diffxx

6 ms·

1.
by diffxx 1y ago
I'm ready for their follow up product.
2.
by diffxx 1y ago
The instantaneous fertility rate dipping below replacement level does not mean humanity dying out. It might mean that this particular civilization with this particular population level is. Infinite growth ad infinitum leads to an inevitable
3.
by diffxx 1y ago
Every EU nation should be thinking about how to fast track and incentivize American immigration.
4.
by diffxx 1y ago
Yes, though don't forget about the incompetence of adding the wrong person to the chat which goes part and parcel with the embarrassingly superficial/cynical discourse.
5.
by diffxx 1y ago
As a good friend who is the maintainer of a widely used oss tool likes to quip: the two hardest problems in computer science are naming things and making money in open source.
6.
by diffxx 1y ago
Here's my countervailing advice for keeping your phone safe: don't use a case or any protection at all. This trains you to take care of it.
7.
by diffxx 1y ago
I don't think correlation vs causation is the right question. Loneliness was clearly rampant long before chatgpt showed up. The question is whether chatbots are capable of reducing people's loneliness. To me it feels self-evident
8.
by diffxx 1y ago
Imagine putting your time and energy into something other than building a bigger imaginary pile for yourself.
9.
by diffxx 2y ago
It sometimes feels like there is a strange resistance to defining ad hoc sum types. If your language has good pattern matching capabilities and an expressive syntax for declaring data types, then this scales very well. For example in a pseu
10.
by diffxx 2y ago
My definition is very different. It is about my ability to have control over my life in the areas that matter most to me. I value my time and personal development above material wealth (to a point). I don't need a giant house. I don&#x
11.
by diffxx 2y ago
This does not feel like at all a good faith reading of the situation. Hardcore anti trans-activists on the right would like to make life so miserable for transpeople as to essentially eliminate them from public life entirely. That is the co
12.
by diffxx 2y ago
I'm long on humans and suspect that many people will begin to prefer imperfection in reaction to the overproliferation of ai generated content.
13.
by diffxx 2y ago
I agree with the author that slow can be good and that taste and diligence can trump raw smarts. I think what is often missed though is the opportunity cost of shipping bad products. Our industry lionizes fast delivery to juice short term e
14.
by diffxx 2y ago
I know I'm being pedantic but zero dependencies is impossible. I'm all for minimizing dependencies though.
15.
by diffxx 2y ago
I unfortunately do not have a good reference of my own, but it strikes me that this list is missing resources for language design. This is the underdiscussed hard part of compiler writing. Good language design can also make compiler impleme
16.
by diffxx 2y ago
This is my experience too. I switched about five years ago and haven't looked back but many people still feel strongly that Google is better so like you I'm not sure if I'm doing it right or wrong. What I will say though is t
17.
by diffxx 2y ago
Python is too big to be a proper Lua replacement.
18.
by diffxx 2y ago
I feel that the problem is not text but language design. A great language should be close to a pareto optimum for both human and machine legibility. Most languages are optimized for human familiarity, which is definitely not the most machin
19.
by diffxx 2y ago
Definitely an interesting report. The conclusions seem skewed by the author's existing coding skill and fluency though. If anything, I'd expect on aggregate these tools to disempower smaller businesses relative to their competitio
20.
by diffxx 2y ago
This is why most of the best software is written by people writing things for themselves and most of the worst is made by people making software they don't use themselves.
21.
by diffxx 2y ago
Yes, but you could bypass the login page.
22.
by diffxx 2y ago
Late Carlin got far too misanthropic for my taste. Like all things, we need balance. This is a good argument against guilds, but there are positive aspects of the system too. Imagine a world that was truly a free for all -- one in which the
23.
by diffxx 2y ago
I'd imagine cool is up there as well: https://nguyenthanhvuh.github.io/class-compilers/cool.html
24.
by diffxx 2y ago
I personally a prefer a stricter syntax with less redundancy. With a sufficiently fast and accurate compiler, things like indentation issues can be resolved very quickly when there is a copy/paste issue.
25.
by diffxx 2y ago
I found the section on forward declarations at least partially off. I have never needed to use forward declarations for single recursion like the fibonacci example he gave. Mutual recursion does of course require forward declarations.
26.
by diffxx 2y ago
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
27.
by diffxx 2y ago
True story: I wrote my ph.d. thesis on a special case of a general problem. After about one year of work, I realized that the approach would never work for the general problem for intractable reasons. But I also really wanted to finish my p
28.
by diffxx 2y ago
The first two properties can be handled by adding optional fields to your struct. The third can be done at compile time rather than runtime if you define a strict class hierarchy. I think really the problem is that many languages make struc
29.
by diffxx 2y ago
- def foo(): int | None + def foo(): None | int Whether or not this makes a semantic difference is language implementation dependent. I think that is why this kind of tool is not especially appealing to me. I would have to have almost compl
30.
by diffxx 2y ago
Hobbes doesn't get the last word on the natural state of mankind. Thank God.

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