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3,923 karma · joined September 20, 2017

I have a blog called "Deus In Machina" on Substack to improve my writing. If you check it out, I hope you enjoy your time at the digital hearth :)

https://www.deusinmachina.net/

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Decabytes··on How SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine
He also unbanned a lot of people and got Trump back, got to ride the AI wave with Grok, pushed paid subscriptions and implemented paying people for tweeting. I would argue growing the platform by bringing back people that were brought back for violating the original rules is not a win. Nor is attracting people to the platform that follow those people, Nor is riding the AI train.

And even with all of that, the new users, the AI, the paid subscriptions, None none of that actually fixed the major underlying issues that Twitter is not profitable. Jack Dorsey couldn’t fix it and neither did Elon. I think he just realized having a modern media platform he controls is more powerful than it making money. He inherited a platform built by someone else, and keeps the lights on with a skeleton crew. I don’t see that as a success

Decabytes··on Swift 6.4 Released
Yes to the subprocess 1.0. CommandLine utils are how I try out any new language. I feel like Swift hits the sweet spot for me in terms of safety, cross platform capability, ahead of time compilation, and automatic memory management compared to other languages currently available.
Decabytes··on Mistral raises €3B
So what is the sentiment on Mistral? Does it get the same hate as other AI companies? Or does its European and open focus make people give it some slack? It doesn’t really seem like anti AI people care if something was AI generated with Mistral vs something else. If it’s AI generated it is bad and that’s that.

Doesn’t seem like if LibreOffice partnered with Mistral for more ethical AI features, people would be excited about it

Decabytes··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
I feel like setting up the social media is a solved problem. And while getting users is hard, if you hook up to the fediverse, you can piggy back off other Platforms. I think the harder problem is making it profitable
Decabytes··on ChatGPT Is Throwing 404
Laughs in small local model
Decabytes··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
I moved to KDE from Gnome for a variety of reasons, but I genuinely miss Gnome and Native GTK apps. They weren't as customizable, but the features you did get work so well.

One of my main issues with KDE is that the default keybindings for desktop operations feel like they were designed by people who don't navigate their desktop with a keyboard.

Then there are little things like in Gnome the screenshot implicitly copies to the clipboard, while in KDE you have to click the copy button. There are just little points of friction I experience in KDE that make me yearn for Gnome's workflow. I think my ideal world I would have a KDE desktop that used all the Gnome shortcuts, and worked more like Gnome.

Decabytes··on Stop Making TUIs
Isn’t the GUI version of a TUI just an Electron app?
Decabytes··on Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
One think I think is strange about the m programming world we live in now is the mythologization of pre llm code. As if people weren’t copying code from stack overflow, auto completing their way through APIs using intellisense, intellicode, tab nine, or checking in code there didn’t properly test or understand
Decabytes··on Writergate: Zig I/O Interface Overhaul
Can someone help me understand the advantage of no hidden control in this context? Are people really optimizingI/O interfaces such that they need an api that is verbose just for the sake of having no hidden flow?

It feels to me that most people will just use the abstracted interface instead

Decabytes··on Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
As expected Google completely forgets about it’s other language, Dart
Decabytes··on To save C, we must save ABI (2022)
One of the most frustrating things in my opinion about new systems languages, is that they refuse to have a stable ability to, so everything has to pretend to be C at the boundaries.
Decabytes··on Chicken Scheme 6.0
Why do people use chicken over gambit? Is it due to chicken’s larger ego system and eggs, or is there more?
Decabytes··on Squeak 6.1
one thing I love about Smalltalk is being able to inspect the code as it's running. Especially from the GUI. You can just be like Oh I wonder where the code for this button is from, inspect it, and it takes you right to the code. It's a shame we can't have this level of introspection without negative performance implications.
Decabytes··on Why Do Fewer Renters Expect to Move?
It is very common in Japan to have to pay key money when moving in, which is typically 1-2 months of rent. This isn’t like a security deposit as it is non refundable and is basically a “thank you for letting me live here”

Also if you are actually getting paid in Yen then the gap narrows between NY and Tokyo. Then there is the fact that your home could be destroyed in a massive earthquake but everyone has a different price for that risk

