Obviously yes. Imagine for a second that you're a MAGA supporter, anti-abortion, stick it to the liberals type of person. Would you say that voting has been effective to get the things you care about passed into law (or repealed)?
> We didn't write this parser by hand because, at least pre-AI-coding, parsers were extremely difficult to maintain. Writing one without AI would have taken months [...]
> Instead, we use ANTLR, a state-of-the-art, open source parser generator.
I don't agree with this (pre-AI-coding) take. Hand-rolled parsers are much easier to write well and maintain than people think. They also tend to be much faster and produce much better errors than parser generators. I guess if the language you're trying to parse is, say, C++, then you're going to have a miserable time (probably no matter what). But an SQL parser is very doable. (I say this as the author and maintainer of an in-house SQL dialect thingy at work.)
What makes building and maintaining a hand-written parser such a tractable task is:
- The code size can be large, but you can start with a core of a few well-chosen abstractions and then you add lots of parsing code for various language constructs but it's all kind of orthogonal and doesn't add compounding complexity as you go.
- It's just about the most testable kind of code there is. You can cover all the various corner cases with tests and really lock in the behavior so that you can very confidently make changes. One approach I like is to make zillions of tiny test files in the target language accompanied by some golden representation of the AST.
And of course, as the author found out, these properties make writing a parser a really good task for AI coding, too. These tools are very, very good at generating a bunch of new code based on existing abstractions and covering it with lots of test cases.
So I agree with where they ended up, just not where they started :)
That's valid criticism, I kinda hand-waved the "months" part. I read everything I could about parsers while building this (I have a CS background but hadn't thought about parsers in a long time) and came across this blog post https://lakesail.com/blog/sql-parser-in-one-week/ which talked about building a toy parser in a week, so I scaled that up to months for a production one.
Well… tis difficult if one does not understand how grammars work, and therefore parsers. But we’ve seen people use stuff like ContextFreé’s Design Grammar, without even being IT guys, and still figure themselves around.
The whole notion grammars are hard is just wrong. They are not only powerful, but super simple in fact. As is the basic regexp if one cares to spend a focused afternoon to understand it. Probably even less time if working with a decent teacher.
I live a couple of blocks away from this Kirkland roundabout and I drive through it very often -- almost every time I go anywhere. Overall, I like it. My average traversal through the roundabout, for just about any source/destination, seems a bit faster than the pre-roundabout infrastructure and much faster than the temporary so-many-stoplights configuration they had for the past year or two.
AFAICT this is not talking about Glasswing stuff. They are saying that they were sent a demonstration of Fable 5 being used/abused in some specific way that led to the "discovery" of some minor, already-known vuln, and that other models can find it too. IOW, they're claiming that the USG's complaint is baseless and dumb.
This is a zero sum take. There are no winners, only the people you deem using free expression correctly. Would a developer who names releases like "Ukrainians are nazi's" or "Taiwan is China" be met with this same sympathy? Or would you brush them off as a mouthpiece for those governments? I'm thinking it's the latter. Free expression is rarely anything other than socially acceptable expression.
IMO the ethical response should be positive disengagement with entities with which you disagree, instead of negative engagement.
See something in the release notes of an app you don’t like? Go use a different app, give your money to a different entity. Don’t spend your time and resources messing with the producer or user of the thing you don’t like.
This of course runs the risk of maximal polarization once everyone has filtered themselves into their neat and tidy little bubbles. What happens then, everybody leaves each other alone? Or do the echo chambers slide into further radicalized detachment from each other?
I mean it depends what it is. If someone is talking about master races in patch notes I think that can be met with negative engagement. Splitting along an ideology binary can definitely lead to further entrenchment and possible radicalization. I think the danger there though is the binary choice itself. You of course have edge cases where it is a binary, but I think having people with more complex attitudes and opinions can only be a boon to cooperation and progress.
To get back on topic though, I think conflating using Y app with holding X position on a topic like politics is a dangerous road. Which is where I think having a dedicated space for those politics makes more sense. Whether that's a blog, twitter, etc. It allows those most dedicated to you to know you better without making the product or program a political stance. But the developer is ultimately free to do what they want. So it's not like anyone here can tell the developer to change in any way.
What a bad take. Not every political statement is morally equivalent nor worthy of the same respect. Supporting self-determination of people is not the same as supporting oppression of people - for example.
So the free expression is considered by everyone according to their own ethical and moral values.
It is 1995. You get an unsolicited email with a dubious business offer. Upon reflection, you decide it's not worth consideration and delete it. No need to wonder how it was sent to you; that doesn't need to influence the way you handle it.
No. We need spam filters for this stuff. If it isn't obvious to you yet, it will be soon. (Or else you're one of the spammers.)
