In April 2016, Rovi acquired TiVo for $1.1 billion.[8]
In December 2019, it was announced that TiVo would merge with Xperi Corporation. The merger completed in May 2020.[9]
Xperi itself also split apart in 2022, so it's effectively 3 companies removed from its original roots. Basically at this point it is only valuable for the vague nostalgia consumers have for the brand.
If everyone is using LLMs to write new code, and LLMs are trained on existing code from the internet, that creates an enormous barrier to the adoption of new programming languages, because no new code will be written in them, therefore LLMs will never learn to write the code. It is a self-reinforcing cycle.
I've experienced this to some degree already in using LLMs to write Zig code (ironically, for my own pet programming language). Because Zig is still evolving so quickly, often the code the LLM produces is wrong because it's based on examples targeting incompatible prior versions of the language. Alternatively, if you ask an LLM to try to write code for a more esoteric language (e.g., Faust), the results are generally pretty terrible.
Fine-tuning existing base models on your programming language is pretty practical. [1] You might need a very good and large dataset but that's hardly a problem for a programming language you're generating because you better have the ability generate programs for fuzzing your compiler anyway.
[1] There are a lot of models that achieve this. E.g. Goedel-Prover-V2-32B [2] is a model based off of Qwen3-32B and fine tuned on Lean proofs. It works extremely well. I personally tried further fine tuning this model on Agda and although my dataset was pretty sloppy and small, it was pretty successful. If you actually sit down and generate a large dataset with variety it's pretty reachable to fine tune it for any similar prog lang.
> enormous barrier to the adoption of new programming languages, because no new code will be written in them, therefore LLMs will never learn to write the code
Let’s see.
I’ve vibe-coded some apps with TypeScript and react, not knowing react at all, because I thought it’s the most exemplified framework online.
But I came to a point where my app was too buggy and diverged, and being unable to debug it, I refactored it to Vue, since I personally know it better.
My point is that just because there’s more training data, the quietly is not necessarily excellent; I ended up with a mixture of conflicting idioms seasoned react developers would have frowned upon.
Picking a less exemplified language and supplementing with more of your knowledge of the language might yield better results. E.g. while the AI can’t write better Rust on its own, I don’t mind contributing with Rust code myself more often.
> But I came to a point where my app was too buggy and diverged, and being unable to debug it, I refactored it to Vue, since I personally know it better.
One of the many pitfalls with using an llm to write code. It's very easy to find yourself with a codebase you know nothing about that you can't progress any further because it keeps breaking.
Let's not underestimate LLM's ability to do in-context learning. Perhaps it can just read the new lang's docs and apply what it already knows from other languages
But didn't LLMs read all the math books and can't really do arithmetics (they need special modes / hacks / python to do it I think)?
So why would they be able to "read" the docs and use that knowledge except up to pattern matching level. That's why I also assume, that tons of examples with results would do better than lang docs, but I haven't tested it yet.
While I don't like to argue for LLM competency, you have to remember that at the end of the day LLMs are word generators.
They will always be bad at math unless there is a major structural change.
So while they cant learn arithmetic they should be able to learn programming languages given that they are way closer to what it was designed and trained for.
What if we require LLM to write anything in Brainf**? If the language design is small enough to insert into our message every time, maybe it can work well.
People were saying we would all be getting in our cars and taking a nap on our morning commute. We are clearly still a pretty long ways off from self-driving being as ubiquitous as it was claimed it would be.
There are always extremists with absurd timelines on any topic! (Didn't people think we'd be on Mars in 2020?) But this one? In the right cities, plenty of people take a Waymo morning commute every day. I'd say self-driving cars have been pretty successful at meeting people's expectations — or maybe you and I are thinking of different people.
The expectation of a "self-driving car" is that you can get in it and take any trip that a human driver could take. The "in certain cities" is a huge caveat. If we accept that sort of geographical limitation, why not say that self-driving "cars" have been a thing since driverless metro systems started showing up in the 1980s?
And other people were a lot more moderate but still assumed we'd get self-driving soon, with caveats, and were bang on the money.
