The main benefit of C is that it is especially readable by humans.
I think that’s what makes it so common in codebases that have long term maintenance stories.
(I say that because my personal project has me reading great loads of C written by diverse authors and I am surprised at how easy it is to figure out, compared to most other languages)
- The out-parameter of strclone. How annoying! I don't think this adds information. Just return a pointer, man. (And instead of defending against the possibility that someone is doing some weird string pooling, how about jut disallow that - malloc and free are your friends.)
- Avoiding void. As mentioned in another comment, it's useful for polymorphism. You can do quite nice polymorphic code in C and then you end up using void a lot.
Yes that section raised my hackles too, to the point where I'm suspicious of the whole article.
The solution, in my opinion, is to either document that strclone()'s return should be free()'d, or alternately add a strfree() declaration to the header (which might just be `#define strfree(x) free(x)`).
Adding a `char **out` arg does not, in my opinion, document that the pointer should be free()'d.
> AI inference demand is directed at improving actual earnings. Companies are deploying intelligence to reduce customer acquisition costs, lower operational expenses, and increase worker productivity. The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical.
That's a cool dream, but my question is: is it happening?
Out of the things you listed the only ones that seem plausible are translation team and data entry team, though even there, I'd want humans to deslop the output.
Source: Reality. You are probably already communicating with people who you have no idea are using AI to translate their messages.
I have used AI translation professionally for a few years, and between hundreds of people in long conversations, nobody has ever asked if the text has been translated. Before AI translators, you could write at most one message and people would notice.
I think that is it happening is an important question, but “does the consumer actually want it to happen” should be equally important. It won’t be, because the c suite will just make the decision for us all, but it ought to be.
If done properly you shouldn't be able to tell. A really good voice AI assistant is indistinguishable from front line support reading through a script, and potentially a few steps better.
Meanwhile I can't get a hold of my landlord because they removed both their support email and online formular in favor of an AI chatbot, which means I can't get them to repair my heaters and have been without heating since thursday
Historically, this is not how technology that improves productivity has affected the economy. I’d encourage you to learn more about economics and the history of automation.
Large banks have tens of thousands of call center employees and a large % of calls they handle are perfectly solvable with a good AI bot. They are working very hard to cut call center staff as quickly as possible.
People don't realize how much a call to customers service costs. Back when I was at MSFT, a call to tech support for our product costs $20 to have someone pick up the phone. Since we were selling low margin HW, a single call to tech support completely erased the profit from that product's sale.
Layoffs have already happened and they will continue to happen.
One can argue this is a positive, as a customer if I can push a few buttons and issue a voice command to an AI to fix my problem instead of waiting on hold, that is a net positive. Also the price of goods will drop since the expected cost of customer service factored into the product price will drop.
E.g. $30 / support call, 1 in 10 customers call support during the lifetime of a product, $3 saved, but the way costs are structured, $3 saved in manufacturing can end up as nearly $10 off the final retail price of a product.
(And in competitive markets prices do drop when cost savings are found!)
This replacement has already happened. Everyone who can has long since replaced their phone support with a set of menus that end in "use the website". When you need to talk to the human you still need to talk to the human.
>One can argue this is a positive, as a customer if I can push a few buttons and issue a voice command to an AI to fix my problem instead of waiting on hold, that is a net positive.
If you could do it through the website then you would be much happier than having to argue with a chatbot. And if you can't do it through the website, there aren't going to let a robot do it on your behalf.
"Costs $20" really means "one of those poor call center reps got paid $20, barely enough to pay rent." Once you solve the supposed problem, all those people will be on the streets.
Those who work at call centers are already desperate for any job and have zero savings. I'm not sure where they will down even further. I guess the governments will have to pick them up at the end: give them some fictious jobs and pay the minimum out of taxes from the remaining populace who still have jobs.
- How is Rust only one order of magnitude faster than Python?
- How is Python that much faster than Node.js?
So I looked at the benchmark repo.
These benchmarks mean nothing folks!
Each of these benchmarks is just a SHA256 hash. This is NOT a valid way to compare CPUs, except if the only thing you will ever do with the CPU is to execute SHA256 hashes.
Hash functions are not representative of the performance of:
- Compression or decompression (of text, video, or anything really)
- Parsing
- Business logic (which is often dominated by pointer chasing)
So, you can safely ignore the claims of this post. They mean nothing.
Been doing Rust lambdas for 4 years now, Rust is absurdly fast, especially when compared to non compiled languages. If anything, Rust is even faster than those benchmarks in real world workloads.
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