3 ms·
Personally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much. I would very much pr
by torginus 1mo ago
Personally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much.
I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.
- knollimar 1mo agoIf you want a spoilery TLDR: It's more about the journey. He tracks down the origin, finds the support, finds the support flawed, and leaves you to your own conclusion rather than make a new flawed one. The basic idea is that the origin assumes a highly critical inner hot loop, don't assume where it is, and optimize there. There's some other time spent saying this justifies slower abstractions for maintainability elsewhere.
- abainbridge 1mo agoAnother point I liked was that there was, apparently, an influential book called Structured Programming, whose content was so universally agreed upon, that all programming became Structured Programming. Nobody needs the book anymore.
- mrkeen 1mo agoHard to tell if sarcastic, but anyway. I think the GOTOers just died out. Some day null, statements (rather than expressions) and side-effects will have always been wrong.
- knollimar 1mo agoNo, they're not sarcastic. It was an interesting point; if an idea succeeds well enough people just do it and make it "common sense". It's a point in the talk.
- tialaramex 1mo agoIt's not the focus of the talk and so it's hard to tell if Casey understands (the choice to separate the words GO TO in several places suggests he does) but the `goto` keyword you've seen in several modern languages is not the problematic "GO TO statement", it's a de-fanged remnant, the toy poodle to GO TO's wolf pack. The actual GO TO complained of is, like the jump instruction in machine code, just entirely unbothered by context. Want to go from the middle of this code about employee payroll processing to mid-way through initializing a weather simulation? No problem. Well. No problem for the machine, for a human programmer it's a complete nightmare. Actually that's putting it mildly, nightmares have more structure. You cannot do anything like that with for example C's goto. You compiler can, and in a few cases (that's what the discussion about the tail-call optimisation is about for example) it will, but the program you wrote doesn't do this and so you don't have to try to keep the whole program in your head. So in that sense GOTO died out with, maybe BASICs? I think the BASICs tend to have that wolf nature GOTO feature, but nothing modern has it.
- cure_42 1mo agoWindows batch, no?
- tialaramex 1mo agoCOMMAND.COM in its batch mode? Kinda, sorta. The interpreter can AIUI "call" other files but the "goto" is restricted to the same file. So we can jump over a variable declaration which is pretty confusing, but we can't jump into unrelated code. Also while COMMAND.COM can't be as old as BASIC it must be pretty old.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- hirvi74 1mo agoSo, I have never seen anyone actually use GOTOs, so maybe a lot of the stigma comes from excessive, poor usage or something. However, having written a good chunk of ASM in my life. I don't think jumps or branches are really that hard to follow. Jumps/Branches and GOTOs specify the next location. It is not as though one has to guess where. It's not the arrow, it's the archer that is the problem.
- jasomill 1mo agohttps://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/1243380 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/1243380 See also https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/356635.356640 https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/356635.356640
- kshallvari 1mo agoThere is a 45 min version at Primeagen's "The Standup"
- philippta 1mo agoHaving watched both, they cover completey different topics.
- wpm 1mo agoAudio transcription has been around for a while, you could solve this problem for yourself quite easily.
- andai 1mo agoI get the auto-transcript with yt-dlp then ask a cheap LLM like DeepSeek to clean it up. Though lately I've been uploading the audio to AssemblyAI, I somehow still haven't used up my credits after several years lol At one point I built a system that would summarize the transcript and I'd be able to ask questions about it, but Gemini can do that natively now so I usually just use that.
- andai 1mo agoMaybe go for a long drive? Long walk? Whatever floats your boat. I used to do manual labor and I would work my way through like eight hours of audiobooks per day.
- torginus 1mo agoI've noticed after I've switched to audiobooks that my retention is horrible compared to reading. For actual complex topics, it's even worse.
- pitched 1mo agoI’ve found this too but I think audiobooks still have a place, they just can’t something you rely on being able to perfectly understand. A second book on the same topic or something in a topic loosely related but interesting. Or fiction to help stay awake on long road trips.
- yoyohello13 1mo agoI agree. I use audiobooks for fiction. For learning I need to read the thing to really retain anything.
- Rendello 1mo agoIt's likely the same for me, but I tend to relisten to audiobooks I like, sometimes dozens of times. I have a hard time focusing on physical books, and I've probably only re-read a handful of them, so the net effect is that I take in more with a good audiobook. I would like to learn to focus... (https://youtu.be/1IRn8BN3Qhw?t=331 https://youtu.be/1IRn8BN3Qhw?t=331)
- torginus 1mo agoHaha. I used read a lot of books when I was younger, then slowly stopped, and found getting back to reading quite hard as well. Armed with the knowledge that I used to be able to do this, I just forced myself to. And after a while, I found I had no trouble committing any more.
- pton_xd 1mo agoIt's worth the listen if you're even mildly interested in the history of computer science. He's a great presenter. I guess at some point you do have to prioritize how to spend your time, though.
- xen0 1mo agoThanks to modern playback technology, you can pause it and resume play later at your convenience.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- DanielHB 1mo agoCasey mentions that at some point one of these great minds were upset that it was so difficult to write programs because they didn't have things like keyboards or screens. One of them even brings up exciting new developments in electronic typewriters that could be used to improve their workflows.
- MobiusHorizons 1mo agoIt is quite long, but I thought it was worth it if you can find the time. Short of that I think just reading the Knuth article the quote is from might bring similar insights.
- gessha 1mo agoIt’s on YouTube, pull the transcript and format it with an LLM. If there’s no transcript, there’s Whisper. All of this can be done with local models too.
- JavierFlores09 1mo agoAudio transcription is nowhere near the same as a properly written piece of text. Videos are simply a different format, and thus a lot of the communication is held by the fact that there's visual cues to go by. If one were to write an article about the same, you'd use much denser language as well as references/links around the topic. Maybe even restructure the whole thing to communicate it better through text. It is something you can maybe whip up with the help of an LLM but then you're left wondering whether it is actually communicating what the video intended to begin with, as you wouldn't be as knowledgeable about the topic, one wouldn't be able to spot the parts where an LLM interpreted something horribly and thus reaching the wrong conclusions. For all of the above, I do not consider audio transcript to be of any help when one prefers written content. It is useful for translation or people with hearing issues, but both of those receive help of the visual parts to convey the topic.
- gessha 1mo agoYes but in the absence of a blog version, what are you going to do?
- ggdG 1mo agoI asked my clanker to summarize it for me: https://rentry.co/2ttr46r9 https://rentry.co/2ttr46r9
- brabel 1mo agoThis is one talk that is worth the 3 hours (the talk is 2 hours, plus a qa with none other than Ginger Bill of Odin fame)!
- bena 1mo agoThe last hour is a Q&A. I don't know if that changes your perception of how watchable it is. It's also a little fluffy. It's basically the history of how the book Structured Programming came about, because it's that book that essentially caused Knuth to write an article that contained the quote. A lot of it is fairly interesting but it also highlights a big problem I do have with Muratori. He generalizes from self. He didn't fully understand or appreciate the quote about premature optimization, so no one did. And even though he's been told what it actually means, and was probably pointed to the full quote, he would stick on his interpretation. It's likely someone he views as "higher", like Jon Blow, challenged him and then he took the time to actually look at it.
- Pannoniae 1mo ago"He didn't fully understand or appreciate the quote about premature optimization, so no one did." He ain't wrong though.... most people definitely don't get the jive for sure. Knuth was talking about a massively different kind of optimisation than what we do today yet people keep continuing to parrot the 97% figure uncritically like as it was some gospel. [0] [0] http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?p=580 http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?p=580