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When I first used GPT-4, I could see what Dijkstra was talking about. You can’t just say to the A.I., “Solve my problem.” That day may come, but for now it is more like an instrument you must learn to play. You have to specify what you want carefully, as though talking to a beginner. In the search-highlighting problem, I found myself asking GPT-4 to do too much at once, watching it fail, and then starting over. Each time, my prompts became less ambitious. By the end of the conversation, I wasn’t talking about search or highlighting; I had broken the problem into specific, abstract, unambiguous sub-problems that, together, would give me what I wanted.
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
newyorker.com
In the mid-19th century, banks often used signatures to authenticate people’s identities, but many of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank’s clients could not read or write. So it created a “test book” that contained a wealth of personal information. When clients came in, clerks asked them about their personal history and relations to verify their identities. Sometimes they even asked the quintessential question, “What is your mother’s maiden name?” (The assumption was that your mother’s maiden name would have faded so far into the past that almost no one else could possibly have known it.)
Online Security Questions Are Not Very Effective. I Still Love Them.
Sophie Haigney
If I were asked to do the same thing for Linux, it likely would take five years, and two dozen people.
Linux is pretty balkanize, has a lot of kingdom building, and you have to pee on everything to make it smell like Linux.
I could do the same in FreeBSD in about a year and a half, with a dozen co-conspirators to run the changes through.
What Goes Into Making an OS to Be Unix Compliant Certified?
Quora
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