I think this is OK though. We can still micromanage[0] the code generation part for a useful productivity boost, I think.
[0] At least, in my experience, "micromanaging" the AI is what gives me the best results. Iterating on the initial design, then iterating on the plan, then reviewing the proposed code changes (including tests), then getting an independent code review from another LLM, etc. If you give an LLM too much latitude that's when the really shitty code and ill-considered breaking changes/obliteration of existing functionality starts to creep in.
I had previously got around this by using Anaconda but I don't really like the amount of crap that brings in either, and also it leads to a dev environment that doesn't look anything like production so that sucks too... as a result of which I'm back in the boat you're describing.
It's still better than it was 10 years ago (compiling everything from source wasn't uncommon even then!) but it's painful. Comparisons to other interpreted languages aren't really fair though, if JS/TS had as many compiled C libraries, they'd be in exactly the same positions. Go doesn't have the same compiled library thing because of the focus of excluding C dependencies wherever possible.
Scipy maintainer here, the main issue with the wheels was the Fortran77 that was SciPy throwing wrenches into the mix. With C/C++ self compilation should be quite straightforward. We (all Scientific Python packages) really worked hard on that.
From version 1.19 of SciPy there will be no need for fortran compilers (because we translated everything to C https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/18566) and then all becomes much easier in all platforms due to the large availability of C compilers in all platforms. Together with the Stable API developments in CPython the wheel clash issues "hopefully" will decrease gradually.
Thanks for all your hard work! I already consider SciPy and NumPy to be best practice in this area but as I'm sure you know, it's the long tail of stuff built on top of these and other core packages that are really the issue!!
Ah, my bad. what I failed to emphasize is that many of the downstream issues are coming from the upstream restrictions so this is one of the major blocks that was causing some mayhem down the line. So indirectly we might have caused some heartburn for you, apologies in advance.
In the UK at least a big part of the problem for all high street retail is high fixed costs.
High rents for "prime" locations that, given the trend over the last 25 years, are no longer very prime, coupled with high business rates set by central government make it incredibly hard to make any money. And that's even before thinking about staff, where cover is no doubt needed at a higher concentration per square foot than warehouse based businesses.
Couple that with increases in minimum wage[0] and employer NI, and taking into account inflation and cost of living in recent years, and a lot of formerly workable retail businesses have simply been rendered non-viable.
I also think the UK are very tight with money (not sure about other countries). There are lots of people, according to our local Clarks shoe shop, who get their feet measured and then just buy their shoes online to save a few pounds. People do the same with anything they can try on in the shop and then order the same thing somewhere online for a bit cheaper.
The things you said are definitely making things much worse and I suspect that even back in the day when everyone bought things from the local shop, most retailers were not making massive profits so anything cutting away at that will make it worse.
I do. Shops, cafes, pubs are closing left right and centre because the median person can’t afford labour intensive unskilled jobs. The majority of the public are earning little more than minimum wage (1.6 times). 25 years ago it was 2 times.
Wages compression means shops, cafes, pubs closing, as exemplified today with Morrisons closing 100 local shops, putting people out of work, denying people easy access to local shops.
Another problem with the UK retail scene is the charity shop, of all things.
It is hard to hate the charity shop as they are Mother Theresa and Bob Geldof in retail form, feeding the starving of Africa (name me one) and bringing us one step nearer to curing cancer (as if).
But, after a while, the charity tends to perpetuate the problems that it seeks to solve. So you have what amounts to a business that has volunteers rather than paid staff (forget about minimum wage), the electricity bill is at a special rate and even the products come for free, from house clearances and people just getting rid of their 'empty gifts of capitalism' (plastic trash).
The real hustle is with rent and business rates. Rent and rates gets paid but at a fraction of the cost. If the landlord kept the place empty then he would have to foot the rates bill, but get that charity shop in and the problem goes away. The landlord can then count on the value of his property going up because they don't make land any more and all capital ends up hoisting up property values, even if the crumbling 'property' was paid for aeons ago and is best demolished.
What you have with a toy shop is specialist retail, where customers have expectations of service. The staff should know the availability of every product, stock levels and much else. It is not 'pile it high' as per the Toys R Us model.
I worked in specialist retail and for a boss that despised charity shops. We were in a back alley, with a fraction of the footfall. Anyone visiting the town would see the usual row of useless charity shops but not our shop. We had bills to pay and they didn't. It was unfair.
Nowadays the High Street doesn't just have the charity shop scams going on. There is the joy of money laundering. Imagine you have a fine cannabis operation going on and you are bringing in tens of thousands a week. What do you do with that money? How do you convert it to property?
This is where the nail bar comes in to play. Or the 'barbers'. Or the 'vape shop'. Hire your immigrant labour to sell nothing all day, and you can put through all the money you want.
Then we have the Wetherspoons pub, where they don't really make money from beer, the idea is to build a property portfolio. Another hustle.
Then there are the naive hopefuls. Personally I would love to own a little shop that sold all my favourite toys that I was denied as a kid, so that would mean train sets. Or maybe I would love to own a little cafe that sells the healthiest food in town. With some lottery winnings or an inheritance, I could dive in, hire my best friends and have the grand opening.
Narcissism would mean that all the warning signs would be ignored. Pride would mean that I would be in it until the house was mortgaged three times over, with half the suppliers demanding payment up front. Every day would be praying for rain, as in sales. I would be complaining and blaming the usual suspects such as the jungle store.
