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  • 45 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: April 4th, 2026
  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•S&P downgrades Oracle stock to BBB-English
    1·
    2 days ago

    The adult entertainers are the VC investors. They’re pretty world-wise, but can’t be well versed on everything. So when someone sells them on something that sounds pretty good, they bite. The CEOs are the bros laughing about how great everything is, except in real life they don’t have consequences. All the CEOs get paid like it might be their last job so if they never work again they’re still fine.

    It’s still impressive to see what the LLMs cook up when asked about programming problems. I’m coming back to programming from some time away from it, and it’ll give you the answer to the question you asked. If you ask it for an old way of doing something, it’ll tell you that. Then it slips and shows you a new way of doing something (I’m specifically talking about std::cout versus std::format and std::print), and the doors are wide open all of a sudden.

    Then it gives you a technique for something and you spend hours debugging code only for the LLM to say that the solution it provided won’t work.

    Prompt engineering is going to be a real thing whether we like it or not.

  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why does not a CR (Carriage Return) automatically start a new line on some online text editors?
    0·
    4 days ago

    There is Carriage Return (CR), and also Line Feed (LF, often called New Line). If you think about old mechanical printers with the metal arm sticking out, a CR operation would move the type head to the far left column, and a LF operation would advance the paper by one line. Variously through the years depending on hardware (typewriter, teletype, those early CRTs that you had to refresh the screen, or modern computers) you would get one or both of those if you pressed Return/Enter, and it’s configurable in software, depending on the software. I don’t know what windows does these days with notepad, but at one time the Enter key sent both (CRLF). UNIX style systems tended to use LF, and older Macs as someone else referenced used CR. If you wrote a generic program to handle anything you had to account for all of them. Mostly these days it gets abstracted away which generally works well enough unless a team of people used a random collection of software to edit a text file.

    printf "\r\nHexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.\n" | hexdump -C
00000000  0d 0a 48 65 78 61 64 65  63 69 6d 61 6c 2c 20 6c  |..Hexadecimal, l|
00000010  69 6b 65 20 74 68 61 74  20 73 63 65 6e 65 20 66  |ike that scene f|
00000020  72 6f 6d 20 54 68 65 20  4d 61 72 74 69 61 6e 2e  |rom The Martian.|
00000030  0a                                                |.|
00000031

    The 0a is a Line Feed character, and the 0d is a Carriage Return character. In my terminal without piping it through hexdump you get:

    printf "\r\nHexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.\n"

Hexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.

    The LF at the end of the string makes it so that the prompt at the terminal doesn’t appear on the same line as the output, and the blank line before the text is caused by the LF at the beginning. I don’t know/care/have to worry about what eats the CR.