agentultra

5 ms·

31.
by agentultra 1mo ago
128-bit integers aren’t part of the standard (yet)… but the point is right; platform and architecture matter. Many aspects of them are defined by the compiler implementation. Also ABI compatibility isn’t part of the C specification. Most im
32.
by agentultra 1mo ago
Blacklisting is a shady practice, unfortunately. They generally work on ranges and you don’t get much of a say. Most blacklist maintainers have a way for you to report a false positive. Responsiveness varies. Most maintainers will drop your
33.
by agentultra 1mo ago
It’s not that bad, but it does require some effort. I self-host. I spend far more time using and enjoying email than I do maintaining the infrastructure. However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like
34.
by agentultra 1mo ago
It’s designed to “feel” that way. It’s a computer program, not a person. People made it. Don’t get fooled into treating these systems like they’re people or intelligent collaborators. At the best of times these chat/agent/loop sys
35.
by agentultra 1mo ago
You have to be able to write the software yourself in order to judge the results and get good software out. Otherwise the system claims the goals are met, the tests pass, and the human driving the system puts up a new PR. If they don’t know
36.
by agentultra 2mo ago
Tania Aelbi wrote a good one of her trip. I’m working towards a solo circumnavigation myself. Love reading about the stories of others.
37.
by agentultra 2mo ago
Or anyone else! This isn’t for the protection of kids. It’s for the protection of profits by surveillance capitalism.
38.
by agentultra 2mo ago
I think the controversial part is that an engineer cannot talk to or understand customers.
39.
by agentultra 2mo ago
A test doesn’t prove much. Highly experienced programmers seem to have a hard time understanding this. Why do we have tens of thousands of test cases and we still find new errors constantly? Why is our software so bloated and slow? We do we
40.
by agentultra 2mo ago
Apparently it is. Modern companies seem to prefer dysfunction over anything else. I have been trying to understand why for my whole career.
41.
by agentultra 2mo ago
I don’t disagree. I’ve worked on teams that definitely valued the non-coding skills more and it showed in their inability to deliver on certain requirements… mainly performance and stability. But these are skills that can be taught to indiv
42.
by agentultra 2mo ago
The author might be missing the intent of the observation. Maybe they’re misinterpreting it. What I, and many people who’ve said, “code was never the hard part,” aren’t referring to the skill of an individual. It’s not the hard part of the
43.
by agentultra 2mo ago
I think people are one factor. Source does, when done well, communicate intent and implementation precisely to other people . If the language has enough semantic information it can communicate some part of the specification as well. Knowin
44.
by agentultra 2mo ago
The market logic isn’t going to be defensible. The market is highly irrational and prone to be influenced by those with the most capital, not the, “invisible hand.” Cars are freaking everywhere not because they are the best solution of tran
45.
by agentultra 2mo ago
> I do not miss the wall, and I will not pretend to. The wall is the point, if you want to truly know the truth of something. I still believe there is no royal road. Taste isn’t the answer to why you would choose a bump allocator over
46.
by agentultra 2mo ago
Simulating Elevators in TLA+ is a fun exercise. https://github.com/tlaplus/Examples/blob/master/specificatio... Another interesting, and underrated one: hotel keys.
47.
by agentultra 2mo ago
This brings me back. I got to work at a movie store for a while. Great times. Almost like Empire Records.
48.
by agentultra 2mo ago
I believe there’s a small minority of LLM users who will show up to any comment thread and scream bloody murder if you post any kind of policy limiting LLM use. They seem to feel like it’s a personal attack and must justify their use of LLM
49.
by agentultra 2mo ago
That would be an example of, “overfitting.” It is something the AI labs are concerned about. They tweak parameters to try and avoid it. It’s a hard balancing act to do. Give in too much randomness and you get non-sensical outputs that are d
50.
by agentultra 2mo ago
Okay so in the sense of Lean’s kernel, we can trust it as long as we understand it. Verifying it cannot be automated therefore, according to the criterion, it must be small so that it can be verified by a human. Does it not also follow that
51.
by agentultra 2mo ago
Right, I’m thinking of the de Bruijin criterion applied to the generated kernel in this case. That generated kernel sounds large, and being generated, I’m curious as to why or how we don’t have to verify/understand it?
52.
by agentultra 2mo ago
What I’m wondering about is why we don’t need to understand/verify the generated kernel and only the spec? Is there an implicit trust we must put in that kernel?
53.
by agentultra 2mo ago
> A human reviewer only needs to read 93 lines of formal specification and run the Lean checker to certify the correctness of the kernel, skipping the intricate 1000+ lines of AI-written implementation. To prove correctness, AI autonomou
54.
by agentultra 2mo ago
Building a MUD engine is quite an endeavour in itself. Let alone the game! A good way to test your skills in networking, parsing, databases, and data structures. I’ve been chipping away at one on my stream using Haskell. Experimenting with
55.
by agentultra 2mo ago
It’s a big tent and anyone is welcome in. I learned to code on my own thanks to the efforts of people to write manuals, articles, text files on BBSs and NNTP. That’s just one way. But try the other shoe on and walk a mile. You like writing
56.
by agentultra 2mo ago
Their adoption results are going to be biased by the fact that Google has a vested interest in accelerating adoption and have been sticking their AI products in front of everything they can. Seems like this isn’t going to be a useful data s
57.
by agentultra 2mo ago
You should check out Borges’, The Library of Babel . Basically if you have an infinite string of characters in some language then you have every possible book, tweet, script, scribble, and scrap of everything ever written. You just have to
58.
by agentultra 2mo ago
This seems to be grasping for analogies to make sense of the work this person was doing. A compiler does a lot more than source code translation. There are specifications that tell us the de jure specifications of the language, if there is
59.
by agentultra 2mo ago
That will depend on your life goals.
60.
by agentultra 2mo ago
There are cabinet makers who still make pieces by hand with hand tools. They charge whatever they want and do well. Not everything is Ikea.

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