barrkel

44 ms·

811.
by barrkel 3y ago
Custom grammars are a cool idea. They are terrible in practice and one of the biggest reasons why Lisp failed to take off, why it's almost noone's first choice of language for building something big. The reason is that new grammar
812.
by barrkel 3y ago
The cross product of multiple state machines, I expect. If you try and use a single state diagram to encode the product of states, everything multiplies.
813.
by barrkel 3y ago
Some roads aren't even open to non-locals on weekends (no through road for motorized traffic). Here in Switzerland, for example: https://lenews.ch/2018/05/24/swiss-mountain-passes-to-be-res...
814.
by barrkel 3y ago
China implementing the National Security Law in Hong Kong, as forcibly as they did, was a trial run for what they want to do in Taiwan. China's military has been built with the explicit long term goal of invading Taiwan. They drill for
815.
by barrkel 3y ago
Can't agree, honestly. Someone in sales might have dropped their laptop a few times, but outside of coffee spillages (thinkpads had a drain hole), they're not in bad shape. I've bought (via donation to charity) used work macb
816.
by barrkel 3y ago
This is API reference documentation. What you're missing is conceptual documentation and use case examples. Conceptual documentation, the big picture, is important to convey the mental model implemented by an API. In applications, you
817.
by barrkel 3y ago
Thing is, high value users won't use a site that has no content. There's no there there any more without the userbase.
818.
by barrkel 3y ago
And a portion of the bill should go to an insurance fund that compensates both guests or hosts in case of negligence on the part of either.
819.
by barrkel 3y ago
I stayed at a place in Switzerland where we had a backed up drainage system due to the apartment upstairs flushing makeup wipes. The host accused us of flushing baby wipes (we use reusable cotton ones), left us with a bath full of sewer wat
820.
by barrkel 3y ago
> All these apps won't be native, they won't have a relationship or license with us, we won't review them, they won't use our APIs or tools, they won't use our stores, etc. I read this as code for letting busin
821.
by barrkel 3y ago
I don't think it's that badly designed. JVM bytecode is not much more than AST serialization, a post-order traversal of expression trees. It's designed for verification - every control flow needs the same typed stack - rather
822.
by barrkel 3y ago
There's nothing especially valuable about a technological marvel. Applications matter. Applications people pay for, or can be served ads alongside. That market is untested.
823.
by barrkel 3y ago
Sports bikes in particular don't have much steering angle to work with, so at slow speeds - on a course designed to test slow speed manouvering - they can have wide turning circles. It is possible to turn more tightly but it requires l
824.
by barrkel 3y ago
Stable Diffusion is still good but you need to fine tune it (not that expensive with Lora) and use controlnet to get good results. The model is just too small on its own.
825.
by barrkel 3y ago
Rediscovering memory unsafety through performance chasing. Ah well.
826.
by barrkel 3y ago
It's not quite the same thing - it's under oath, rather than public speech - but in the Alex Jones, Sandy Hook libel case, the Judge Gamble admonished Jones: “You believe everything you say is true, but your beliefs do not make s
827.
by barrkel 3y ago
This is a fine, absolutely trivial, example. But LLMs are simply not all that. IME GPT-4 can't write a bug-free 10 line shell script. It's particularly poor at inferring unstated requirements - or the need to elicit the same. Ther
828.
by barrkel 3y ago
Under what circumstances would Wikipedia shit down, if it still has money for operational expenses? The biggest set of responsibilities charites I didn't list is sales (aka donations). But Wikipedia doesn't do more good work (as d
829.
by barrkel 3y ago
A senior staff engineer at FAANG makes decisions on the implementation of features which have effects on 8+ digits of revenue. It's mostly downside risk: if you don't do it right, then the lack of availability costs a lot .
830.
by barrkel 3y ago
The thing is, what exactly does something like Wikipedia need executives for? What strategic shifts does it need to adapt to? What new product lines does it need to move the entire org around to create? What hard decisions does it need to m
831.
by barrkel 3y ago
Production MySQL databases of any significant size use pt-osc or gh-ost for schema changes, and these can be throttled, paused, aborted and so on.
832.
by barrkel 3y ago
Cool. I wasn't running macOS though.
833.
by barrkel 3y ago
The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks. An example I had last night: how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together agai
834.
by barrkel 3y ago
The next time you find yourself on the wrong side of Euston Road road for St Pancras station, take this underpass here: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5302507,-0.1231112,3a,75y,25... It does require local knowledge to
835.
by barrkel 3y ago
It's for new things: new languages, frameworks, libraries. When you're not fluent, it can be a helpful hand for a beginner, or someone who has to do a lot things that they are not expert in, like a one man band in a sole enterpris
836.
by barrkel 3y ago
The fastest option in London is somewhere between a motorbike and a bicycle (if you ignore traffic lights). It is not public transit.
837.
by barrkel 3y ago
I use blank keycaps on my mechanical keyboard for my Dvorak layout: https://www.keyboardco.com/product/blank-black-filco-104-key... I also don't see the point of printing Dvorak layout. You use Dvorak to speed up
838.
by barrkel 4y ago
I've found that LLMs give good results for really basic stuff, and are increasingly fantastical as you head towards the tail of the distribution. If you just need the beginner's gist or are completely unfamiliar with something, th
839.
by barrkel 4y ago
Architecture yes, but specific feature set, including exact support for each incremental revision of the SIMD instruction and register set, not so much. If you're e.g. providing a docker image for a service, it's fine to build per
840.
by barrkel 4y ago
Relational databases have shown, and will continue to show more longevity than object orientation. Facts and the relationships between facts is a deeper foundational principle than the concept mashup of modularity, hidden [mutable] state, d

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