people don't know this, but introverts still want to be around people, just need alone time too, so I understand where you are coming from. If you find yourself not doing things or not experiencing things or not participating in conversations because they do not revolve around tech and science, and I know this sounds dumb, but force yourself to do it. I had a low point in my life and decided to force myself to say yes to things I really didn't want to do, and over the years I found out there is a reason people like sports, or concerts or whatever, and other things I tried once and knew it is not for me. And you don't have to change your interests or try to be popular or care about fashion like Graham talks about. I don't like sports in general, but I will always go to a college football game if invited, it is fun, even if you don't enjoy football, also there are other people at super bowl parties that don't watch football either; but I will never go to a nightclub again, once was enough to know. Your social circle expands and one day saying 'yes' to something will lead you to meet someone you will eventually start a family with and then your social circle will slowly shirk and that is okay.


I had a handful of marks/scars that lasted for several years on my legs after using one of these. I am sure it depends on the brand, but please be careful using these.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: