pron

18 ms·

151.
by pron 3mo ago
I should add that in the 30 years I've been a professional software developer, I've worked on and advised many projects. They all ran into serious challenges at one point or another. Not of those projects that was held in high tec
152.
by pron 3mo ago
Sounds to me like his choice of Zig was made in haste, as was his choice of Rust. If you find yourself changing a project's primary language more than once a decade (more like 15 years, but let's say a decade), the problem isn&#x2
153.
by pron 3mo ago
> The first solo-founder unicorn isn’t built by a genius doing the work of three hundred people. It’s built by one person sitting at the center of a coordination layer that does the work the three hundred people mostly used to do... What
154.
by pron 3mo ago
We comprehend, but these "scaling laws" have been in effect for less than a decade (and they're more historical observations over a very short period than actual laws), and while some technologies progress exponentially for s
155.
by pron 4mo ago
> robots seem mainly limited by software First, I don't think so. Second, some resources would take even robots decades or centuries to collect. Even something as fundamental as energy production takes a lot of time and money to bui
156.
by pron 4mo ago
> Because the thing pursuing the goal would be able to improve it's ability to pursue the goal But not necessarily without needing a huge amount of resources. It is a mathematical certainty that no intelligence can solve computation
157.
by pron 4mo ago
> I suspect we just have different beliefs about how close we are to RSI. I don't have any belief on the matter, but my scepticism isn't necessarily about RSI itself, but about how much it would matter even if it does happen so
158.
by pron 4mo ago
Because most systems in nature and society, including technological progress, aren't linear. It's certainly plausible that improvements will continue, but the pace is completely unpredictable. It's also plausible that the tra
159.
by pron 4mo ago
> I just don't understand why people are incapable of extrapolating. I guess it's a matter of education. People with a mathematics or computer science background know that unless the dynamics of a process are known to be linear
160.
by pron 4mo ago
Sure, but because work is something we spend so much time on, when workers can quit when the work feels meaningless or absurd, that's a good thing. We should aspire for a society where all workers can do that.
161.
SIMD Vectors in the HotSpot JVM – Auto Vectorization and the Vector API(youtube.com)
3 points by pron 4mo ago|0 comments
162.
by pron 4mo ago
> Every time you compile a statically-typed programming language you are using formal verification Yeah, this is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about proving properties with deep alternative quantifiers. >
163.
by pron 4mo ago
> I would think the cost multiplier in those cases is much lower for an LLM as compared to a human that doesn't have an inherit understanding and needs to give it thought. Wouldn't you? No. I don't see why proving would re
164.
by pron 4mo ago
Whatever the cost multiplier is, I see no reason why that same multiplier won't remain with AI. Personally, I don't think that picture is quite accurate. Yes, there is a high cost multiplier for small programs , albeit perhaps no
165.
by pron 4mo ago
> It’s no longer just for safety-critical systems with the budget for specialized proof engineers. It’s for anyone who has a property worth proving ... and the budget to pay the AI to prove it. I have quite a bit of experience with forma
166.
by pron 4mo ago
Nominal. The inflation-adjusted price today is 2/3 of what it was then.
167.
by pron 4mo ago
If we view Rust (including unsafe) as a memory-unsafe language, then it's the same as C++, since we can then view Rc/Arc as optional. But if we want to look at Rust as a memory-safe language, then it mandates the use of GC when
168.
by pron 4mo ago
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/97810035953... Note that this is a pretty new technology. The first production-quality "pauseless" moving collector for commodity hardware was releas
169.
by pron 4mo ago
> so "low footprint" also generally means "low latency" Not anymore. You're absolutely right that one of the reasons moving collectors were not used more widely was that, while their throughput was always very im
170.
by pron 4mo ago
> But that doesn't mean any language that allows you to implement reference counting as a library, is a garbage-collected language. The concept of "a garbage-collected language" is not well-defined. There are languages, li
171.
by pron 4mo ago
Right, and there are differences within tracing GCs that are just as big as between refcounting (and even manual malloc/free) and tracing. For example, Go uses tracing to determine when an object lifetime ends. But the moving collector
172.
by pron 4mo ago
> I think a lot of people just want to be able to discuss different areas of the automatic memory management design space separately, and maintaining the distinction between reference counting and garbage collection (meaning tracing GCs)
173.
by pron 4mo ago
It's not about restricting the language. It's that practising programmers often don't know a subject well enough, so they use different words to make distinctions that don't matter as much as they think (see "transp
174.
by pron 4mo ago
> What I didn’t like about this series of books was choosing “garbage collection” as umbrella term for both tracing GC and reference counting, without verifying if programming community would agree with that, which turned out they didn’t
175.
by pron 4mo ago
> I'm saying I don't like this proposal And I'm trying to tell you that this document is not what you think it is. It's a rough sketch of a building's foundations and your critique is about the roof. Even if this
176.
by pron 4mo ago
> it's still a bad choice Except there's no choice here. It's a draft of an exploration of a portion of a feature. Drafts are ideas that have not even been submitted for consideration for inclusion in the roadmap. You can
177.
by pron 4mo ago
Java is getting that power in a different, more orthogonal way, IMO, through Project Babylon: https://openjdk.org/projects/babylon/
178.
by pron 4mo ago
I'd be very surprised if Google go for it.
179.
by pron 4mo ago
I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not claiming that the most successful products necessarily have all the best features. I am saying that the claim that "team X consistently makes worse decisions than team Y" is hard
180.
by pron 4mo ago
I don't think the issue is nuance. The issue is what people enjoy talking about. E.g. here's what the industry probably looks like in terms of how many people work in different languages: https://www.devjobsscanner.com&

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