What if AI can greatly reduce the amount of money (i.e. tax receipts) that the government needs to function properly? What if AI can quickly determine who really qualifies for government assistance, and cuts off all the fraudsters without needing an army of bureaucrats?
We could even cut out a ton of middle-men and return congress to a part-time job. One can only dream, right?
> What if AI can quickly determine who really qualifies for government assistance, and cuts off all the fraudsters without needing an army of bureaucrats?
Surprise, Surprise. LLMs will respond according to the set of data that their model was trained on!
While just about every LLM is trained on data that far surpasses the output of just one person, or even a decent sized group; it will still reflect the average sentiment of the corpus of data fed into it.
If the bulk of the training data was scraped from websites created in 'WEIRD' countries, then it's responses will largely mimic their culture.
I developed a new database management system and I needed a GUI application to use as an admin tool for it.
I decided to build it using Qt (Qt Widgets in c++) mainly because my whole data engine is also in c++. Since it just uses standard windows and dialog boxes; I haven't felt the need to keep up with the latest Qt version. I am still using Qt 5 (I think revision 13 or 15).
I have been contemplating moving to Qt 6. Have users noticed a big difference (e.g. performance) between Qt 5 and Qt 6?
QtQuick uses a different runtime which is (afaik) faster and targets modern graphics backends (eg. Vulcan) in a way widgets does not.
It also uses an a javascript scripting engine.
Saying “they’re both c++” is seems kind of misleading and meaningless right?
It’s probably more accurate to say QML is actively being worked on and receiving performance enhancements and updates and widgets is not, and has not for some time.
So yes, it’s actually pretty unlikely that QML would be slower (depending on what you do with your scripts) but it’s probably not as clear cut as you are suggesting.
QML apps that heavily implement core logic in javascript would be slow as balls.
> Saying “they’re both c++” is seems kind of misleading and meaningless right?
Not really, if you avoid writing Javascript code in your QML components, than most of your executable will end up being compiled C++ code. If you do write Javascript code in your QML components, than it *could also* be compiled to C++ code using the QML script compiler[1[2].
> QML apps that heavily implement core logic in javascript would be slow as balls.
The entire point is to separate logic and view where logic is written in C++ and QML simply represents the view (which almost end up being built upon simple primitives that *are* C++ objects). So if you keep this separation you get amazing performance with great simplicity and velocity.
If you ever run into trouble with execution of JS slowing down your Qt/QML application, you are using way too much JS. The most common performance issues in decently written applications are rendering of invisible items aka overdraw (especially on very weak embedded SoC GPUs) and slow startup time. There is tooling to find these and ways to fix or improve them.
> The most common performance issues in decently written applications are rendering of invisible items aka overdraw
That's indeed what I found as well! Especially, these hidden items consume a lot of unnecessary RAM. What tools do you know for Qt/QML that can help with this issue?
I already showed in my benchmarks that my block editor is faster than all block editors on the market - even more than those that uses native frameworks. And there are ten of thousand of lines of QML code (and round the same of C++ as well).
You can't claim something is slow without showing empiric data. I showed mine when I claimed programming Qt C++ and QML together is fast. If you claim otherwise, you need to support it with data.
Reminds me of the old saying: 'If you have just one watch/clock, then you always know what time it is; but if you have two of them, then you are never sure!'
Makes you wonder if the reason why some trivial bug in a closed source project goes unfixed for years; is because all the engineers are afraid to touch the code in some obscure library and instantly become its new 'owner'.
Mostly it is that you don’t go around fixing random stuff.
You might actually get in trouble picking up stuff that is not a priority.
Company I work for is less strict so we do “fix anything Friday”.
But for some other companies you might get a slap on the wrist for not following the plan and product owners pick what gets fixed and what not based on business plan. If there are big customers nagging - bug will be fixed asap.
I wonder how effective it is for an OSS maintainer to try to prevent someone from 'stealing their project' when <corporation> doing the fork is huge with plenty of resources (engineering, marketing, and legal) vs just some startup that is trying to gain some traction.
In my experience with exactly what parent comment discussed... it's not effective. In fact, the company may even (which I have witnessed personally multiple times) blatantly violate your OSS license to incorporate it into their proprietary money-making product, because they know they can get away with it... most lone devs do not have the money or willpower to attack a corporation, even if they could win.
Usually I see those lone devs either ignoring them entirely, or ragequitting open-source altogether.
I have a side project that I have worked on for years, mainly because I enjoy writing software. I get an adrenaline rush when I can make my data management system do things better and/or faster than other things on the market.
I have written articles about it and made the binaries freely available on my website under an 'open beta'. People keep telling me that if I really want it to take off, I should open source it.
So far, I have resisted doing that, for many of the reasons that you cited.
If you are bilingual, with one language being stronger than the other one; try reading something in the language you are least comfortable with. I do this (e.g. reading LoTR in Dutch) and it forces me to pay closer attention to each sentence.
There are words you don't know or know how to use them properly. It will help you learn the second language better, while also helping you to not gloss over whole passages.
> try reading something in the language you are least comfortable with
I did this with Spanish and it was terrible for learning grammar because things tended to be transliterated from English however I found it good for learning vocab.
I chose really trashy romance novels translated from English e.g. Danielle Steel.
\* they tended to use more colloquialisms
\* simple plots, so easy to read
\* useful words
\* often transliterated directly from English so easiest forms of grammar
I tried some literature but that was a bad idea (too complex for beginner, and faaar too boring). I just don't like the Spanish literature I have tried reading.
I also found it screwed up my Spanish pronunciation and had a queer side-effect that it permanently slowed down my English reading.
Personally, I think languages should be learnt by talking and mimicking (as much like a baby as possible). Reading is worthwhile for work but I expect to be more careful for the next language I learn.
Back in college (for me the 80s), I learned that storing table data in rows would greatly increase performance due to high seek times on hard disks. SELECT * FROM table WHERE ... could read in the entire row in a single seek. This was very valuable when your table has 100 columns.
However; a different query (e.g. SELECT name, phone_number FROM table) might result in fewer seeks if the data is stored by column instead of by row.
The article only seems to address data structures with respect to indexes, and not for the actual table data itself.
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