Twey

8 ms·

61.
by Twey 5mo ago
Were there perhaps [licensing issues]( https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chardet-LLM-Rewrite-Relicense ) with the original?
62.
by Twey 5mo ago
Sure, I'm not suggesting we need to go into infinite regress for every explanation! I'm saying that you should bear in mind that you _are_ in the middle of an infinite stack, and what is a ‘how’, a ‘what’ or a ‘why’ is just a func
63.
by Twey 5mo ago
As any four-year-old can tell you, ‘why’ is infinitely recursive. ‘What’ from the perspective of level n is ‘how’ looking down from level n+1 and ‘why’ looking up from level n-k.
64.
by Twey 5mo ago
As far as I understand it I'm on your side in this argument — I think ‘code’ continues to matter so long as the LLM-to-execution pipeline remains a leaky abstraction — but I don't think the analogy is correct. The ads are the resu
65.
by Twey 5mo ago
And given a C description of a program, a C runtime can implement that program in various different ways — interpreted vs compiled, explicit memory management vs garbage collection, different pointer sizes and memory layouts, parallelism at
66.
by Twey 5mo ago
Specs also evolve over time. There's no ‘end goal’ because requirements are always changing. Specs are traditionally more forward-looking only because, by removing a lot of the implementation details that are required to write code, th
67.
by Twey 5mo ago
The traditional name for this spec is ‘source code’ — a canonical source of truth for the behaviour of a system that is as human-readable as we know how to make it, that will be processed by automated tools into a less-readable derived arte
68.
by Twey 5mo ago
Intuitionistic logic is a refinement of classical logic, not a limitation: for every proposition you can prove in classical logic there is at least one equivalent proposition in intuitionistic logic. But when your use of LEM is tracked by t
69.
by Twey 6mo ago
And WhatsApp and Instagram were acquisitions, not creations.
70.
by Twey 6mo ago
Depending on your lambda calculus! From a categorical perspective a lambda calculus is just a nice syntax for Cartesian closed categories (or similar, e.g. *-autonomous categories for linear lambda calculus) so you can use it to reason abou
71.
by Twey 6mo ago
If we're going to define a programming language as one that is Turing complete, it's important (in a kind of pedantic sense) to note that that includes HTML (with CSS), which can be used to encode a Rule 110 automaton, and exclude
72.
by Twey 6mo ago
I think it's also true that, regardless of the desirability of the feature at the time (which sibling comments discuss eloquently) people who've bought into a language are usually quite wary of also buying into extensions to that
73.
by Twey 6mo ago
> It is the right tradeoff to write those structs for libraries that absolutely have to avoid dynamic dispatch. In other cases it is better to give a trait object. IMO it is a hack to use dynamic dispatch (a runtime behaviour with honest
74.
by Twey 7mo ago
Vibe coding is painful mostly just because natural language is bad for programming in. Give it a couple of iterations and statistical programming will be at least as enjoyable as deterministic programming is today :)
75.
by Twey 7mo ago
Right… but what I'm saying is that for the most part if the compiler pushes back on your LLM-generated code it's because that code is wrong. In the LLM world these are known as ‘guardrails’ and they're great because they a) p
76.
by Twey 7mo ago
The case given here for ‘why Go, not Python’ is just as applicable for ‘why Rust, not Go’. > The borrow checker catches real bugs. The type system is rigorous. The compiler says no, and when it says no, it’s right. The problem is that th
77.
by Twey 7mo ago
No, a message is always consistent, both in the actor model and in hardware memory. My point is just that if you restrict your messages to those supported by hardware memory, you get exactly the same semantics when sharing the actor as y
78.
by Twey 7mo ago
The shared memory in the Mem setup is not the local copies of the values after reading from Mem (just as the registers or private memory ranges of a thread are not shared) but (the internal state of) the Mem actor itself. To phrase my
79.
by Twey 7mo ago
But there are data races. Mem as I set it out above is an example of multi-threaded, mutable data. Another process can't alter the data you've received, indeed, just as in a shared-memory system another thread can't alter t
80.
by Twey 7mo ago
The operations are atomic because of the single-threaded nature of actors. But the operations can be arbitrarily ordered, except for the pairwise ordering constraint (which mirrors the happens-before relation on memory within a thread). I
81.
by Twey 7mo ago
Adapting your communication doesn't have to imply deception or even insincerity, it just means understanding what's important to your target audience and making sure to address it. Sometimes that's something like financial im
82.
by Twey 7mo ago
Sure, if we want to shift topic from directness to density, but that's not a cultural difference either: all (spoken) languages famously transmit at about 39 bits per second [1]. Specific idioms, especially newer ones, might be a bit m
83.
by Twey 7mo ago
The Gladwellian direct/indirect dichotomy (or continuum) is a misapprehension of how language works. All communication is indirect in some sense because we don't have mind control powers over our fellow humans. Even saying ‘I want
84.
by Twey 7mo ago
> Are you implying other people's emotional immaturity is exclusively my problem to solve? Emotional maturity (from most standpoints) does not mean being completely emotionally unaffected by other people's communication. Insofa
85.
by Twey 7mo ago
Sometimes what you're trying to get them to do is understand something that you (think you) understand. There's a reason software has tutorials as well as reference documentation. Sometimes telling someone something directly isn&#
86.
by Twey 7mo ago
Message passing is a type of mutable shared state — but one that's restricted in some important way to eliminate a certain class of errors (in Erlang's case, to a thread-safe queue with pairwise ordering guarantees so that all p
87.
by Twey 7mo ago
They certainly have the right. All laws are (effectively?) public in every country I can think of, even when the law is ‘don't upset the not-so-benevolent dictator’. The problem is that to try to cover all the corner cases the sheer am
88.
by Twey 7mo ago
The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large n
89.
by Twey 7mo ago
Nice link, thank you! I'm not sure it's super related to my comment but it is closely related to some other things I'm thinking about. I'll give it a read :)
90.
by Twey 7mo ago
Thanks for the article! As someone who writes a lot of Rust/JS/Wasm FFI it gave me some good food for thought :) Yes! Mutexes are much nicer in Rust than a lot of languages, but they're still much too low-level for most use-c

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