Category: technical
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99.99% Friendly AI isn’t good enough
One of the first articles from The AI Security and Safety Book is Max Tegmark’s Friendly Artificial Intelligence paper from 2014. The paper is wonderful, but its purpose is hard to understand. After reading it multiple times, I came to a core quote that made sense to me: To program a friendly AI, we need…
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Musk on AI safety before xAI in 2019
MUSK: I think there is a lot—a tremendous amount of investment—going on in AI. Where there’s a lack of investment is in AI safety. And there should be, in my view, a government agency that oversees anything related to AI to confirm that it does not represent a public safety risk. Just as there is…
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Why functional programming?
This is a post to discuss the benefits of functional programming (FP) for those who don’t use functional programming and I guess most relevant for full stack developers – you love your JavaScript and your SQL children equally. tl;dr: FP combines well with SQL, is easy to learn like Excel, is declarative, makes you think…
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Composable
What does it mean to say that something is composable in JavaScript? These are some notes after watching the funfunfunction Promises video. Callbacks are not composable, but Promises are. My simple understanding of composing two functions is just calling one function inside another: The example compares callbacks: vs Promises: Or in individual terms, we can…
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VSCode Neovim setup
I recently switched over to using the vscode-neovim extension for VSCode. What wasn’t obvious though was how to get a plugin manager and plugins / vim customisations working. I’ll add here quickly my plugins setup as I’m using vim-surround, and a bunch of Tim Pope plugins: I’m on Linux / Ubuntu 22.04, with nvim installed…
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Javascript REPL
I really like the simple ‘console’ REPL that you have in a browser debug tools. I wanted to recreate this in VS Code. tl;dr Debug console It turns out after lots of experimenting this can be also done with the ‘Debug Console’ when you start a debug session – see VSCode debugging. This is exactly…
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VSCode debugging
What I don’t think a lot of VSCode users are used to is constantly living with the debugger turned on. Most web devs grew up in a world without Visual Studio, so console.log is the norm. However anyone who used Visual Studio for Visual Basic or C# development will know the power of constantly using…
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Translating Sublime Text into Vim
Intro Coming from a Windows world getting into Vim, to me is almost exactly like the struggles I had learning French or Dutch. I spent 10 years learning French growing up and I can’t speak a proper sentence. I then moved from England to the Dutch speaking part of Belgium (Flanders) and I learnt to…
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Vim Language Server Client (LSC) plugin first impressions
After months of problems with CoC: https://github.com/neoclide/coc-eslint/issues/72 I’ve given up and I’m trying other plugins. I used ALE for ages with eslint, but never got it decently working using LSP. I tried ALE with Deoplete – but ALE is very slow and deoplete took ages to configure (python3 + pip + msgpack 1.0+ is a…
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Embracing the Neovim/Vim Terminal
I’ve only finally just started using Neovim’s terminal. Vim 8 has this too of course, but it was Neovim that championed it and included it by default. I switched to Neovim about a year ago to see if there was anything missing compared to Vim. I find Neovim fascinating purely because of how faithful it…
Ian Channing 