rjpower9000

8 ms·

1.
by rjpower9000 1y ago
Part of the land — 120 of the nearly 700 acres — is rented from a family who owns multiple farm properties and wants their fields weed-free with perfectly straight grids of crops, a deep-rooted tradition among Midwestern farming communitie
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Flowmark: Better auto-formatting and line wrapping for Markdown and plaintext(github.com)
4 points by rjpower9000 1y ago|0 comments
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Twinkling lights and nested loops: distributed problem solving and spreadsheets [pdf](lri.fr)
5 points by rjpower9000 1y ago|1 comments
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
Not sure where I stumbled on this, but fascinating historical article on how people were already using spreadsheets for task management and development back in the 80s.
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
Thanks for sharing. I ended up reading through one of these -- https://atonementlicensing.com/surviving-your-first-oracle-l... -- it's truly amazing/terrifying that it's so bad. It's hard to imagine how
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
I might have phrased this unclearly, I meant specifically for the case of translating one symbol at a time from C to Rust. I certainly won't claim I've figured out any magic that makes the coding agents consistent! Here you'v
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
It's in between. It's more C like than the Claude port, but it's more Rust-y than c2rust. How much depends on how fine-grained you want to make your port and how you want to prompt your LLM. For inside of functions and intern
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
It seems feasible, but I haven't thought enough it. One challenge is that as you Rustify the code, it's harder to keep the 1-1 mapping with C interfaces. Sometimes to make it more Rust-y, you might want an internal function or str
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
I'm the author. That's a great idea. I didn't explore that for this session but it's worth trying. I didn't measure consistently, but I would guess 60-70% of the symbols ported easily, with either one-shot or trivia
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
That's an interesting idea. I hadn't thought about it, but it would be interesting to consider doing something similar for the porting task. I don't know enough about the space, could you have an LLM write a formal spec for a
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
Thanks for sharing, I did not know about that! Indeed, this is exactly the type of subtle case you'd worry about when porting. Fuzzing would be unlikely to discover a bug that only occurs on giant inputs or needs a special configuratio
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
I was pretty hand-wavy when I made the original comment. I was thinking implicitly to things like the Python sub-interpreter proposal, which had strong pushback from the Numpy engineers at the time (I don't know the current status, whe
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
Fixed, thanks!
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
I had a similar experience. I finally got around to reading Ulysses when I had some downtime between jobs and pushed my way through it. I ended up referring to https://www.ulyssesguide.com/ as I went along which helped subs
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
The one in which I spend way too much time building a crappy version of Claude Code, ending up with yet another Rust port of Zopfli, but different from that of Syzygy, and I promise I didn't make up any of these words.
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
> I mean, you can. "Have an initial idea. Define a utility function. Apply gradient descent". > It's just that all three steps are really really hard. Haha, I was hoping for something a little easier than that! I'm
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
I won't argue with the idea whether you can test a particular program produces a result (we aren't so interested in programs that run forever in any case). Your observation of the origins of TDD makes sense in this regard: there
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
I respect he's open about his work and struggles, and it's cool he's programming at 86, but it does seem like his approach makes it harder for him rather than easier. For example with the bowling score calculator, it's g
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
> incremental search from a simple start point towards a solutions Good point. More broadly than just TDD, we might characterize an "easy" problem as one where the surface from conception to completion is broadly visible and th
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Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought(rjp.io)
100 points by rjpower9000 1y ago|66 comments
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
I was fascinated by the "Sudoku Affair", found myself speculating on the internal mindset of TDD advocates, and ended up with an unsatisfying conclusion that you can't systematize thought. Not my best writing but thought I&#x
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
It's true you're still working, but it's a different, more distracted effort: you put the LLM on something for a while and then come back. Sometimes it does it right, some times not. I can see the relation to gambling if, say
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
Good insight. That's a better description than what I came up with, "Tiktok for engineers". LLMs probably compound the issue, with that hope of a magic outcome. Though I've had many problems pre-LLM where I was plowing t
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Stepping Back(rjp.io)
178 points by rjpower9000 1y ago|76 comments
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by rjpower9000 1y ago
I have to assume there are some other obsessive engineers out there with reflections of their own. I'm curious how people approach the challenge of staying focused while keeping an open mind about the futility of a particular direction
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Show HN: Animus – Interactive Workbooks(animus.rjp.io)
2 points by rjpower9000 2y ago|0 comments
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by rjpower9000 10y ago
3 trucks would only be wasteful if they didn't manage to complete a full load over their entire shift. I doubt that's the case. (The yard waste and recycling bins are more full in my neighbourhood than the garbage cans...)
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by rjpower9000 11y ago
Sorry, just seeing this now. I can't speak for other languages, but for C++, it's mainly the huge build time just to get started using the project. This is obviously an issue for any C++ project, but with GRPC, having to build al
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by rjpower9000 11y ago
>The reality is the free ride on inflation can't last forever and if the Fed fails to predict the future it can get pretty grim. >Similarly, there are a number of bubble like portents such as resource prices that are showing an e
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by rjpower9000 11y ago
Interesting. I'll have to look at this in more depth when I'm off the phone. It does seem a bit over to top. I've been toying with a similar idea that would focus only on static libraries and would handle binaries as an optim

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