There are many, many other hustles and it sometimes helps to explore a town with someone from 'the other side of the tracks'. Poor people get preyed on in ways you would not believe.
For instance, cigarettes. If you went into one of those convenience stores and wanted a packet of cigarettes, it would cost you a vast fortune, I don't know how much, but probably around £20 nowadays, at a guess. However, for our special friends, they get the counterfeit ones at a ridiculously low price.
If you were to ask for them then the owner would tell you where to go. However, if a special friend were to introduce you to the store owner, then you would be able to buy the £3 or £5 counterfeit items too. You can even pay by card, so long as you are in the club.
A certain poverty mindset keeps people from 'my special world' going back to these convenience stores to buy food and drink items that have no nutritional value apart from calories. It is very sad but you would be amazed at how much money can be made from the seedier side of the High Street.
The problem isn't with this strange underworld, it is with the people in charge. They don't have the 'speakeasy' code words needed to appreciate how it works and they haven't tried to give specialist retail a go. They are probably at a different level of criminality, with the rentier class that are the true parasites of Western society.
Hmm, see I don’t agree. I use Spotify extensively for music, but also for podcasts and audiobooks. Great for a long car journey, or background listening whilst doing DIY.
I have plenty of frustrations with the app, but not with the core offer as a delivery mechanism for various types of audio entertainment and information.
In a just world what Zuckerberg and his cronies are doing - the sheer unrelenting tidal wave of destabilising societal damage (nationally, internationally, globally), not to mention the negative consequences of bullying and the exacerbation of mental health issues at individual and group levels over the course of, now, decades - would be considered crimes, and they would all be put on trial, held to account, and appropriately sanctioned for them.
What he's done to individuals, to marginalised and oppressed groups, to societies, and to global stability is far worse than any damage that, for example, Sam Bankman-Fried managed to do and yet somehow SBF is in prison for 25 years and Zuck walks free.
Not OK.
(Not to say SBF doesn't deserve his criminal penalty but to highlight the disconnect where we're not seeing similar treatment of these social media moguls who, at very best, are completely indifferent to the harm they cause but whom, one starts to suspect, are actually gunning for that harm in order to cement their own power and positions.)
I think what social media companies are doing is both immoral and criminal. In a just world this behavior would count as a crime against humanity and the people responsible would be tried in a court of law accordingly. In a just world we would have strong consumer protection laws which would protect users against the behavior your parent described. And consumer protection agencies would shut these companies down before they were able to cause this much harm, The worst offenders like Zuckerberg would be criminally charged and go to prison.
In a just world Zuckerberg would already be talked of only in past tense. This reality will get flagged/killed without a single Meta employee/astroturfer who does the flagging providing a justification as to why this isn't true.
> I wonder if that threat is now much more severe in the age of AI.
It is. I've been using Codex to analyse repositories en masse for a project I'm working on now[0]. Codex, Claude (my usual weapon of choice), etc., make pretty short work of looking for all kinds of problems and antipatterns in large codebases.
[0] Before any wags chime in, no, I'm not the one who hacked Nx and exported 4000 internal GitHub repos. I'm talking about a legitimate client project for a reputable company!
I don't mind them using it as a channel per se (although the userbase isn't what it once was) but it certainly shouldn't be the only channel.
For example: Twitter/X, along with Nitter mirrors like XCancel, are all blocked at the client I'm currently working with so although they can see this discussion, they're excluded from some of the most important details.
(Like many former twitter users, I don't have an X account these days so I'm guessing wouldn't be able to see the full original thread - glad of XCancel, that's for sure.)
Occasionally though, rather than petering out, you get a rage-fork that does something good.
The io.js fork from node back in 2014 or 2015 springs to mind. IIRC there were a bunch of changes/improvements that needed to be made to move node forward and Joyent were dragging their heels (a V8 upgrade might have been one of them but it's been so long I can't remember for sure). Some of the core devs were getting fed up with how long all of this was taking.
So a group of them forked off io.js from node, did the upgrade and a bunch of other improvements, and eventually all of that was folded back into core node, and everyone was happy with the final result.
But I think we could have found ourselves in a world where we'd all be using io.js rather than node had it turned out slightly differently.
Also the EGCS fork of GCC. That one ended happily, as, IIRC, the EGCS maintainers were assigned (by the GNU project) to be the new official GCC maintainers.
Beryl forked from Compiz and even though Compiz was the name people knew, Beryl was more popular for a while because it had like 10-20x more functionality out of the box. At some point they merged back together into Compiz Fusion and lost almost all that additional functionality, as well as most of the momentum it had, then was later renamed back to Compiz.
A place I worked some years ago we even had an escrow foisted on us by our larger partner in the agreement so that they’d be able to continue running the software we were building if we went under.
Honestly, it was a pain in the ass and meant that for them alone we ended up running an older version of the software than we offered to clients because as we developed its capabilities it became ever more integrated into our core platform and we weren’t about to escrow that.
When the agreement came up for renewal at the three year mark we managed to get the escrow clauses removed.
[0] At least, in my experience, "micromanaging" the AI is what gives me the best results. Iterating on the initial design, then iterating on the plan, then reviewing the proposed code changes (including tests), then getting an independent code review from another LLM, etc. If you give an LLM too much latitude that's when the really shitty code and ill-considered breaking changes/obliteration of existing functionality starts to creep in.