Virtual Threads aren't quite the same as green threads (they don't block the OS thread) and they work extremely well now.

That's interesting because I remember people talking about Rust green threads as M:N mapping, which seems to be the only difference.

They are not even remotely the same, there is no reason to compare them at all.

Nice site, but missing the Law of Conservation of Misery.

> A lot of it was unfortunately organizational politics

The hardest bugs in my experience are those where your only source of vital information is a third party who is straight-up lying to you.

Sometimes it isn't outright lying. I have had the issues with hardware, API and SDK documentation being subtly different from the product as shipped. With hardware with a mixture of revisions, some conforming to doco and other differing and even their engineers not being clear about which is which.

My recollection is that before subreddits were a thing, Reddit was not that far off how this place is now.

On wikipedia: don't trust it blindly and always read the talk page.

The original is almost impossible to debug when something inevitably goes wrong too.

I have encountered dozens of places where streaming API calls have been reworked into imperative by whoever ends up maintaining it just so they can figure out why the hell it is breaking in some unforseen edge case.

Side-effects do not mix with lazy on-demand streams! This is unfortunately a problem with bringing functional programming constructs to a language with idiomatic pervasive mutation.

BTW, this is a non-issue with C# 1.0 and later due to `yield return` syntax.

Sorry, I'm skeptical -- how exactly does a 'yield return' resolve the divergences between functional programming & mutable data structures?

My layman's impression was that 'yield return' was largely syntactic sugar around an iterator, rather similar to Java.

The comment you responded too were talking about debug experience.

One of the most prescient of the 20th dystopian novels was Fahrenheit 451.

This was not about a totalitarian government burning books.

This was about a population numbing themselves with bright colours, bland affirmation and meaningless feeds of facts. With vacuous, superficial interaction with friends and family through screens. They burned the books themselves, so they didn't have to encounter anything challenging.

I first encountered this at SCEE in 2008.

A while ago, Google photos autogenerated a video for me from my photo library. It was about a minute long, stitched together dozens of photos, called "dog video", and with a horrifying yapping dog soundtrack.

Every single photo was of a cat.

I have to say I was humbled by the amount of human and computing power that had gone into developing this system over the years, that could achieve such a complicated, impressive technical feat, without requiring any effort or money on my part, and yet also be 100% wrong.

> be 100% wrong

This really is quite impressive. It's rare for humans to do worse than random guessing on tasks, and they almost never do much worse. There's something almost charming about the ability of AI to put real effort into actively avoiding correct answers.

Really it sounds like an error somewhere else, rather than the AI system. More like the ID for cat and dog were switched.

If this is the Google Photos folder system, I suspect the problem was that the IDs and the bucketing were de-linked.

Photos creates folders for you based on identified themes, and then adds new photos to them as they're taken. I haven't checked, but I'm guessing it doesn't relabel existing buckets to avoid causing confusion. And I'm not sure whether bucketing is done by assessing theme or similarity to other photos in a folder. If it's the latter, the system could have hit the confidence threshold to make a Dog folder out of a few images, then ceaselessly dumped similar-looking photos (i.e. cats) into that bucket.

At a large organisation I worked at years ago we used to call it Coder Shopping - when a manager would do the rounds trying to find someone who would say "yes" in a situation like this.

Invariably there would be someone who would, and if you were the person who had initially refused you probably wouldn't even be aware that it had happened until the bug reports came in...