• 47 Posts
  • 216 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • A task that might have taken five hours assisted by AI, and perhaps ten hours without it, is now more commonly taking seven or eight hours, or even longer.

    What kind of work do they do?

    in my role as CEO of Carrington Labs, a provider of predictive-analytics risk models for lenders. My team has a sandbox where we create, deploy, and run AI-generated code without a human in the loop. We use them to extract useful features for model construction, a natural-selection approach to feature development.

    I wonder what I have to imagine this is doing and how. How do they interface with the loop-without-a-human?

    Either way, they do seem to have a (small, narrow) systematic test case and the product variance to be useful at least anecdotally/for a sample case.









  • So you’re using [] as an alternative function call syntax to (), usable with nullable parameters?

    What’s the alternative? let x = n is null ? null : math.sqrt(n);?

    In principle, I like the idea. I wonder whether something with a question mark would make more sense, because I’m used to alternative null handling with question marks (C#, ??, ?.ToString(), etc). And I would want to see it in practice before coming to an early conclusion on whether to establish as a project principle or not.

    math.sqrt?() may imply the function itself may be null. (? ) for math.sqrt(?n)? 🤔

    I find [] problematic because it’s an index accessor. So it may be ambiguous between prop or field indexed access and method optional param calls. Dunno how that is in Dart specifically.








  • On AniDB I can enter dd.MM.yyyy or yyyy-MM-dd (text input), which I like a lot. I often prefer reading and writing yyyy-MM-dd.

    Some time ago I changed my Windows number format settings to show me yyyy-MM-dd formats. Unfortunately, that broke my webbrowsers date input / datepicker. :( So I had to go back to the standard culture format (de in my case).

    The worst is when you work with dates and don’t know what is what, or when the behavior is unexpected.

    Probably everyone knows about the Excel shitshow of implicitly converted values.

    In SQL Server, what do you think 0000-00-00 is when converted to a date, explicitly or implicitly? Well, unfortunately, yyyyMMdd is a safer format than yyyy-MM-dd.

    SET LANGUAGE 'us_english'
    SELECT CONVERT(date, '2025-12-13')
    --SELECT CONVERT(date, '2025-13-12') -- err
    SELECT CONVERT(datetime, '2025-12-13 07:00:00')
    --SELECT CONVERT(datetime, '2025-13-12 07:00:00') -- err
    
    SET LANGUAGE 'Deutsch'
    SELECT CONVERT(date, '2025-12-13')
    --SELECT CONVERT(date, '2025-13-12') --err
    --SELECT CONVERT(datetime, '2025-12-13 07:00:00') --err !!
    SELECT CONVERT(datetime, '2025-13-12 07:00:00')
    

    No, yyyy-dd-MM is not a common or valid German date format. That’s usually dd.MM.yyyy.

    But worst of all, it changes behavior of the date parsing between date only and date + time types.