thefaux

6 ms·

1.
by thefaux 23d ago
It sounds like you don't code much in bed or with your feet up. A laptop is a distinct tool from a desktop and if you try to use it like a desktop, I agree it is a terrible substitute. Personally I find laptops vastly more ergonomic th
2.
by thefaux 1mo ago
On scala, I think there were several factors that led to it stalling out in the mid to late aughts. I am not convinced the community was the root cause. I think more significant was the scala 3 transition. When they were still near the peak
3.
by thefaux 2mo ago
There is something that I don't fully understand about this design: why are they insisting on building a giant binary for debug builds that contains all of the code? From my perspective, a simpler approach is to generate many smaller s
4.
by thefaux 5mo ago
Syntax and semantics are never orthogonal and you always need syntax so it must be considered from the start. Any reasonable syntax will quickly become much more pleasant to generate an ast or ir than, say, manually building these objects i
5.
by thefaux 6mo ago
Cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis is an abdication of moral reasoning and responsibility. There is no such thing as an abstract life, only concrete realizations. What if the victim of an avoidable fatality is the one person who had th
6.
by thefaux 6mo ago
I have written a compiler for a language at more or less this abstraction level. It provides access to 16 general purpose registers and a set of virtual instructions that operate on these registers. I program on an intel mac so the virtual
7.
by thefaux 6mo ago
> Why would anyone create a new language now? The existing ones are "good enough", and without a body of examples for LLMs to train on, a new language has little chance getting traction. Compiler writing can be an art form and
8.
by thefaux 7mo ago
It is interesting though that he evidently didn't notice this 2.5X productivity increase until you pointed it out to him.
9.
by thefaux 8mo ago
Just because it is small doesn't mean that it isn't important.
10.
by thefaux 8mo ago
The lead maintainer of sbt does it as a labor of love. I am very curious if he actually will be receiving any money.
11.
by thefaux 8mo ago
The examples that you and others provide are always fundamentally uninteresting to me. Many, if not most, are some variant of a CRUD application. I have yet seen a single ai generated thing that I personally wanted to use and/or spend
12.
by thefaux 8mo ago
This feels like it conflates problem solving with the production of artifacts. It seems highly possible to me that the explosion of ai generated code is ultimately creating more problems than it is solving and that the friction of manual co
13.
by thefaux 8mo ago
I do see this as a bad thing and an abdication of taking responsibility for one's own life. As was recently put to me after the sudden death of a friend's father (who lived an unusually rich life): everyone dies, but not everyone
14.
by thefaux 8mo ago
At the end of life, Maslow became convinced that self-transcendence was the pinnacle of the hierarchy. Strong identification with work will not get one to that final step. I am not sure if ai is a path to self transcendence or self annihila
15.
by thefaux 8mo ago
I truly believe that the cult of c performance optimization has done more harm than good. It is truly evil to try and infer, or even worse, silently override programmer intent. Many if not most of the optimizations done by llvm and gcc shou
16.
by thefaux 9mo ago
Honestly, I found this piece depressing. Life is too short and precious to waste on crappy software. So often the question ai related pieces ask is "can ai do X?" when by far the more important question is "should ai do X?&qu
17.
by thefaux 9mo ago
Sure, but I prefer to work on projects that are fundamentally sound and high impact. Indeed, I have certainly noticed a pattern that very often ai enthusiasts exalt its capabilities to automate work that appears to be of questionable value
18.
by thefaux 9mo ago
> Try a GraalVM native image. Milliseconds. Gone. Try building a GraalVM native image. Minutes gone.
19.
by thefaux 9mo ago
This logic is both too broad and rigid to be of much practical use[1]. It needs to be tightened to compare languages that are identical except for static type checks, otherwise the statically typed language could admit other kinds of errors
20.
by thefaux 9mo ago
Sometimes someone genuinely has a clear vision that is superior to the status quo and is capable of executing it, improving quality, performance and maintainability. The challenge is distinguishing these cases from the muddled abstractions
21.
by thefaux 9mo ago
I had a roommate who failed out of college because he was addicted to Everquest (yes, Everquest, and yes I am middle-aged). Your last paragraph is barely even hyperbolic. Do you think unemployed young men who live at home with their parents
22.
by thefaux 9mo ago
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged. 2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. 3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but consideres
23.
by thefaux 9mo ago
The canonical western text is Richard Wilhelm's german interpretation, translated to english by Cary Baynes. This site has the hexagram descriptions from that translation: https://www.iching.online/wilhelm.php I recomm
24.
by thefaux 9mo ago
In the medium to long term, if LLMs are unable to easily learn new languages and remap the knowledge they gained from training on different languages, then they will have failed in their mission of becoming a general intelligence.
25.
by thefaux 9mo ago
The intelligence and benevolence of many marine mammals is vastly under appreciated.
26.
by thefaux 9mo ago
As impressive as this analysis is by the compiler, I shudder to think how much time the compiler spends doing these kinds of optimizations. In my opinion, a better architecture would be for the compiler to provide a separate analysis tool t
27.
by thefaux 9mo ago
I liked the first few paragraphs, but the article took a wrong turn for me when it pivoted to ir. Compiler ir need not be fiendishly complex, though modern compilers, particularly clang and gcc can create this impression. There are two nice
28.
by thefaux 9mo ago
If the boosters are correct about the trajectory of llm performance, these objections do not hold. Debugging machine code is only bad because of poor tooling. Surely if vibe coding to machine code works we should be able to vibe code better
29.
by thefaux 9mo ago
It's sad but I generally agree. Scala was in my view pretty well positioned for an up and coming language ~2010-15. Not only did the scala 3 rewrite fail to address many of the most common pain points -- compile times and tooling immed
30.
by thefaux 10mo ago
I'll answer with a question for you: what legitimate concerns might some people have about a private company working closely with the government, including law enforcement, having access to private IRS data? For me, the answer to your

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