bluetomcat

7 ms·

1.
by bluetomcat 6d ago
They are ignorant about the elephant in the room. The input language of a compiler is a formally-specified grammar with well-defined semantics for each operation. It generally abstracts the computation process over a von-Neumann machine, ad
2.
How I shamed the slop machine(bbuyukliev.blogspot.com)
4 points by bluetomcat 19d ago|0 comments
3.
by bluetomcat 26d ago
It has no semantic depth. The sentences and the paragraphs are a statistically viable derivation of existing human text, but once you try to grasp the whole thing with its temporal and spatial dimensions, you are left with a blurry mess tha
4.
by bluetomcat 26d ago
> Why are we using C anyhow? Because "cc prog.c; ./a.out" offers you the most direct way to interact with your system. Because "man 2 mmap" documents a C API. Because "nm" lists your functions and globa
5.
Code is the hard part(bbuyukliev.blogspot.com)
7 points by bluetomcat 1mo ago|1 comments
6.
by bluetomcat 1mo ago
Abstractions are ultimately a tool for humans to manage complexity in a particular class of problem, and to reduce cognitive load. Good abstractions come from imaginative human brains with taste and lived experience. Abstractions are also m
7.
Are we living in an age of statistical mediocrity?(bbuyukliev.blogspot.com)
1 points by bluetomcat 2mo ago|1 comments
8.
LLM coding is the wrong layer of abstraction(bbuyukliev.blogspot.com)
3 points by bluetomcat 6mo ago|1 comments
9.
by bluetomcat 6mo ago
No. Plausible code is syntactically-correct BS disguised as a solution, hiding a countless amount of weird semantic behaviours, invariants and edge cases. It doesn't reflect a natural and common-sense thought process that a human may f
10.
by bluetomcat 7mo ago
We went from expressing computation via formal, mostly non-ambiguous languages with strict grammar and semantics, to a fuzzy and flaky probabilistic system that tries to mimic code that was already written. What could go wrong?
11.
Show HN: Shell script and text database for vintage Lego Pirates collections(github.com)
3 points by bluetomcat 7mo ago|0 comments
12.
by bluetomcat 9mo ago
You are correct. The final output was polished by ChatGPT, but I originally presented the basic ideas in a few paragraphs. The LLM added a sense of flow and persuasiveness which are somehow lacking in my rather dry and non-native English wr
13.
The choice between Rust and C-derived languages is not only about memory safety(bbuyukliev.blogspot.com)
45 points by bluetomcat 9mo ago|19 comments
14.
by bluetomcat 9mo ago
It starts from the identifier. At every stage, it outputs a sub-expression which is the “mirrored use” and corresponds to the boxed representation below it. When it reaches the top of the expression, it prints the final type of the expressi
15.
Show HN: Cdecl-dump - represent C declarations visually(github.com)
35 points by bluetomcat 9mo ago|13 comments
16.
by bluetomcat 11mo ago
And consequently, "you need 32GB of RAM just to be future-proof for the next 3 years".
17.
From epoll to io_uring's Multishot Receives(codemia.io)
16 points by bluetomcat 11mo ago|1 comments
18.
by bluetomcat 11mo ago
Because in C, every allocation incurs a responsibility to track its lifetime and to know who will eventually free it. Copying and moving buffers is also prone to overflows, off-by-one errors, etc. The generic memory allocator is a smart but
19.
by bluetomcat 11mo ago
Yes, you can do it with minimal allocations - provided that the source buffer is read-only or is mutable but is unused later directly by the caller. If the buffer is mutable, any un-escaping can be done in-place because the un-escaped strin
20.
by bluetomcat 11mo ago
Good C code will try to avoid allocations as much as possible in the first place. You absolutely don’t need to copy strings around when handling a request. You can read data from the socket in a fixed-size buffer, do all the processing in-p
21.
by bluetomcat 1y ago
> These lies don’t just affect them but also the people reading it as they might never see what actually happens This is what sustains this whole economic bubble built on debt and future promises. At all levels of society, you have these
22.
by bluetomcat 1y ago
They were popular because there was no Unix culture in Eastern Europe at the time. Pretty much any computer geek was a DOS user. To me personally, it always seemed kind of lame because many of these people would not bother to properly learn
23.
by bluetomcat 1y ago
Their English is sufficiently good. It's a cultural aspect regarding writing style. When Russians and most Eastern Europeans write about technical subjects, they tend to be concise, dense and straightforward. Americans, on the other ha
24.
by bluetomcat 1y ago
> Pattern matching should make the language less verbose, not more. In the most basic cases, yes. It can be used as a more polished switch statement. It's the whole paradigm of "define an ad-hoc Enum here and there", encod
25.
by bluetomcat 1y ago
Rust encourages a rather different "high-level" programming style that doesn't suit the domains where C excels. Pattern matching, traits, annotations, generics and functional idioms make the language verbose and semantically-
26.
by bluetomcat 1y ago
The W210s did indeed rust badly and the interiors weren't on par with previous generations, but in purely mechanical terms, they were still solid cars. The diesels (particularly E250 TD and E290 TD) could cover 700k+ kilometres without
27.
by bluetomcat 1y ago
What a mess of an article. A pretentious mishmash of scattered references with some vague abstract claims that could be summarised in one paragraph.
28.
by bluetomcat 1y ago
Big Tech drove us towards techno-feudalism. It's a wider social phenomenon and their hiring patterns for programmers are only one aspect of the problem. Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their r
29.
by bluetomcat 1y ago
With a lot of fancy wording, the article basically proposes that slow-moving, bureaucratic educational institutions should catch up with TikTok’s latest algorithm, helping raise the next generation of influencers.
30.
by bluetomcat 1y ago
Yes, that was my point. Regardless of the programming language, LLMs are glorified pattern matchers. A React/Node/MongoDB address book application exposes many such patterns and they are internalised by the LLM. Even complex code

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