Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 17, 2023

• AMD releases source code for FidelityFX FSR2 v2.2

  Last year AMD announced FSR version 2.2 and today AMD has actually released the source code on GitHub for FidelityFX FSR2 v2.2.

• Flyer: Open Source Messaging UI Library for Flutter and React Native

  Actively maintained, community-driven chat UI implementation with an optional Firebase BaaS.

• Why Chatbots Sometimes Act Weird and Spout Nonsense

  Most people use neural networks every day. It’s the technology that identifies people, pets and other objects in images posted to internet services like Google Photos. It allows Siri and Alexa, the talking voice assistants from Apple and Amazon, to recognize the words you speak. And it’s what translates between English and Spanish on services like Google Translate.

  Neural networks are very good at mimicking the way humans use language. And that can mislead us into thinking the technology is more powerful than it really is.

• Programming AIs worry me

  Now, here’s some important context: Bertrand Meyer’s entire deal is software correctness. He invented Eiffel. He trademarked Design By Contract (tee em). He regularly rants about how SEs don’t know about logic. He didn’t notice the error. Oh, and this article had 114 comments on Hacker News and exactly one commenter (of 48) noticed.

  Using AI-assisted code changes our work from writing code to proofreading code. And that’s a problem.

• Demonstrating a LLM using children

  But that's (very) roughly how these new breed of Automatic Improvisers work.

• Google's chatbot panic

  The really remarkable thing isn't just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn't links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar – even more remarkable is that Google agrees.

  Microsoft has nothing to lose. It's spent billions on Bing, a search-engine no one voluntarily uses. Might as well try something so stupid it might just work. But why is Google, a monopolist who has a 90+% share of search worldwide, jumping off the same bridge as Microsoft?

  There's a delightful Mastodon thread about this, written by Dan Hon, where he compares the chatbot-enshittified front ends to Bing and Google to Tweedledee and Tweedledum: [...]

• Flutter: Best 18 UI Packages to Spice up Your App Interface

  Flutter is an open source UI software framework and development kit for building mobile (Android, iOS), Desktop and web apps.

  It is originally created by Google on top of the Dart programming languages.

• Computing the UTF-8 size of a Latin 1 string quickly (AVX edition)

  Computers represent strings using bytes. Most often, we use the Unicode standard to represent characters in bytes. The universal format to exchange strings online is called UTF-8. It can represent over a million characters while retaining compatibility with the ancient ASCII format.

• This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 482

• Why Aren't Programming Language Specifications Comprehensive?

  Although I explained in that post that programming language specifications and implementations are separate things, I didn't explain why it's ever considered acceptable for different implementations of a language to produce different output for a given program. In this post I'm going to attempt to correct that oversight, and to do so in a way that I hope is relatively approachable. As that suggests, I will be as informal as possible, since I've found that more formal treatments of this subject can obscure where it has a day-to-day impact on programming.

  Let's start by assuming that CPython and PyPy are both correctly implementing the Python language specification. Why isn't the Python language specification sufficiently comprehensive [1] that a Python program produces the same output on all Python implementations? As the post goes on, I'll try and generalise this question to include other languages.

• PostgreSQL in Python Using Psycopg2

  Are you a Python programmer learning to work with PostgreSQL? If so, this tutorial on psycopg2, the PostgreSQL connector for Python, is for you. You can connect to PostgreSQL databases and run queries—all from within your Python script—using the psycopg2 adapter.

  In this tutorial, you’ll learn the basics of using psycopg2 in Python to do the following: [...]

• PyCon DE 2023

  PyConDE & PyData Berlin 2023, Berlin Germany. Where Pythonistas in Germany can meet to learn about new and upcoming Python libraries, tools, software and data science.