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The southeast of England is well-off, everywhere else is less so. It has basically always been like this. There have also obviously been repeated hammerblows since 2008, with austerity (which is still happening), Brexit (a remarkable self-own), and then covid (an unprecedented upwards transfer of wealth). The political and economic establishment is also essentially monopolar, a process begun with Blair and now approaching culmination.

People just don’t have the money to spend on things. Wage growth is non-existent and prices have risen dramatically. For my own part I have get a real “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” feeling. All we ever hear on the news is how spending will have to be cut yet again and taxes will have to go up.

Being from Northern Ireland I personally hope for unification with Ireland, although without significant changes I worry nothing much will change as Ireland has its own very similar issues.


I frequently (basically every conversation) have issues with Claude getting confused about which version of the file it should be building on. Usually what causes it is asking it do something, then manually editing the file to remove or change something myself and giving it back, telling it it should build on top of what I just gave it. It usually takes three or four tries before it will actually use what I just gave it, and from then on it keeps randomly trying to reintroduce what I deleted.


Your changes aren’t being introduced to its context, that’s why.


The models definitely can get confused if they have multiple copies in their history though, regardless of whether your latest changes are in.


Sekiro was so good at engendering this feeling. The first time you fight Genichiro you will probably die within seconds. The next fight it might take you 20+ tries to beat him. And then the last time you fight him you can basically no-hit him.


IMO, while Genichiro and sword/spear-wielding enemies are mostly fun, non-humanoid & gank bosses suck so bad.

Those bosses felt way too frustrating to me because they force you to unlearn the entire deflect gameplay, turning it into an annoying, slow-paced & somewhat janky fight.


I actually don't think I've ever had AI solve a non-trivial problem by itself. I do find it useful but I always have to give it the breakthrough which it can then implement.


https://datafusion.apache.org/blog/2024/09/13/string-view-ge...

> The concept of inlined strings with prefixes (called “German Strings” by Andy Pavlo, in homage to TUM, where the Umbra paper that describes them originated) has been used in many recent database systems (Velox, Polars, DuckDB, CedarDB, etc.) and was introduced to Arrow as a new StringViewArray[^3] type. Arrow’s original StringArray is very memory efficient but less effective for certain operations. StringViewArray accelerates string-intensive operations via prefix inlining and a more flexible and compact string representation.

Seems to be nothing more than they were invented at a German university. I spent quite some time thinking it had something to do with German’s sometimes-SOV word order.


Here is the paper in question:

Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance

https://db.in.tum.de/~freitag/papers/p29-neumann-cidr20.pdf

Section 3.1 covers string handling.

This article (also linked from tfa) explains German strings in more detail.

https://cedardb.com/blog/german_strings


my tl;dr: after reading the article:

- two 64-bits words representation

- fixed, 32 bits length

- short strings (<12 bytes) are stored in-place

- long strings store a 4 byte prefix in-place + pointer to the rest

- two bits are used as flags in the pointer to further optimize some use-cases


Seems like they missed an opportunity to have a 8 byte version for strings that fit in the 4 byte prefix.


This general string format style has been invented many times over the decades. Unfortunately, we seem to need to relearn the tradeoffs each time.


> I spent quite some time thinking it had something to do with German’s sometimes-SOV word order.

If you refer to subclauses in the German language: here the rule is rather "the finite verb is at the end of the subclause".


It also applies to infitives and participles and the verb in nominalized noun-verb compounds. So the rule is closer to "the verb is at the end of its grammatical unit, except for the finite verb in a main clause, which appears in second position." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order


I think this is also called V2 word order.


V2 word order (finite verb comes second) is what is used in main clauses.


In the UK this happens with tax rebates. For the vast majority of people your tax is calculated by HMRC and taken out of your pay and if they make a mistake you just tell them and they will adjust your tax code so you pay less/more tax until it works out.

Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.


I pay £22 per month to rent a seedbox and I would happily pay more.


For an English speaker it would be difficult. It is a highly synthetic language (meaning the markers which tell you which parts of the sentence are doing what), compared to English which is an analytical language (meaning there are extra words like prepositions which tell you which part of the sentence is doing what). This is why Finnish (and other Uralic languages’ words) look so long to us, because where we in English would use prepositions and word order to denote object, subject etc., much of that is expressed in Finnish through suffixes.

Perhaps for a speaker of another synthetic language like Polish it might be easier to learn Finnish as their brain might would already have the wiring but even then, as the article notes Finnish is not an Indo-European language so it is further removed still.


The joke goes: There are 3 kinds of people

The pessimist says: Finnish is too hard for an adult to learn, mission impossible.

The realist says: With 10 years of hard work, it's doable.

The optimist says: I can do it in 5 years.

Myself I was an optimist and I kind of did it in 5 years, but it was tight. However, after having spoken it daily for 25 more years I get more and more pessimistic: There are several aspects I will not master in this life.


I guess I'm just not asking it big enough things. I'm asking it things on the level of an individual function or component. To be honest I really haven't had much success at all with IDE integrations and giving it access to the whole codebase. I get far better results by asking very focused questions, which means I'm only waiting a few seconds for a response.

This is Claude Sonnet 4


Depends how good your QA is. Where I am it is terrible so most of the time I spend in “code review” is spent checking out the code locally and testing it myself.


Yes, this is all on paper. Where I work we don't have QA


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