• When does 4 become 5?

4.5 >=? Lots of programming languages define casting as the largest integer value, not the the rounded value. Outside of programming, there are scenarios where 4 cannot be rounded to 5 either… Like a height requirement for a ride at an amusement park. Though, it might seem natural to round it to humans.

• When does green become black in a gradient?

With computer languages, we define colors with red, blue, and green. The above is a gradient on horizontal x-axis, with

(r = 0, g = x, b = 0) 

This is more complicated. If we surveyed 1 million people, maybe we’d get a plot that defined the start of green as something like the following.

And then maybe we could take the the average and state that as green.

Though, is that really good enough description of green to serve as a legal definition of green? Maybe lawyers would select significantly different results than the general population when surveyed for the value of green. Maybe the results should be restricted to lawyers?

• And when does 2 become 7?

If we restricted it pixels to a 3x5 grid…

We could possibly define 2 and 7.

But then is this a 2 or a 7?

I haven’t paid

edit: Well I did for grok, but not on purpose. Grok still failed too.

And the self driving car company? Didn’t he also recently found another company for servers or something? I remember seeing him get like 1st place (or top 10) for one of the days on Advent of Code like a year or two ago. Thats very difficult, like Olympic swimmer of programmer type of thing.

I have yet to be impressed. I’m not very convinced*. I asked for format type mappings between Pipewire, WebGpu, and Vulcan and both ChatGPT and Gemini failed very badly only providing the most common type mappings. This should be a wildly easy task, something any programmer or even beginner programmers can complete. It’s just very boring, mundane, buffer shifting like work. It almost feels like pencil pushing.

Why couldn’t they do it?

_

The creator of Go has an infamous quote on the language.

The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike

source

In the past I’ve recommended onions for port forwarding. It’s more simple than alternatives and using the network is free.

The authors or Tor really don’t want their network used for torrenting though. They do support JS, and by extension I would argue the authors intended for their users to be able to use YouTube. In comparison to video, git traffic is insignificant. I don’t see anything wrong with it, but then again, users of torrents don’t usually have issues downloading without port forwarding.

@emotional_soup_88@programming.dev

After thinking about it for a moment, if you don’t want to pay for a VPS, I think you can run a hidden service with Tor then just use the onion address to ssh back into the computer. I found this guide. I haven’t done it, but it seems like it should work.

I just use autossh for it.

I run an ssh connection to a VPS I pay like $5, which forwards a port there. The screen in the following command isn’t required, but I have it so I don’t have to keep the terminal window open.

screen -d -m -S autossh.eastusa.keepalive autossh -M 33333 -R VPS_IP_HERE:5555:localhost:22 root@VPS_IP_HERE

Then from other computers, to connect back

ssh -L 5555:localhost:5555 root@VPS_IP_HERE
ssh root@localhost -p 5555

For remote computers connecting back, the first ssh connects to the VPS and forwards a port to the remote computer. Then the 2nd ssh connection uses the forwarded port to complete the ssh connection to the computer behind the IP that can’t port forward.