gdwatson

5 ms·

1.
by gdwatson 9d ago
Names for C successor languages are pretty well exhausted by this point, so I sympathize, but I strongly associate the name C* with a decade-old rant about C compilers’ aggressive exploitation of undefined behavior: https://www.c
2.
by gdwatson 11d ago
I am bad at recognizing LLM writing off the bat, though I am getting better. It's pretty common that the writing is good enough to get me reading on a topic I am interested in; then, once I am invested in the piece, it turns out to be
3.
by gdwatson 2mo ago
Deliberately so, and for an Internet standard correctly so. I know there is a long tail of environments, so I am curious. What's your environment like that you need traffic inspection but don't have full control of the clients?
4.
by gdwatson 2mo ago
There are two angles on this. There is the rejection of the humanities in favor of science and wealth, which are good things in themselves but are not everything. But, on the other hand, what many modern humanities faculties offer is a ve
5.
by gdwatson 2mo ago
That post salvaged the subreddit; before, it had lost its focus. When I came back to give it another try, that post had become a meme and a rallying cry, and the sub had a lot of legitimately interesting thoughts and discussion.
6.
by gdwatson 2mo ago
Fair. If only they'd retired those APIs, too. I remember when Windows gained experimental support for a UTF-8 locale usable with its 8-bit APIs. I used to run it at work; it had some issues at first, but most got shaken out pretty qu
7.
by gdwatson 2mo ago
Windows bought into Unicode hard before Unicode expanded beyond 16 bits. The consequence is that its native strings are theoretically UTF-16, but often behave like UCS-2, allowing random halves of surrogate pairs. Windows APIs reflect tha
8.
by gdwatson 2mo ago
I am not so paranoid, and I haven’t been working with AI, so my AI-dar is bad. But I keep reading technical writeups like this, then getting frustrated at the writing style or incomplete explanation – this one was more complete than most,
9.
by gdwatson 3mo ago
I stumbled over that too, but it makes sense when you finish the article. The ancient Romans didn’t build a lot of keyboards.
10.
by gdwatson 3mo ago
I think a lot of people just want to be able to discuss different areas of the automatic memory management design space separately, and maintaining the distinction between reference counting and garbage collection (meaning tracing GCs) lets
11.
by gdwatson 3mo ago
This reminds me a bit of the way academics in programming language theory internalized the type-theoretic definition of the word “type” over and against the traditional programming definition. You sometimes see people who try to correct th
12.
by gdwatson 3mo ago
It was a clever hack for porting existing code. But it doesn’t scale at all – you’ve just described adding four registers to a register-starved architecture in order to solve the issue for one CPU generation or so.
13.
by gdwatson 3mo ago
"He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position." At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm
14.
by gdwatson 3mo ago
I actually think I like the baseline-aligned one best. It's spaced reasonably well while reflecting the character of each font better, IMHO. Or maybe it's just because a consistent baseline rhythm feels so typographically right
15.
by gdwatson 5mo ago
> Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct. You need to get into either fishing (chartreuse lures are common) or cocktails: https:/&#
16.
by gdwatson 5mo ago
I feel like I am missing too much background here. If there is only one licensor, why add terms to defeat the license it chose rather than choose a license which does not need defeating?
17.
by gdwatson 5mo ago
I think the idea is that SmallTalk replaced conditional syntax with methods on booleans. You could call `ifTrue:` on a boolean, passing it a code block; a true boolean would execute the block, and a false boolean would not. (There was als
18.
by gdwatson 5mo ago
I hope that God is indeed willing, but the man is 88 years old and he’s not done with the third tome of volume four. It would require a minor miracle for him to finish volume 7 within this lifetime.
19.
by gdwatson 6mo ago
I guess I am a sucker for stories about redesigning data structures, and I'd have liked more detail on that front. Also, they talked about Rust's greater memory safety; it would have been nice to know whether there were specific
20.
by gdwatson 6mo ago
I will confess to skimming by the end. But I don’t think they explained how they solved the cache issue except to say they rewrote the software in Rust, which is pretty vague. Was all the code they rewrote originally in Lua? So was it jus
21.
by gdwatson 7mo ago
> Scribus is an open source project but I’m not sure how the quality is in that. I am not a typographer, and I’ve never used it in a professional capacity, but v1.6 (early 2024) improved Scribus a lot. I’ve used it and liked it for so
22.
by gdwatson 7mo ago
Years ago I wrote a toy Lisp implementation in Objective-C, ignoring Apple’s standard library and implementing my own class hierarchy. At that point it was basically standard C plus Smalltalk object dispatch, and it was a very cool languag
23.
by gdwatson 7mo ago
> I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. There are so many ways to game the system, whom do you trust to enforce it? I don’t trust my own “side” to do so, and I sure as heck don’t trust the other side.
24.
by gdwatson 7mo ago
I think that diff algorithms have more in common with traditional, “lower” textual criticism than with the sort of source criticism canjobear is pondering.
25.
by gdwatson 7mo ago
It’s interesting that they’re organized by date. On an intuitive level, that makes sense. But so many of the dates are hotly debated, and reorganizing the list would produce such a different impression, that it’s a surprising choice. I am
26.
by gdwatson 8mo ago
Units based on base 12 or base 2, as U.S. standard measures tend to be, are easier to divide in many ways. Now if we used base 12 numbers instead of base 10, and we had a system of units based on that, I bet we’d have the best of both world
27.
by gdwatson 8mo ago
I realize you are tongue in cheek, but I hope people respect the logical limits of this sort of thing. Years ago, there were some development tools coming out of the Ruby world – SASS for sure, and Vagrant if I remember correctly – whose st
28.
by gdwatson 10mo ago
Could you explain your reasoning? I don’t see any moral difference between deliberately limiting compatibility from the peripheral side and doing so from the “computer” side (i.e., iPhone, iPad, Macintosh). One type of device may produce
29.
by gdwatson 10mo ago
Beside being a neat font in its own right, Iosevka allows for custom builds with different settings, selection from a bunch glyph variants, and custom ligature choices. It's pretty incredible.
30.
by gdwatson 11mo ago
The first few times you use it, XSLT is insane . But once something clicks, you figure out the kinds of things it’s good for. I am not really a functional programming guy. But XSLT is a really cool application of functional programming f

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