That’s irrelevant. I’m talking about what the researchers wrote, how that relates to their own prior research, and how Arstechnica reported on it. I am not making and have not made any claims about whether or not developers are actually more productive.
Wow, they are at best cherry picking the article they cite on productivity with AI, if not outright trying to lie. They say
Last year, an METR study found that open source coders using AI tools were 19 percent less productive than those who didn’t use them, even as those AI-using coders said they felt 20 percent more productive. But in a February update on a follow-up study, those same researchers said that “we believe it is likely that developers are more sped up from AI tools now—in early 2026—compared to our estimates from early 2025,” citing early raw results and conversations with study participants.
But if you, y’know, actually read this February update, you would see that the researchers are lamenting the fact that they cannot draw conclusions effectively because of the proliferation of AI use. To wit, they say:
Altogether, these issues make it challenging to interpret our central estimate, and we believe it is likely a bad proxy for the real productivity impact of AI tools on these developers.
In fact here is the full passage Arstechnica cherry-picked from (emphasis mine):
Based on conversations with study participants, we believe it is likely that developers are more sped up from AI tools now — in early 2026 — compared to our estimates from early 2025. However, because of the selection effects in our experiment, our data is only very weak evidence for the size of this increase.
Based on conversations, which is to say, not on their data. This after the study a year prior which suggested developers are not reliable reporters of their own productivity.
I am just going off the abstract, but they do not claim and I see no reason to believe that the parameter they constructed has a straightforward relationship with wall-clock time. It’s just a number where you can construct equations that make this number “look like” time. There is no claim that this number is related to “true” time.
Put another way, I see no reason that an interval over this parameter should correspond to any interval of “real” time.
Yes, that seems like a rough analogy at least
So they are not actually measuring time. If you look at the actual article (which I linked in another comment), what they did is experimentally assign a number to the different states of their system just based on that state, but in such a way that these numbers naturally order the states. Then they did the math to predict how their system behaves using this number as if it were time, and those predictions match what they experimentally observed.
The point is that in this experiment the “time” is an emergent property of the system, and not something presumed. So this a stepping stone towards determining if the real time that we all experience is a similar emergent phenomenon, or at least helps other physicists investigate this possibility.
The “mini-universe” stuff is pop-sci BS.
So here is the actual article and not the pop-sci woo: https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/1h9j-df4k
What’s interesting to me from the abstract is the fact that they experimentally construct an ordered parameter, derive an effective Schroedinger equation that uses this parameter as if it were time, and then show that this equation actually does properly describe the experimentally observed evolution of the system.
I don’t understand what the issue is/could be. “Respectively” is clearly functioning syntactically as an adverb, and the sentence “Bob, Alicia, and Siobhan are a teacher, plumber, and electrician” without the “respectively” is a valid sentence where its two noun phrases happen to be conjunctions of other nouns.
A sentence like “Bob, Alicia, and Siobhan are a teacher, plumber, electrician, and astronaut, respectively” is equally valid syntactically, it’s just invalid semantically.
Here is the actual study, and the questionnaire they used can be found attached as Supplement 1
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2846565
In many programming languages, phrases are shortened to reduce the time taken to write programs.
I really do not think this is why; the amount of time saved is miniscule, especially with autocomplete. It’s so that more can fit on the screen at one time so you can better comprehend chunks/lines of code. There is also probably a historical aspect where the size of code on disk (or paper!) used to matter more.
I think one of the main points of this study is exactly to show that studying such smaller quantities would be worthwhile and could have tangible health implications
The very first sentence is
A new study examined the impact of alcohol consumption in healthy adults who did not report drinking more than the accepted ‘low-risk’ alcohol limits.
Which makes it very clear that by “little” in the title (they do not say “little” in the article) they mean “below the low-risk limit”, and that “low-risk” is a technically defined term. Here is also the very first sentence of the abstract of the paper which the article is about, which they link to and is free to read:
Low-level alcohol consumption at or below current guidelines (≤1 standard drink equivalent/day for females, ≤2 standard drink equivalents/day for males)
What more do you want?
That is literally the entire point of the study. How is that misleading?
The title is really missing a keyword from the actual quote… (emphasis mine)
Not only that, but it’s possible to kill almost any NPC in the game…
Something I see a lot that I think blocks understanding is “the dimensions”, “the 3rd dimension”, “the 4th dimension”, etc. This is wrong.
Dimensionality is a property of something. It is a number which describes some aspect of a thing. As others have said, it corresponds to the number of “independent directions” needed to describe a thing, but these directions need not be uniquely definable in any way, and most certainly you cannot say “this is the first one, this is the second one”, etc.
As a small example, just as you can say North and East are two independent directions on a map, you can also say South and North North East are as well; either of these facts on their own imply that a map is at least two dimensional. The fact that you cannot find a third independent direction means a map is two dimensional.
You don’t need separate disks like people are saying. You can have two separate EFI System Partitions (ESP) on the same disk, the one Windows makes and one that you make for just Linux so Windows isn’t ever messing with it.
I’ve run Windows 10 & Linux on the same disk through many Windows updates without issue.
And actually, if you’re never going to update Windows, then there would be no reason you can’t have them use the same ESP.