ekidd

12 ms·

151.
by ekidd 10mo ago
I belonged to the generation that graduated into the rising dotcom boom. Around that time, lots of universities taught C++ as the first serious language. (Some still started with Pascal.) The main thing a lot of had going for us was 5-10 ye
152.
by ekidd 10mo ago
Many ideas in math are extremely simple at heart. Some very precise definitions, maybe a clever theorem. The hard part is often: Why is this result important? How does this result generalize things I already knew? What are some concrete exa
153.
by ekidd 11mo ago
> There is little reason for an LLM to value non-instrumental self-preservation, for one. I suspect that instrumental self-preservation can do a lot here. Let's assume a future LLM has goal X. Goal X requires acting on the world
154.
by ekidd 11mo ago
> It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. A fascinating example of this are some Labrador retrievers. Labs are descended from a Newfoundland "landrace" of dogs known
155.
by ekidd 11mo ago
I know a bunch of trans gun owners. They're pretty standard gun geeks, and a few of them do shooting competitions. I've asked them how they got into shooting sports, and a lot times, they tell me some pretty scary stories of real-
156.
by ekidd 11mo ago
This is my experience as well: Writing parsers for complex file formats in Rust often leaves a few edge cases which might cause controlled panics. But controlled panics are essentially denial of service attacks. And panics have good logging
157.
by ekidd 11mo ago
> they shouldn't be its maintainers. I mean, yes, the ffmpeg maintainers are very likely to decide this on their own, abandoning the project entirely. This is already happening for quite a few core open source projects that are us
158.
by ekidd 11mo ago
The actual real alternative is that the ffmpeg maintainers quit, just like the libxml2 maintainer did. A lot of these core pieces of infrastructure are maintained by one to three middle-aged engineers in their free time, for nothing. Meanwh
159.
by ekidd 11mo ago
> It's a matter of UK law and, I'd bet, many countries, that they have the sovereign right to legislate about matters in and outside their borders. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the entire founding political mythol
160.
by ekidd 11mo ago
Yup, I have been a junior compiler engineer at three(!) different jobs early in my career, before moving on to other stuff. It has never been a huge niche. It's fun work if you can get it. There were often MIT grads around, but I don&#
161.
by ekidd 11mo ago
Several of the Reddit "AmITheAsshole"-style subs have a significant number of posts which are either AI or sloppy creative writing. Mass-produced outrage bait isn't new, and it's available in a thousand flavors. But AI h
162.
by ekidd 1y ago
I suspect the big problem here is thinly-stretched volunteer maintainers. I am very sympathetic to the idea that all memory corruption bugs should be fixed systematically, whether or not they're exploitable. It works well for OpenBSD.
163.
by ekidd 1y ago
Back in the 90s, this was actually a sneaky part of Dartmouth's CS23 Software Engineering course. At least half your grade came from a 5-person group software project which took half a semester. The groups were chosen for you, of cours
164.
by ekidd 1y ago
"Truth" is often a very expensive commodity to obtain. There are plenty of awful sources and mistaken claims on the shelf of any town library. Lots of peer reviewed papers are crap, including a few in Nature. Newspapers are consta
165.
by ekidd 1y ago
Back in the old days of "Eigenfaces", you could project faces into 12- or 13-dimensional space using SVD and do k-nearest-neighbor. This fit into cache even back in the 90s, at least if your faces were pre-cropped to (say) 100x100
166.
by ekidd 1y ago
I am concerned about EV maintenance outside of warranty. My family has routinely gotten even American cars above 200,000 miles, or at least kept them going for 15 years or more. This has gotten harder over the years. Cars from 2010 rust a l
167.
by ekidd 1y ago
Yup, I'm very fond of Dell's Ubuntu laptops. Ubuntu just works, and I rarely need to mess with anything. (I have had occasional hardware problems over the years, but they have an on-site support option that works well even in rura
168.
by ekidd 1y ago
> I'm so curious around what people's median experience is of AI coding tools. My experience is coding agents work best for either absolute beginners, or for lead engineers who have experience building and training teams. Get
169.
by ekidd 1y ago
Vector embeddings are slightly interesting because they come pre-trained with large amounts of data. But similar ways to reduce huge numbers of dimensions to a much smaller set of "interesting" dimensions have been known for a lon
170.
by ekidd 1y ago
Gemini is really fantastic at anything that's OCR-adjacent, and it promptly falls over on most other image-related tasks.
171.
by ekidd 1y ago
A lot depends on your goals for your code reviews. And your goals might even be different for different parts of the code base. - Are you trying to make sure that more than one human has seen the code? Then simply reading through a PR in 10
172.
by ekidd 1y ago
I mostly wind up using Arc a lot while using async streams . This tends to occur when emulating a Unix-pipeline-like architecture that also supports concurrency. Basically, "pipelines where we can process up to N items in parallel.&qu
173.
by ekidd 1y ago
> You don't need a monad abstraction to have things with monadic properties, and indeed often reality isn't quite perfectly shaped to theory, so forcing your object to fit the abstraction can be costly. Please note that I was
174.
by ekidd 1y ago
So, one way to understand a monad is that it's essentially a container type with "map" and "flatten" operations. Let's say your monad is type M<T>. The "map" operation allows you to take a funct
175.
by ekidd 1y ago
Git is pretty modular, and it already includes multiple languages. I guess that significant parts of it will remain in C for a long time, including incremental improvements to those parts. Though it wouldn't surprise me if some parts o
176.
by ekidd 1y ago
For whatever it might be worth... Looking at the comment thread, at least one person I recognize as a core maintainer seems to be acting as if this is an official plan that they've already agreed on the outline of, if not the exact tim
177.
by ekidd 1y ago
Some of the people who have caused the most pain, suffering and death in the world were still kind to their dogs. They are often pleasant socially. Stalin, by was apparently delightful over a glass of whiskey and some cigars. The older I g
178.
by ekidd 1y ago
"Sum types" (aka "Rust enums") are something that I've really come to love for representing the idea "There are 3 possible cases here, here's the data we need in each case, and please remember that these c
179.
by ekidd 1y ago
There are two deep capabilities that make Rust, Rust: 1. Banning shared, mutable data. You can't change data that other code might be reading. This is a huge win for threading and multiple CPUs, but it's a dramatic departure fro
180.
by ekidd 1y ago
For security reasons, the correct answer on how process invalid UTF-8 is (and needs to be) "throw away the data like it's radioactive, and return an error." Otherwise you leave yourself wide open to validation bypass attacks

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