dcminter

On every occasion you could have made exactly the same point.

Perhaps, but why are you so convinced we're so close when we weren't all the other times?

It would be rather glorious if the company that ate Sun Microsystems in the aftermath of the dot com crash were itself to be vanquished by a bubble pop.

The dot com crash was a thing though. The bubble burst. It's just that there was real value there so some of the companies survived and prospered. Figuring out which was which was absolutely not …

"AI" has been doing that since the 1950s though. The problem is that each time we define something and say "only an intelligent machine can X" we find out that X is woefully inad…

This is true. The old original series (and later) Star Trek computers being able to interpret normal idiomatic humam speech and act upon it was, to those in the know, hilariously unrealistic until ve…

"Empty vessels make the loudest noise" as my headmaster used to rather pointedly quote to me from time to time.

I think it's worth engaging with even if this guy's a troll (not saying he is) because it's not that freakish a view in the real world. What are the arguments to counter this kind of …

Well frankly your lack of concrete arguments makes it seem a lot like you don't actually understand what's going on here. I'm enjoying the new LLM based tooling a lot, but nothing abo…

The Java one (Idea) got a lot better in the last year or two too; I couldn't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but it did make me wonder if I'd turned on an AI feature by mistake! I'm …

> this is not an intellectually honest claim Don't do that, it's not cool. > Take [...] a step further, and imagine the systems in 2035 How about imagining AI slop multiplied by 10 yea…

Define "make decisions" such that an 'if' statement does not qualify but an llm does. LLMs may be a stepping stone to AGI. It's impressive tech. But nobody's proven anyth…

> we are on the cusp of intelligent machines That's an extremely speculative view that has been fashionable at several points in the last 50 years.

If they're that profound you should be able to come up with one example though, right? Not that I think you're wrong, but come on - make the case! I have the very unoriginal view that - ye…

I'm comparing object references (pointers) not the value boxed by the object (what the pointer points to). For performance reasons boxed Short objects are interned when they represent values in t…

It was such a lifesaver for doing raw database stuff. The boilerplate for making sure Connection, PreparedStatement, ResultSet and so on were all released properly was a huge pain before that.

Maven was peak Java build tool. I detest Gradle. Some people just hate XML enough to doom us all.

You can disable them at runtime (e.g. in prod) to avoid the performance overhead once you're satisfied the codebase is thoroughly enough tested. For some things like requiring arguments to be non…

> Are there linters for this sort of thing? Yes and they're pretty good so it's rarely an issue in practice. Using == on object references will indeed usually get you yelled at by the lin…

No, it's a 6 month release cadence. You might be confusing the initial release with a point release which are less regular. Edit: oh, my bad, I see the article author had the wrong year for 24. …

Or my favourite... Short w = 42; Short x = 42; out.println(w == x); // true Short y = 1042; Short z = 1042; out.println(y == z); // false

I very rarely see assertions in "real" Java code; I think the author is right - in fact the place I see them the most often is in unit tests where they've been used by mistake in plac…

Some of the weirder choices have been the result of a desire to avoid making breaking changes to JVM bytecode. Also there was a long period when changes were very lumpy - it could be multiple years …

Yeah, I know there are even oddballs using it for HFT and the like - I like Java a lot, but even I find that a bit peculiar. Edit: actually, if someone here is using it for something like that I…

Well, it was annoying until autoboxing came in. // Before autoboxing list.add(new Integer(42)); // After autoboxing list.add(42); Mostly it's a non-issue now. If…

One of the more amusing bugs I had to figure out resulted from the fact that some of the autoboxed values get cached, resulting in peculiar behaviour when someone managed to reflectively change the bo…

Last time I tried to make an international transfer from my British bank account it couldn't accept destination names with any accented characters. An international transfer. Sheesh.

I usually flag such stories when I see them. Per the Site guidelines: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interestin…