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IsTom

1,578 karma · joined March 27, 2012

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IsTom··on Tesla takes on $30B in credit as it approaches unprofitability
I've seen taxi drivers use them in Europe multiple times basically every time you want to transport more people. Beats using 2 cars.
IsTom··on Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
> speaking about gypsies in a racist way is followed by a ban

I'm suspecting that is only because of behaviors learned from US on the internet. If not for that they wouldn't have thought of banning for it. It's not a topic that comes up often, but IRL negative views on gypsies are the norm in Europe.

I think it's important to understand that it's viewed as culture issue, not color-of-skin issue (that is something that can be changed, people of gypsy heritage that go to school and work are not considered gypsies for this) and so not getting filled in the category of "racism".

IsTom··on OpenAI: Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription
And renamed to Copilot
IsTom··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
If the Nord Stream didn't get blown up it could have been different.
IsTom··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
That's the point. France has 70%+ nuclear energy in the mix, but isn't the economic miracle that nuclear power is supposed to bring.
IsTom··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
> During the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder, the social democratic-green government decreed Germany's final retreat from using nuclear power by 2022.[1]

The Gerhard Schröder that

> Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom.[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der

IsTom··on Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage
Yeah, and it's alt+k on my default keyboard layout on debian… I think some punctuation is available on macos as well — so perhaps it's a windows-ism that «only AI can use punctuation».
IsTom··on Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
> The "trick" is that they are not Turing-complete, they mandate termination of every expression.

I don't think this is a big deal for day-to-day programming. You're trying to stay in n, nlogn or maybe n^2 realm most of the time. And the kind of infinite loops you encounter (e.g. event loops) are co-inductive or have some notion of making progress.

IsTom··on I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
Even more concretely, the halting problem for turing machines with halting problem oracle would be undecidable for them. And if you could solve that you won't believe what problem would be undecidable. It's turtles all the way up.
IsTom··on C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour
Yeah, but then you need compiler to somehow know if it's truly unreachable to know when to emit the warning and when to not do that.
IsTom··on C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour
> should've explored a rule that required the compiler to emit a diagnostic or error for trivial loops (whether as defined by C11 or otherwise), requiring the programmer to explicitly insert ::yield or similar

It wouldn't work when this kind of loop is generated by macros/templates in some unreachable case left after const folding.

IsTom··on Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
> no general purpose programming language lets you put an arbitrary expression in the same language in a type as a permanent condition, or lets you state facts that the compiler will prove

Lean can be used as a regular programming language. There's also languages like idris2 and f-star, but they don't seem to have much traction.

IsTom··on Small programming tricks
`find` does a lot more things than that.
IsTom··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
It's also a particle and a self-propelled gun. There's a limited number of short legible words.
IsTom··on Show HN: 1080p is 920px tall – 1k real browser viewports
Why'd 800x600 be this popular? Is this some specific device? Is this 90s? Seems suspicious to me.
IsTom··on Bad benchmarks and evals: Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires
> but I guess you get into problems with it being ice and snow that you're testing

If it's not actively snowing for a few days roads get clear by thawing during day because of salt/cars being hot/sun shining.

The "summer tyres get too hard in the cold" idea could very well come from places where the typical winter is at least < -5°C. It's not uncommon in central/eastern/northern europe for temperatures to be < -10°C for extended periods of time.

IsTom··on Bad benchmarks and evals: Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires
I'm a little bit confused about these tire claims as

> down to 0C / 32 F (he didn't test colder conditions)

I get that people live in different places, but that's a huge caveat. How's that winter if you're not below 0°C? That sounds like "winter tires are worse than all-seasons tires in winter if you exclude winter".

IsTom··on Base84 deserves a place in file names
Yes, but typically people are not doing this on every command and if you're globbing files it'll get used as flag.
IsTom··on Base84 deserves a place in file names
> anything but NUL is valid.

And slash/!

IsTom··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
If they reject more ads they get less money.
IsTom··on Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master
For small separate changes in isolation then maybe it's ok? But not for whole days 8 hours each.

But then you need to watch for bugs coming from interaction with previous changes and in 700k loc that might be nontrivial. How do you know which states are reachable and which are not? That takes time.

It only takes a botched condition here (forgot a "not"? swapped "and"/"or"?), a swapped variable name there, code that looks ok, but isn't.

IsTom··on Navier-Stokes Announcement
Soundness bugs in lean are not unheard of. That's why they recommend using external checkers for "malicious" proofs.

https://github.com/leanprover/lean4/issues/14576

IsTom··on De-Anglicizing Programming
To be a slightly more neutral It'd be a nice opportunity to base it on esperanto.
IsTom··on Show HN: Compute polynomials twice as fast
Pretty cool, especially in finite fields. Though coefficients seem to blow up pretty quick in Q?
IsTom··on I resigned from Anthropic today
Technology depends on a lot of people cooperating around the globe. Disrupt a few critical chains (power generation, fertilizers, computers), add a bit of good old war and you'll soon be in the era before Haber process and a lot of people die. And then the remaining people will have trouble keeping that level of technology with how sudden the change would be.
IsTom··on C*: Unifying Programming and Verification in C (2025)
I like the concept of separation logic as much as the next guy, but I don't think this is it. Just look at the examples, with loop invariants alone being longer than the whole example. It's not only a problem with ergonomics, but it leaves a lot of space for specification bugs.

And I suspect that cross section of people writing C code you want to verify with formal verification folks is not particularly big.

IsTom··on Show HN: GET Together – A social network where you don't need POST to Post
> To meet and spend time with other human beings.

The design is very human.

IsTom··on You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules
Yes

> Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing tort claims, electing representatives who will better manage the public-water system, and petitioning their representatives for other remedies.

which is easier said than done.

From outside of US this seems extremely ass backwards.

IsTom··on You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules
On the other hand it means that states can just not do that and leave their citizens without clean drinking water.
IsTom··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms#Set-theoretic_mod...

> The Peano axioms can be derived from set theoretic constructions of the natural numbers and axioms of set theory such as ZF.[15]

If you're going against the general consensus you should present something more than nebulous assertions that it's wrong.

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