vacuity

21 ms·

361.
by vacuity 2y ago
My understanding is that noalias isn't fully utilized by LLVM, just that it's less buggy now, so there's some uncertainty leaning in favor of Rust in terms of future Rust-specific optimizations. Certainly a language like Fort
362.
by vacuity 2y ago
As the base reality of computers and the inflated reality of software have diverged more and more, education and culture has tracked the software story and led to runaway irresponsibility. Forget not optimizing for performance; I think a lo
363.
by vacuity 2y ago
The power of software is not tied to processing power or memory, although those help a lot. Code is the deciding factor, not quite because it can be laid out wherever and have far reaching effects, but for the underlying basis for code. Sof
364.
by vacuity 2y ago
No. It's normally memory safety and/or ease of tooling/coding/whatever.
365.
by vacuity 2y ago
It's hard to make people view both intelligence and arrogance (or other bad traits) in hand. And neither does society encourage benevolence. I think Dijkstra was right about many things, but I can take those views and choose to act in
366.
by vacuity 2y ago
I don't consider COBOL to be a good indicator of programming quality. Although frankly, I will say that about most software. Generally products stick around not because they're good but because replacing them would be too costly.
367.
by vacuity 2y ago
I want to expand on your sentiment about our pre-AI mindset. Programming has made it easy to do things of essentially no value, while getting lots of money for it. Programming is additive and creative; we can always go further in modelling
368.
by vacuity 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29228427 A thread going into what Knuth meant by that quote that is usually shortened to "premature optimization is the root of all evil". Or, to rephrase it: don't tire y
369.
by vacuity 2y ago
I think it's good that HTML serves a narrow purpose. What's problematic is that we want every other purpose to be served by just one or two things (CSS, JS). It shouldn't be a struggle to differentiate between "script th
370.
by vacuity 2y ago
Agreed on the crucial aspect of task boundaries. Errors should be dealt with as close to the edge of the task as possible, and tasks should be cleanly separable from one another. Think of an app as a small driving program that uses many lib
371.
by vacuity 2y ago
AGI will be achieved when Knuth + LLMs work to finish TAOCP with no errors.
372.
by vacuity 2y ago
In a few words, human nature wasn't built for rational thought all the time.
373.
by vacuity 2y ago
I seem to be rambling. I will add, particularly to clarify my third paragraph (the big one): a library should not panic. It can have defensive panics, but overall it should not panic, and triggering a defensive panic is to be treated as a b
374.
by vacuity 2y ago
> Given that this is a feature that should be used very sparingly, and also one that is very apt to be misused While it should be used carefully, perhaps it need not be used sparingly. My main concern is that unwinding panic occupies a w
375.
by vacuity 2y ago
While panics can be made to unwind and be caught, at that point the different error handling methods are really abort/Result bubbling/Result bubbling but cooler, and I want the last one to be packaged up nicer than "unwinding
376.
by vacuity 2y ago
I happen to agree with @lelanthran's position, but aside from that I think their point is not that there are C libraries following their principle, but rather that libraries should follow it. This is akin to Rust's "get"
377.
by vacuity 2y ago
Indeed. It's in the name: libraries are there to be browsed, while services wait for customers to call on them (and do management and other things in the meantime). This should be understood among the developers of applications, librar
378.
by vacuity 2y ago
Thank you for pointing out that food demand is inelastic, that does shift my perspective somewhat. A complication about demand for food is that American culture promotes luxury and overindulgence. Still not elastic, but more food waste than
379.
by vacuity 2y ago
I disagree. Just as C++ and Rust conceive of "plain old data" (POD) as data that basically has no surprising behaviors on cleanup (probably butchered that explanation), I think of libraries as "plain old code". Unlike se
380.
by vacuity 2y ago
I say the right of any sentient agent is that it has a baseline of not deserving to suffer. Here, I like Peter Singer's presentation in "All Animals Are Equal". No one should be made to suffer or harmed in any way without an
381.
by vacuity 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Food waste will not be addressed properly without cultural shifts. Granted, certain technological improvements may prompt them, but that's a bit backwards of a problem
382.
by vacuity 2y ago
Having accidentally lost lots of digital stuff many times, I have a mindset of not storing much, and closing anything I'm not storing quickly, and failing that, accepting that I won't miss it too much if it's gone. So I still
383.
by vacuity 2y ago
A paper every programmer should read and comprehend. Related to object capabilities/capability-based security: e.g. a network capability is a powerful way to control how a program can access the network. In fact a capability naturally
384.
by vacuity 2y ago
"Intern" (job) -> staying at a workplace for some time to be trained and do some work "Intern" (software) -> staying resident in memory to be referred to canonically I find that often words do come about with a sur
385.
by vacuity 2y ago
But that's the thing: if we want to optimize both machine and human experience, we should create a 1:1 dual format, one which is machine-readable and one which is human-readable. A standard tool easily converts one to the other. This s
386.
by vacuity 2y ago
What shocks me is how addictive everything is. It seems like people of mostly any age or persuasion can get into some kind of slop media or another. For video in particular, I refrain from going out of my way to watch any, but sometimes whe
387.
by vacuity 2y ago
Upvoted the post so more people will see the pictures. And because it's uh, interesting and stuff, of course!
388.
by vacuity 2y ago
I think trying to shoehorn everything into sequential, imperative code is a mistake. The burden of performance should be on the programmer's cognitive load, aided where possible by the computer. Hardware should indeed be simple, but no
389.
by vacuity 2y ago
> We're not all equally wrong. For sure, but I think GP's point (certainly mine) is that the opposite end of the spectrum is also a commonly trod landmine. The world is not split into, say, people who believe global warming is
390.
by vacuity 2y ago
You're quite right. We all develop a bias about the world, and even as I say that I'm pretty good at "critical thinking", there's no telling whether I actually am. Anyone at any level of knowledge, experience, or cu

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