titzer

40 ms·

661.
by titzer 2y ago
If you're replacing an old system, a great piece of documentation is the original requirements against which it was built, especially if that document is versioned. Goes a long way to understanding why something was built a certain way
662.
by titzer 2y ago
Well no, the whole point is that the spec is not detailed enough to be code. Of course it leaves out details. I feel like this conversation will diverge to generalities without an example. So, take the WebAssembly spec for example. There&
663.
by titzer 2y ago
> The circular specification problem > The only way to know exactly what software we want to build is to fully specify it: without doing so, there will be gaps between our vague ideas and harsh reality. However, a complete, abstract s
664.
by titzer 2y ago
I want Richard Dawkins or David Attenborough to narrate my code for me.
665.
by titzer 2y ago
The AI woman's voice is far too breathy and emotive. I instantly hate it and don't want to hear it. The AI has also copied one of my personal pet peeves, which is dropping or swallowing d's and t's from certain words, li
666.
by titzer 2y ago
Can't wait for this AI voice assistant to tell me in a sultry voice how I should stay in an AirBnB about 12 times a day.
667.
by titzer 2y ago
> it supposedly having been a proxy for an ideological battle More than anything, it was a proxy for developing ICBMs and other space capabilities (e.g. satellites) for fighting the cold war.
668.
by titzer 2y ago
Indeed. How much more evidence do we need that in the end, technology always is at the service of the power structure; the structure stutters briefly at the onset of innovation until it manages to adapt and harness technology to reinforce
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by titzer 2y ago
> How much would you pay for that? I would pay $TAXES for that. The United States collectively pays over $800 billion a year for public education ( https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... ).
670.
by titzer 2y ago
> Additionally, members of the program receive priority placement and “richer brand expression” in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments. Hi, the future called and it's been enshittified.
671.
by titzer 2y ago
> In September we encountered a show stopper bug. The vendor product stored every customer transaction as a json record in a giant json document. So as test data accumulated, performance of the product got slower and slower. For the love
672.
by titzer 2y ago
All fast JavaScript VMs use some form of pointer tagging. V8 uses (compressed) tagged pointers and both JSC and Firefox used NaN-boxing. WasmGC has a i31ref as part of its reference hierarchy, which is implemented with pointer tagging.
673.
by titzer 2y ago
Part of the benefit of compiling bytecode (or anything) is specializing code to the context (types, values, etc) in which it appears. While I don't doubt your analysis, it could be the case that compiled C code in question is full of b
674.
by titzer 3y ago
glibc is not stable on Linux. Syscalls are.
675.
by titzer 3y ago
> A lot of that is due to coordination problems. The dumpster fire at the bottom of that is libc and the C ABI. Practically everything is built around the assumption that software will be distributed as source code and configured and rec
676.
by titzer 3y ago
> everything has to be computational to be real But that's just circular logic. It begs the question as to what is "computational" and what is "mathematical". E.g. Tegmark has good points in the "Mathematica
677.
by titzer 3y ago
> But models tend to break down if you look close enough, and I think this may also happen to QM at some point. Sure, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that it will be some kind of deterministic computation underneath. >
678.
by titzer 3y ago
What Deutsch is saying is that any simulation is going to virtualize all possible observations (including time and any/all side channels), which means there's no way to see through the abstraction. But that doesn't mean we a
679.
by titzer 3y ago
Not really. The best models that we have to explain measurable physical phenomenon are wave equations from quantum mechanics that describe probably distributions. There have been proposals for nearly a century that a deterministic model und
680.
by titzer 3y ago
It's a concern, but it's orders of magnitude better to clean up the garbage than not clean up the garbage. Like, the entire foodchain being decimated by choking on floating garbage kind of difference. I mean, if you want to optimi
681.
by titzer 3y ago
Virgil's reachability analysis also applies to initialized objects and their fields. I.e. it will only include the reachable parts of the heap and will remove fields that are never accessed from objects. This analysis happens on the en
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by titzer 3y ago
All the padding is because of touchscreens. It's ruined the web and now ruining desktop. Low information density, superfluous animations, icon-ese everywhere, losing tooltips, it all sucks.
683.
by titzer 3y ago
Looking back, one of my regrets is that I didn't make my own Window manager, or at least customize or skin one with longevity and stick to it. I am pretty much tired of being jostled around by UX engineers repeatedly reinventing the wh
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by titzer 3y ago
> Money. Sure, but please also recognize that the only reason we've gotten to renewables being cheaper is through massive subsidies. Solar has gotten there from economies of scale and technological innovation, which has been drive
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by titzer 3y ago
FWIW, the reachable analysis in Virgil eliminates not only dead code, but dead fields, objects, metadata, etc. It's not just code.
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by titzer 3y ago
Better solid waste than gas.
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by titzer 3y ago
> I think there's a strong optimistic case that the private sector can get us there by 2100 or so So, never. The private sector has been dragged kicking and screaming to where we are now; Oil CEOs today are still resisting calls t
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by titzer 3y ago
Tree-shaking is such a bad misnomer. Virgil's compiler calls this "reachability analysis" and it's built into the compilation model. The compiler will parse and typecheck a program's (and libraries' code), and
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by titzer 3y ago
The proper way to fear in programming is to fear: 1. Your input will be incorrect/corrupt/malicious. Sanitize the crap out of your input. Think of every possible way your parser could go off the rails and fail. 2. Your code will h
690.
by titzer 3y ago
Oh, haha, yeah. I guess I'm the opposite--I actually like AI more than the attention economy! At least one of them is not actively trying to drain my brainpower and skill set and get my to buy stuff and do stuff I wouldn't other

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