titzer

40 ms·

691.
by titzer 3y ago
It isn't. If a serial killer spent a week digging mass graves by hand, they don't get years taken off their sentence. You don't get points just for working hard or spending money, particularly when it cheapens or just appropr
692.
by titzer 3y ago
Indeed. As an amateur guitarist, but a professional virtual machinist, I have a ton of respect for people who have dedicated their whole lives to mastery in any one particular area. To have a machine gulp down untold eons of human exertion
693.
by titzer 3y ago
I wasn't aware of a right to recoup the costs of any bad idea, which seems to be what you're implying here. Because computers, therefore profit? Huh?
694.
by titzer 3y ago
The conversation is quickly devolving into a vacuum of ignorance where things like royalties, fair use policies, revenue-sharing agreements, parodies, sampling, etc, have apparently never been thought about. We're not talking about an
695.
by titzer 3y ago
This is not that. We're not talking about some inane mashup, but a wholesale digestion of every creative thing any person ever did by a monster computer cluster whose scale dwarfs imagination, which then promptly uses it to maximize &q
696.
by titzer 3y ago
In the great web tradition of harvesting the vast body of other people's work in the large[1] and shoving it through huge amounts of computation to wring out a nickel's worth of value that will eventually manifest in some good-pay
697.
by titzer 3y ago
Autoconf is one of the absolutely hilarious things about UNIX. On the one hand, we've got people optimizing kernels down to the individual instructions (often doing very unsafe dirty C tricks underneath), sometimes with super-clunky an
698.
by titzer 3y ago
> requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created Not sure what you mean here. Evolution doesn't work by rolling all the dice at once and only selecting a winner if all the dice match some magic strin
699.
by titzer 3y ago
The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique. The space of possibilities is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. And yet there is no why for the wrinkles on the back of your hand. Nothing chose it. Nothi
700.
by titzer 3y ago
Size is related to the capacity to build computational processing elements; storage, working memory, logic gates. You can't serve YouTube from a pocket calculator.
701.
by titzer 3y ago
The arguments to fine-tuning are utterly remedial. I can't believe that no one in their orbit ever brought up the anthropic principle [1]. We are not randomly distributed over possible universes; we are embedded in a universe that is
702.
by titzer 3y ago
The last part is correct; layouts are not GC'd objects. They are views over byte arrays (or mmap'd memory, or unsafe regions like the execution stack). The first part is partially incorrect; layouts are not "boxed"--they
703.
by titzer 3y ago
For (2) Virgil has several features that allow you to layout memory with various levels of control. I assume you meaning "array of structs", and you can do that with arrays of tuples, which will naturally be flattened and normaliz
704.
by titzer 3y ago
> Imagining what would have been required for all this to work together gives me a headache. In addition to the shared backbone interface, there would need to be software written to make an almost-endless number of configurations work s
705.
by titzer 3y ago
Just what exactly is sound about positing "magic fields" that have shoddy experimental evidence[1], predict nothing (or if they do, predict obvious things which we have completely adequate explanations for), and are totally unfals
706.
by titzer 3y ago
I've seen him give a talk. He continues to persist with pseudo-scientific theories that posit forces for which there are no evidence that purport to explain phenomenon that we have completely adequate scientific explanations for. His t
707.
by titzer 3y ago
I posted links because I've had this conversation many times over. The short version is: yeah, I used to be a techno-utopian too, 20 years ago. But none of those magic technologies are realistic, we aren't on the path to them bein
708.
by titzer 3y ago
> due to the traditional compilation model. You're talking about C/C++'s compilation model and ABI and there are plenty of others. ICF is a hack to deal with C++'s naive template expansion. There are lots of other lan
709.
by titzer 3y ago
Because of ecological overshoot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot ), which is a real problem ( https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-da... .). Gradual population
710.
by titzer 3y ago
My family has really long generations. Going back 7 generations for me patrilinearly is exactly 280 years; 40 years per generation. When I was young my grandparents were already in their 80s and both grandfathers gone before I was 14. Sadly
711.
by titzer 3y ago
Indeed. Our intentional ecosystem engineering is probably dwarfed by our unintentional transportation of invasive species and infectious diseases, going back centuries. And about zero of that seems to have led to a net increase in biodivers
712.
by titzer 3y ago
It's always been that way, just how many nines of reliability we're talking about. E.g. at Google scale, bitflips in memory from cosmic rays and general noise happy every day. Everything has checksums on it.
713.
by titzer 3y ago
Generally inlining can happen way earlier than linking. E.g. Virgil's compilation model doesn't have a linker at all, it's a whole-program compiler, and that works pretty well, even for 50KLOC programs.
714.
by titzer 3y ago
In Virgil every first-class function is a represented as a fat pointer, i.e. two words[1], for both bound and unbound delegates. It's simple to understand, the syntax is clean, and it always works the way you expect it to. It doesn&#x2
715.
by titzer 3y ago
Also, FWIW, Virgil doesn't have "pointer to member" for fields; it does have a first-class getter for fields, but not a setter: class C { var f: int; } var x = C.new(); var g: C -> int = C.f; &#x2
716.
by titzer 3y ago
C# calls them delegates too, as does Virgil. Virgil uses the fat pointer trick so to avoid any heap allocations. In Virgil, class C { def m() -> int { return 33; } } var x = C.new(); // allocate
717.
by titzer 3y ago
I almost gave you up an upvote until your third paragraph, but I have to now give a hard disagree. We're running more untrusted code than ever, and we absolutely should trust it less than ever and have hardware and software designed wi
718.
by titzer 3y ago
Bah, the only prediction I made is more bullshit on the Internet and I 100% standby this prediction.
719.
by titzer 3y ago
LLMs seem like a new and dangerous tool to scale the bullshit-generation machine to unimaginable levels. Pretty soon it will be impossible to trust any digital information, as every image, recording, video, document, etc can be instantly al
720.
by titzer 3y ago
Is it really hard to believe that the solutions on offer are usually giant piles of steaming crap that do way more than they should but are nevertheless easy to get set up and get going? When programming ecosystems get big, they accumulat

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