I've been using Choosy.app for easily managing different browsers for work and personal (and testing), and it works great. You set it to your default browser, and then anytime something opens a browser it pops up a picker. Lots of global and per-site configuration options like browser profile selection, private windows, etc.
Would you say more about your experience writing it in Rust? It worked well, what didn't, anywhere you found that you struggled unexpectedly or that was easier than you expected?
Hey, thanks for asking. I'm the furthest from an authority in this so I encourage you to take everything I say with a grain of salt.
I was using the burn[0] crate which is pretty new but in active development and chock-full of features already. It comes with a lot of what you need out of the box including a TUI visualizer for the training and validation steps.
The fact that it's so full of features is a blessing and a curse. The code is very modular so you can use the pieces you want the way you want to use them, which is good, but the "flavor" of Rust in which is written felt like a burden compared to the way I'm used to writing Rust (which, for context, is 99% using the glorious iced[1] GUI library). I can't fault burn entirely for this, after all they are free to make their own design choices and I was a beginner trying to do this in less than a week. I also think they are trying to solve for getting a practitioner to just get up and going right away, whereas I was trying to build a modular configuration on top of the crate instead of a one-and-done type script.
But there were countless generic types, several traits to define and implement in order to make some generic parameter fit those bounds, and the crate has more proc_macro derives than I'd like (my target number is 0) such as `#[derive(Module, Config, new)]` because they obfuscate the code that I actually have to write and don't teach me anything.
TL;DR the crate felt super powerful but also very foreign. It didn't quite click to the point where I thought it was intuitive or I felt very fluent with it. But then again, I spent like 5 days with it.
One other minor annoying thing was that I couldn't download exactly what I wanted out of HuggingFace directly. I ended up having to use `HuggingfaceDatasetLoader::new("carlosejimenez/wikitext__wikitext-2-raw-v1")` instead of `HuggingfaceDatasetLoader::new("Salesforce/wikitext")` because the latter would get an auth error, but this may also be my ignorance about how HF is supposed to work...
Eventually, I got the whole thing to work quite neatly and was able to tweak hyperparameters and get my model to increasingly better perplexity. With more tweaks, a better tokenizer, possibly better data source, and an NVIDIA GPU rather than Apple Silicon, I could have squeezed even more out of it. My original goal was to try to slap an iced GUI on the project so that I could tweak the hyperparameters there, compare models, plot the training and inference, etc. with a GUI instead of code. Sort of a no-code approach to training models. I think it's an area worth exploring more, but I have a main quest I need to finish first so I just wrote down my findings in an unpublished "paper" and tabled it for now.
Even in the flood of terrible news about privacy and other things, this exposé stands out as especially disturbing. I was considering getting a new electric car to replace my combustion, but now I'm going to stretch it for as long as I can instead.
pry is what I miss most when using other languages. I've used all kinds of debuggers all kinds of hardware with many different languages, and pry is by far the best tool for development and debugging. People talk about the REPL in Lisp for good reason, but pry takes that concept to infinity and beyond. When I think about the future of AI assisted programming, it's something much more like the pry interactive development loop than a code editor's suggestions.
Reminds me of the story of the kids in Ethiopian village that were given tablets by One Laptop Per Child. The kids had figured out how to turn it on within minutes, in five days they were using 47 apps per child, in two weeks they were singing the English alphabet, and then within five months they had hacked Android. https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/01/kids_learn_hacking_an...
You do a great job explaining these concepts, better than most. I have appreciated all of your replies in this post. Do you have a blog or podcast or teach somewhere? I would tune in.
So the first thing is the meta learning. Looking at companies like Valve and Wolfram, they provide a template of another way of running companies which seem to consistently produce the best kind of software and incredible wealth for all those involved. The two things you look for when running a software company.
Next, Stephen livestreams his day to day as a CEO. This is so significant. I know the HN trope which dang warned about earlier, but I actually love it. Imagine if you could get detailed logs about how Steve Jobs lived his life. Not from books others write about him and make up fake stuff to make it sell more, but straight from the horse's mouth as they say. That is what his meticulous logs and streams of his life provides.
Gabe Newell of course does much less of this, but he still has some incredible videos which go so in depth in how he runs the business and what he thinks about.
Look, we are nerds. To learn business, we go online and try to piece together information. For example, I know for a fact a bunch of YC companies (both in this batch and earlier) have fallen for scammers like Alex Hormozi because he has a massive Youtube presence and just spews nonsense which sounds like it should make sense.
So in that world, to learn as close to first hand from people who actually run some of the biggest and most interesting business on the planet is just incredible.
Has anyone found or made a great set of tutorials for "Affinity for Photoshop Experts"? I've been using Photoshop for more than 30 years (now Photopea), and I don't think I've ever felt more like an alien than the two times I've tried in earnest to learn Affinity tools. A six month trial could be generous enough for me assimilate.
Thanks for this link. Firefox has been getting worse for me stability-wise on my Mac M1, even with tab discarding it consumes huge amounts of power, and at least two or three times a day it will just stop loading webpages and show errors in the network tab and need to be restarted. I spend a couple of hours every few weeks trying to track down the issues and Firefox and even in the bug tracker can't find answers.
I also have a bizarre problem where any Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Brave, Edge) are extremely slow to load any page since upgrading to Sonoma, where Firefox or Safari are near-instant - like taking 60 seconds to even start DNS lookup. After a couple of minutes it will eventually fully load a page. I've seen other people mention the same issue online, but no fixes. I have spent hours trying to debug and track down problems for that too.
It's discouraging how much it feels like every software tool I use on every device has gone to shit, especially things as fundamental as a web browser.
I've also taught git to dozens of beginners in a classroom setting, and I have to agree that the OP and GP articles aren't great for beginners, even if they have a technical background. The problem I have with git media is that everybody begins by teaching git's user interface, which is a usability disaster. On the other hand, the internals of git are elegant and simple, and if you start by teaching from the inside out, it makes it far easier to understand why and when we use certain commands.
The video you mentioned, "Git For Ages 4 And Up" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m7BgIvC-uQ, is the best resource for explaining how it works internally, once they have a rudimentary understanding of what git is and why we use it. Watching this video makes future explanations way more digestible. I still sometimes conceptualize difficult git operations in tinker toys.
Learning git was one of the harder things I've encountered having already used many VCS beforehand. Then one day it all clicked because I'd subconsciously re-engineered in my head how things must be connected under the covers--I wished someone told me to learn about it's internal model. Learning git from commands and workflow is like learning about the world from shadows seen while chained inside a cave.