Decabytes··on SwiftUI After 7 Years
There was a post on here awhile ago from Jeffrey Snovers blog about how Microsoft screwed this up as well. Given how many people have moved to electron, and how big companies don’t seem to be able to handle native GUI’s anymore, have we just made the desktops too complicated?
Decabytes··on Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6
Has anyone ever done a comparison between the smaller models like Luna, against the previous GPT 5 frontier models? Have we gotten to the point where the small models are as good as the frontier models of the past, or is there still a way to go?
Decabytes··on Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2
As someone who didn’t play many of the point and click adventures growing up, thimbleweed park was a lot of fun. I also like the genre more than visual novels. I kind of felt like the dialogue was supposed to be cheesy so I just rolled with it. Were some of the things a little frustrating? Yea, but I think there is a lot of life left in this genre and I’m sure Ron will make some improvements. I can’t wait to play the next one.
Decabytes··on GNU Hurd gets 9pfs, OpenNTPD, dynamic /dev/ entries, and more
Glad to see work on Hurd pick up more this past few years. I doubt it will ever be mainstream, but I’ve always found the concept interesting
Decabytes··on SIMD for Collision
I feel like SIMD has been around for decades. Why has it taken this long to catch on? I feel like I have been hearing it a lot through the past few years. It feels like it’s talked about like some programming silver bullet
Decabytes··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
I feel like the only real answer is "we just don't know". But in an attempt to actually answer this, I think the breaking point are different for different groups of people.

If you are struggling to pay the bills, you probably could care less about software's 'decline', you're just trying to survive. Maybe if something catastrophic happened it would be enough to put you at that limit, but software could stand to get much worse before then.

If you are forced to interact with technology a lot everyday, then what might be a paper cut for someone every once in a while, could be literally hundreds a day for you. In that case you are probably very near or at that threshold already.

As a society, I don't think we would see cracks until we start to see multiple community scale disasters related to poor software, or small disasters in highly visible areas like healthcare, planes, etc.

Decabytes··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
Software quality is tied to the market incentives and always has been. AI isn’t going to make someone care about writing robust software and that is why we don’t see better software all of a sudden. The market doesn’t rewards apps that don’t break on every update, it doesn’t reward cobbling together multiple independent solutions, as opposed to using Microsoft as a one stop shop. If people could have gotten away with this in the early days of computing they would have, but computers were too low powered, and the knowledge too scarce.

There is a saying

Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands

We found the limits of what it takes to make software stand, and what software paper cuts people are willing to deal with

Decabytes··on Solod: Go can be a better C
I did this with a python languah
Decabytes··on Bonnie Tyler has died
I had never seen the music video until the news started playing it. Super funny
Decabytes··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
While I agree that the Zig code in Bun could be better, and that the Silicon Valley pressure to move fast and break things prevented a lot of suggested improvements, this feels like the same argument as people who write C or C++ where people think they wouldn’t make mistakes.

For example this section

> We've been trying to warn you about your comptime abuse for years.

You could replace comptime with templates in C++ and it would be the same story. People will abuse features you put in the language. Is C++ a good language that people are just using wrong? According to Bjarne Stroustrup yes, and the C++ core guidelines fixes those issues, but a lot of people seem to disagree. Don't believe me here is an interview where he talks about memory safety in C++? ^1

> Ryan: One thing that I think C++ is uh infamous for is kind of like memory safety issues or kind of foot guns that exist there.

> Bjarne: I'm so tired of that. Um I haven't had those problems for years. Um, and somebody did a a study of the obvious problems with buffer overflows and um people hacking in using that kind of stuff and uh almost all of the uh these cases when people writing C style code or in C and uh Herb Server has a a talk with with actual numbers and they they are quite significant. It's it's sort of that kind of problems more than 90% are for people that don't write modern C++. They they use raw pointers to pass things around without um the number of elements. No fat pointers, no spans. um you you have them in C++. You can use them. You can use uh vectors. We have hardened libraries. Everybody has hardened libraries that that does the runtime checking. Uh Apple has it. Google has it. Microsoft has it. It's just not standard till now. C++ 26 has a hardened option that are standard. uh and the work I'm doing on profiles will give you a way of guaranteeing that you don't do the stupid things. Um so anyway, uh fundamentally theoretically the problem was solved many years ago and people just do what they've always done and get the problems they've always had. And uh that makes me sad and uh it's one of the things that makes me work on uh coding guidelines and on enforced profiles and on education. I mean education is one way to solve the problem. Is there a way to get the compiler to just prevent people from doing all those risky things? And is that enabled by default in modern C++ today? No, but it should be. I'm proposing that for C++ 29. Uh the simpler versions of that should have been in in in uh C++ 26, but there are still a lot of people even in the C++ standards committee that are very devoted to uh their old code and their old ways of doing things. Um there's people who says you should only standardize what is common in industry. But when the bugs are common in industry, you should do something else.

Is this going to be Zig's answers to real issues that people have in the real world? I'd argue that's not good enough for a modern systems programming language.

> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.

The vast majority of software is written by businesses, who have to cater to the lowest common denominator in their code base, including slop programmers, pre or post llm. They are not incentivized to go slower. We will never see a mass adoption of Tiger Style programming (though I would be happy to be proven wrong). That is the reality of what we need programming languages to help with in 2026. I've never met a professional programmer that has not seen or said the same thing about a code base that they've worked on.

