agentultra

11 ms·

1.
by agentultra 4d ago
I’m the opposite. I don’t believe there is a royal road to understanding anything. For me, the process of programming involves frustration. That is usually when I find my greatest insights. Syntax isn’t a big deal. Names either. You can loo
2.
by agentultra 5d ago
The EPA hasn’t been able to regulate anything since it’s been gutted by the current administration. Of course it’s going to scrap rules. We’re not even allowed to measure the effects of climate change.
3.
by agentultra 6d ago
> In practice, when you reach for a database engine you're actually reaching for four basic features: unique constraints, transactions, indices, and history tables. That might be a very specific assumption. What about serializabilit
4.
by agentultra 7d ago
You can work around 12. with constraint satisfaction solvers. After generating the level structure, emplace an entrance and exit such that they are maximally apart. And emplace a strong monster in one of the rooms around the exit. And empla
5.
by agentultra 7d ago
No. Dear lord no. One thing I am getting really tired of is the growing inability to distinguish legitimate sources. I don’t want to have to play, “can you tell the difference?” It’s not fun being had by a liar. I want human written content
6.
by agentultra 11d ago
We already know how to solve for climate change. All that is lacking is political will. Not AI.
7.
by agentultra 11d ago
Why not both?
8.
by agentultra 11d ago
> just about everything in modern life, from streaming Netflix to running a dishwasher, consumes water at levels that can be portrayed as wasteful by hair-shirt environmentalists. Ad-hominems in an Economist article. This reads more like
9.
by agentultra 11d ago
Big congratulations to the world leaders and policy makers who were at the signing of the Paris Accord. Went home. And did very little about it. Now we output more CO2 faster than we ever have in our entire history. At least the economy is
10.
by agentultra 12d ago
It is a bit of a pedantic argument but I get upset when people misuse the term, abstraction , and can feel the impulse to write a blog post like this. I think it’s important to make clear the RL part and the alignment and parameter tweakin
11.
by agentultra 15d ago
> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them This might be true in a true, free market without monopolistic collusion and the abandonment of antitrust regulation and enforcement in the US. In many cases people don’t
12.
by agentultra 16d ago
I wrote an interpreter in Zig not too long ago. I’d definitely recommend more folks try it out. It’s a straight-forward enough project to dip your toes in emulation and see if it’s your jam. And it’s not a big enough project that you’ll get
13.
by agentultra 18d ago
Not that much of a difference for the average or lower classes of people that outnumber the rich by quite a lot. It would have a great and positive impact for them.
14.
by agentultra 21d ago
I don’t like LSPs. They’re slow and bloated. I’ve been using clangd but I think I’ll stop. It’s slow as molasses. It constantly tries to insert headers into source files that cause compilation issues. There are easier and faster ways to jum
15.
by agentultra 23d ago
It was already difficult to maintain before these tools went mainstream. I’ve worked with many a senior developer who couldn’t write a hash function, didn’t understand memory allocation, and could go on all day about best practices and lint
16.
by agentultra 23d ago
In an ideal world where the market is perfect, maybe. But in reality entrenched market players have access to political influence that lets them stay entrenched. They’ve spent a lot of money since the Industrial Revolution to make sure we n
17.
by agentultra 23d ago
There’s no such thing as destiny. You could also walk out your front door and get hit be a meteor tomorrow.
18.
by agentultra 23d ago
Most 17 year olds I know don’t want anything to do with AI and see the entire industry as an existential threat. Nothing wrong with learning the theory and understanding the papers. Getting to that point you’ll have to get your fundamentals
19.
by agentultra 26d ago
I’d pay for a search engine these days if it meant good results and no AI. Kagi almost fits the bill. Removing paywalled links is a great feature that any future competitor should pick up!
20.
by agentultra 26d ago
128-bit integers aren’t part of the standard (yet)… but the point is right; platform and architecture matter. Many aspects of them are defined by the compiler implementation. Also ABI compatibility isn’t part of the C specification. Most im
21.
by agentultra 1mo ago
Blacklisting is a shady practice, unfortunately. They generally work on ranges and you don’t get much of a say. Most blacklist maintainers have a way for you to report a false positive. Responsiveness varies. Most maintainers will drop your
22.
by agentultra 1mo ago
It’s not that bad, but it does require some effort. I self-host. I spend far more time using and enjoying email than I do maintaining the infrastructure. However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like
23.
by agentultra 1mo ago
It’s designed to “feel” that way. It’s a computer program, not a person. People made it. Don’t get fooled into treating these systems like they’re people or intelligent collaborators. At the best of times these chat/agent/loop sys
24.
by agentultra 1mo ago
You have to be able to write the software yourself in order to judge the results and get good software out. Otherwise the system claims the goals are met, the tests pass, and the human driving the system puts up a new PR. If they don’t know
25.
by agentultra 1mo ago
Tania Aelbi wrote a good one of her trip. I’m working towards a solo circumnavigation myself. Love reading about the stories of others.
26.
by agentultra 1mo ago
Or anyone else! This isn’t for the protection of kids. It’s for the protection of profits by surveillance capitalism.
27.
by agentultra 1mo ago
I think the controversial part is that an engineer cannot talk to or understand customers.
28.
by agentultra 1mo ago
A test doesn’t prove much. Highly experienced programmers seem to have a hard time understanding this. Why do we have tens of thousands of test cases and we still find new errors constantly? Why is our software so bloated and slow? We do we
29.
by agentultra 1mo ago
Apparently it is. Modern companies seem to prefer dysfunction over anything else. I have been trying to understand why for my whole career.
30.
by agentultra 1mo ago
I don’t disagree. I’ve worked on teams that definitely valued the non-coding skills more and it showed in their inability to deliver on certain requirements… mainly performance and stability. But these are skills that can be taught to indiv

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