mattarm

5 ms·

1.
by mattarm 8mo ago
Makes me wonder if the hardware engineers look at software engineers and shrug, “they don’t really know how their software really works.” Makes me wonder if C programmers look at JS programmers and shrug, “they don’t understand what their p
2.
by mattarm 8mo ago
Yeah, the online Gemini app is not good for long lived conversations that build up a body of decisions. The context window gets too large and things drop. What I’ve learned is that once you reach that point you’ve got to break that problem
3.
by mattarm 8mo ago
They work much better off a test that must pass. That they can “see”. Without it they are just making up some other acceptance criteria.
4.
by mattarm 10mo ago
See https://abseil.io/tips/ for some idea of the kinds of guidance these kinds of teams work to provide, at least at Google. I worked on the “C++ library team” at Google for a number of years. These roles don’t really
5.
by mattarm 2y ago
Some popular streamers have dabbled in OCaml this year, sometimes calling it "the Go of functional programming", which probably set off a small wave of people tinkering with the language. OCaml has also gotten gradually better in
6.
by mattarm 2y ago
In my experience learning a bit of OCaml after Rust, and then looking at Haskell, the three aren't all that different in terms of the basics of how ADTs are declared and used, especially for the simpler cases.
7.
by mattarm 2y ago
> Bad example. Google docs doesn’t use CRDTs but uses OT instead. CRDTs may handle your scenario just fine depending on how they decide to handle this scenario. The CRDT may pick one or the other replacement word, but who is to say that
8.
by mattarm 2y ago
I don't agree that a missing "framework" is the whole of the problem. It just isn't that simple. Sure, people need to use resiliency skills to cope with the stresses of life. Often times, this is an important part of wha
9.
by mattarm 3y ago
> It's much more a matter of whether you want to do something small scale and fun, or whether you want to suck all the joy out of it by applying the same soul crushing constraints we already get paid to do in our day jobs. Bleh. Ame
10.
by mattarm 3y ago
Definitely interested in how you achieved another 2-10x over the btree approach. I want surprised that btree was as effective as it was, but I’d be curious to know how you squeezed a bit more out of it.
11.
by mattarm 3y ago
Those are good things to consider in review, but I maintain that the answer might be "no" to one or more of those questions and still be acceptable. I'm old enough to have worked in the pre-code-review era. Things were fine.
12.
by mattarm 3y ago
Given equivalent data stored in both JSON and BSON format I would expect them both to compress down to blobs of roughly equivalent sizes. This is because both encode roughly the same amount of information, so the compression algorithm will
13.
by mattarm 4y ago
> I am more excited by Emacs 30, mostly I like the ahead of time compilation of Lisp code. Emacs has had an ahead of time compilation feature, "Native Compilation," since Emacs 28. Is this what you mean? Or is the Emacs 30 fe
14.
by mattarm 4y ago
There is always an authority structure in these kinds of companies. I'm personally familiar with Google, but this description of Facebook makes it sound similar... The upside is that people, in theory, don't need to wait to be pro
15.
by mattarm 4y ago
> Which is why unless is such a hard concept for people to grasp, not just in code, but also in regular English. This is the first I've heard about this confusion over the word "unless" in English. In spoken English I do n
16.
by mattarm 4y ago
> nix unlike all other distros can install multiple version of the same package The above is sometimes true and sometimes not. For the most part, Nix can install multiple versions of a program but only one can be in use at any given tim
17.
by mattarm 4y ago
My understanding is that they each bring their own GC and run it as WASM code in the VM.
18.
by mattarm 4y ago
> Exact opposite. I ask them to please not bring me a mashed vegetables patty and call it a burger. It is not. I can agree that "mashed vegetables" does not describe a good veggie patty. I don't agree that a good veggie p
19.
by mattarm 4y ago
FYI, an ODR violation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Definition_Rule ) is an example of non-dynamic UB.
20.
by mattarm 4y ago
An automobile recall is a good analogy here. Most people driving cars with an active recall are unaffected by the problem the recall is supposed to address. They can drive on blissfully unaware that something could go wrong. They might ev
21.
by mattarm 4y ago
Two terms: undefined behavior and memory safety. Try searching the web for those terms.
22.
by mattarm 4y ago
I don't think "DMD is a reference compiler and not meant as a production tool" is a great way to characterize it. There are certainly valid reasons for choosing LLVM and GCC for "production", but also valid reasons
23.
by mattarm 4y ago
> Just like the awesome lists on GitHub. My thought exactly, and also why I don't just search 'latest news' on Google every morning. Human curation is a thing. (not sure how much human curation goes into ooh.directory, but
24.
by mattarm 4y ago
I wouldn't say Google's VCS solves all problems. I worked there for years and was constantly looking toward git (or something like it) as a way of managing code I was developing before committing it to the monorepo. Google&#x27
25.
by mattarm 4y ago
Good UI on top of git definitely makes using it more bearable day to day, but I don't think it "fixes" git's fundamental flaws (those talked about in the posted link). That said, to some degree git is just an assembly l
26.
by mattarm 4y ago
Leaving comments is a different kind of participation than curating a personal website. The assertion originally under discussion here (a few posts back) is that most people don't care to curate their own personal website, or, really,
27.
by mattarm 4y ago
A rebase creates new commits from old commits semi-automatically. Git then has no permanent record of the old commits, and even if you want to get back to them right away it requires some delicate git surgery. This is why you can't ge
28.
by mattarm 4y ago
Nothing structural about the way NixOS works at a technical level prevents it from being as stable and battle tested as Debian Stable, but it isn't in practice by my experience. I would bet money that most people who are singing praise
29.
by mattarm 4y ago
Casting from any T* to void* back to T* is always safe. That is one of the few safe things you can do with a void*, and kinda the whole point. :-) I think casting from void* back to double* is the better option here. memcpy() is overkill
30.
by mattarm 4y ago
> Casting should be safe as far as I know I assume you're talking about this: long x = <whatever> double y = *(double*)&x; Nope, it is undefined behavior, with few exceptions, even if sizeof double == sizeof l

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