New programming languages need to contend with that reality if they want to be adopted en masse. If not they are doomed to not be adopted (which is okay I've created many programming languages that are just for me). But if a programming language in never adopted then the supposed benefits or improvements of the language never trickle down to us the users of the software, so they just remain interesting ideas (which again is okay).

> This attention could have been harnessed in a few different ways. For example, he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards.

Andrew kelley runs a tight ship, and his foundation does not need a lot of money to keep going, but he has talked about how working on all the organizational transparency is not his favorite part of the project, and I can see why a lot of young programmers wouldn’t want to go that way.

Now let me be clear I actually like Zig, and have promoted it on Hacker News before, and written some code myself. I actual uses Zigcc in one of my projects because it makes my life easier. I genuinely love the tooling of Zig, and I feel like the language respects my time. I want the language to succeed

I also think that Andrew Kelley is a principled man with good engineering sense, and has turned down opportunities that would have made him a lot more money, were he to violate his own principles. That is admirable, and he has demonstrated it on so many occasions that it is currently not a question to me. What I would like to see, and what Andrew has said Zig focuses is how Zig can improve program correctness even more, without requiring me, or my coworkers to be a 10x programmer

1. https://youtu.be/U46fJ2bJ-co?t=2780

Decabytes··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
It’s interesting to see how llms have turned the concept of rewrite it in rust, from an impossibility for some projects (code is too large and complicated, it will take too much time) to a real possibility for even large projects.
Decabytes··on Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore
I'm curious to hear from people if anyone who uses Bun after this changed has noticed any day to day differences with the rust version over the zig version
Decabytes··on Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
I wonder how useful this could be as a generalized version control for regular user systems, as a way to rollback, or scrub through history. Presumably if this is designed to work at Epic and Big Game studio scale, it should work at home computer scale
Decabytes··on How memory safety CVEs differ between Rust and C/C++
Bjarne Stroustrup was recently interviewed by Ryan Peterman^1

1. https://youtu.be/U46fJ2bJ-co?t=2780

and Ryan asked Bjarne about memory safety. Bjarne brushes it off and says that in almost all cases where we see memory safety issues, they are either

1. Being written in C style C++ and not using "Modern C++" 2. Being written in C

He then goes on to say say that Modern C++ and where it is necessary, hardened libraries, go a long way to making these problems non issues. I'm not a C++ guy, so how much of this is true? What do the C++ developers think about this?

I've postd the whole message if people would like to read. It's about 46minutes into the video

Ryan: One thing that I think C++ is uh infamous for is kind of like memory safety issues or kind of foot guns that exist there.

Bjarne: I'm so tired of that. Um I haven't had those problems for years. Um, and somebody did a a study of the obvious problems with buffer overflows and um people hacking in using that kind of stuff and uh almost all of the uh these cases when people writing C style code or in C and uh Herb Server has a a talk with with actual numbers and they they are quite significant. It's it's sort of that kind of problems more than 90% are for people that don't write modern C++. They they use raw pointers to pass things around without um the number of elements. No fat pointers, no spans. um you you have them in C++. You can use them. You can use uh vectors. We have hardened libraries. Everybody has hardened libraries that that does the runtime checking. Uh Apple has it. Google has it. Microsoft has it. It's just not standard till now. C++ 26 has a hardened option that are standard. uh and the work I'm doing on profiles will give you a way of guaranteeing that you don't do the stupid things. Um so anyway, uh fundamentally theoretically the problem was solved many years ago and people just do what they've always done and get the problems they've always had. And uh that makes me sad and uh it's one of the things that makes me work on uh coding guidelines and on enforced profiles and on education. I mean education is one way to solve the problem. Is there a way to get the compiler to just prevent people from doing all those risky things? And is that enabled by default in modern C++ today? No, but it should be. I'm proposing that for C++ 29. Uh the simpler versions of that should have been in in in uh C++ 26, but there are still a lot of people even in the C++ standards committee that are very devoted to uh their old code and their old ways of doing things. Um there's people who says you should only standardize what is common in industry. But when the bugs are common in industry, you should do something else. The standards committee is a a topic I

Decabytes··on Zig by Example
For clarity in this dual programming language scenario I'm talking about, I'm writing a user facing app that's mostly a lot of business logic.

It's running slow so I profile it and I see my math function in pure Dart (or whatever language you are writing in) is the hot spot, and pressures the garbage collector too much, so I rewrite the function in a lower level language that doesn't have as much overhead, to speed things up. Then I just call it from the higher level language through the FFI.

The benefit of Zig is the syntax is simple, and the build steps are simple, so it doesn't slow down app development too much

Decabytes··on Zig Structs of Arrays (2024)
> Why have operators at all?

I mean as an avid Lisp fan, I feel like Lisp basically answers the question of how much syntax you need in a langauge. I must admit though, not having to deal with operators precedence is really nice

  (mod (+ x (* 2 step)) width)
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