The Cafes

Too often I hear developers insist that they can’t do something because it’s “too hard,” and what they mean is not that it requires hundreds of A100 GPUs and petabytes of RAM or that it’s equivalent to solving the halting problem.

Yesterday I was reminded of a common failing in machine learning algorithms that again suggests they aren’t really thinking or understanding.

AI limitations I’ve noticed lately: * Gemini can’t render the math for a Taylor series on an iPad * Github Copilot, with any of the models it supports, can’t run my tests because VSCode can’t handle JUnit 3 * Gemini doesn’t know if it’s running in AI Stud…

Lately I’ve heard developers claim that it’s now OK to avoid specifying the character set when creating an InputStreamReader or String, or otherwise converting bytes into characters because Java now (JDK 18 and later) uses UTF-8 as its default character e…

I’ve released version 1.4.0 of XOM, my open source library for processing XML with Java.

Often in a code review I’ll point out that public signatures are being changed, and we can’t do that in a minor release.

I’ve released version 1.0.1 of the proper nouns library.

I’ve heard from way too many projects that they can’t sign their applications and binaries.

More than 15 years ago, I wrote “You Can’t Trust the Cloud” and promptly got called in for an “uncomfortable conversation with my manager” because someone thought the thesis was incompatible with Google’s business plans.

I have found something Gemini is relatively good for.