So it's not as ubiquitous as the most optimistic estimates suggested. We're still at a stage where the tech is sufficiently advanced that seeing them replace a large proportion of human taxi services now seems likely to have been reduced to a scaling / rollout problem rather than primarily a technology problem, and that's a gigantic leap.
The story of the bank built from bricks sent through the mail reminds me of the time I completed a move from Austin to Boston by packing all my possessions into rubber tubs and sending them by parcel post.
The delivery date was a range, and I wasn't there on the day of the first attempted delivery. When I called the post office about it, their response (in a thick Boston accent) was, "oh, so you're the tub guy, huh?"
All in all, it was a really convenient way to execute a cross-country move, assuming you don't have a lot of stuff!
Back in that brief window when Amazon was bribing USPS to deliver on Sundays and I could get 50-75lbs of bird seed for $12 shipped I had lots of fascinating Sunday mornings watching postal service workers swear at me and heave bags at my front door.
Or a TON of checked bags. Ran in to a guy in the airport once checking 10 bags. He bought the cheapest suitcase sets he could find, packed what he could, and sold the rest.
When I moved internationally, I found out about the ‘M-Bag’ service. The post office gives you real mail sacks (hefty, expensive seeming things!), which you can directly fill with books and printer matter (and nothing else!). They’re then tagged after sealing the drawstring, and shipped internationally!
I’m sure the USPS wants those sacks back, but the post office in the UK, where I had them sent, was just perplexed by them and told me to keep them.
I don't know about the author's case, but often asset purchase agreements will make the principals / shareholders party to the agreement personally with specific liability provisions. If there are no assets left in the company, the buyer has no recourse against it, since it is essentially an empty shell (in certain cases, insurance could be an exception to this). As a buyer, you will want to have some protection against issues you don't know about at the time of sale (perhaps because you weren't told about them, or the seller was negligent).
Some words in Shakespeare have different meanings today or have simply left standard usage. I don't think the presence of a word in Shakespeare means it is de facto good style to use today.
From a correctness stand-point, I think a descriptionist would be satisfied with an attested usage, especially from such a source. From a style point of view, I still find myself feeling embarrassed for the author when I encounter this usage (which is my own problem).
Maybe because JS files (specifically add-ons) run from the local filesystem are given escalated privileges compared to normal usage, perhaps for ease of development. I'm just speculating, though.
I think it’s a limitation on all extensions applied by Chrome/Firefox. My guess is to stop extensions from making you force install more extensions or something...
(Also what’s up Andrew! YC S09 represent :wave_emoji:)
If you're interested in these challenges (and trust me, these things all seem simpler than they are in practice), consider coming and joining us at Philo (https://about.philo.com/jobs/)! We're hiring for basically all technical (and plenty of non-technical) roles/specialties/platforms, so if you're excited about dragging TV kicking and screaming into streaming age, drop me an email: andrew@philo.com
We have a Little Free Library (https://www.instagram.com/paintedladieslibrary/) that we painted/decorated to look like our house using a laser cutter and a lot of wood glue to mimic the decorative woodwork. Recently I installed a door sensor connected to a Raspberry Pi to collect analytics on how often people open it and how long they browse for. In the past week, it has been opened around 200 times with an average browse time of just over a minute.
I am also "this person", and while it feels awkward to ask, I think it's important to provide at least some social pressure against the adtech megaplatforms. (Similarly, I feel that it is completely acceptable to ask for a .txt, pastebin, or archive link whenever someone posts a medium.com link.)
Ha, yes — I haven't been at Facebook since well before they acquired Instagram, but you're right to note a certain amount of irony in the situation! Of course, I don't mind the comment, and happy to post another way to see what we did with the project!
It shows some of the design elements, too, so maybe folks would be interested in that. I haven't written up anything about the door sensor part, but that was pretty basic, and mostly an excuse to learn about using the Raspberry Pi.
not that its hard but just a reminder that its easier than ever to set up a static html page for this sort of thing on github pages or just stick images in a repos readme, and surprisingly easy to update it automatically from a folder (or webscraped iCloud photo album set to "public") with a tiny script that also automates IG posts if you want to support people both on and off socmedia - speaking of which anyone have opinions on instapy?
