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SubjectToChange

709 karma · joined February 9, 2020

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SubjectToChange··on Go 1.27 Interactive Tour
I’m not sure if you are complementing or denigrating golang’s tooling. Most “STEM software” packages are horrendous in terms of user/developer experience, to the point of hampering their utility. For instance, MPI really reminds HPC users that we are in “STEM”, but not for a good reason.

Golang has good “implementation level” tooling, but that is still nothing when compared to tooling available to Java and C#. Even if GoLand is closing the gap on the IDE front (idk, I haven’t tried it), golang simply doesn’t offer the features found in OpenJDK or Dotnet (GC parameters/implementations, profiling/introspection data, interoperability/ffi, etc.). It just feels like golang’s tooling looks good when it’s competing against python, ruby, or JS/TS.

SubjectToChange··on Go 1.27 Interactive Tour
>Your comment boils down to "I'm smart", which in the end, isn't terribly smart.

They are saying that a programmer should be able to cope with the cognitive dissonance of not immediately understanding something.

>Celebrate laziness and a want for simplicity.

Concepts like generics might be intellectually more challenging, but they are clearly the “lazy” approach for actually writing code. Writing and maintaining multiple versions of the same function, or using code generation, is intellectual lazy but manually intensive.

SubjectToChange··on S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic
>and there is a tremendous amount of marketing online for passive.

There’s a lot of advocacy for passive investing because it’s practically the only good option for retail investors. Managed funds can actually afford to advertise.

There are problems with passive investing becoming such a large portion of public investment, it is practically corporate welfare. But when the alternatives are at or around 2 and 20, with most performing worse than index funds, it’s irrational for the average person to do anything but passive investing.

SubjectToChange··on How ChatGPT serves ads
They can’t be hemorrhaging cash when they IPO.
SubjectToChange··on United Wizards of the Coast
>stable and/or well compensated, high status job. Not exploited/abused much.

Oh, they definitely deserve a union.

>unstable and poorly paid, low status job. Abused and exploited often.

Hmm… their job doesn’t really seem “cool enough” to have a union. They should just take it and shut up. I mean, they’re losers after all.

I’m sort of joking but it’s interesting how so many people “gatekeep” unions when people in unglamorous lines of work need unions more than almost anyone else.

SubjectToChange··on WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?
I'm not "playing a game". "Feld" purports to be a FreeBSD ports committer. Someone with commit rights on a major project would know how to properly file issues and work with other maintainers. But "feld" doesn't seem to know how to do that. Perhaps "feld" had a bad day, or maybe him and the rest of the FreeBSD ports contributors/maintainers just operate in this way, I don't know.

>Where did they say you did?

They said it in the part where you got all confused and responded to me.

SubjectToChange··on WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?
>If

“If you break the law, then you go to jail” is not “you broke the law, you are going to jail”. I didn’t judge the entire FreeBSD community based on this blog post.

SubjectToChange··on WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?
Where did I judge the FreeBSD community?
SubjectToChange··on WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?
Worse yet, despite publishing seventeen blog posts between filing the issue and finally responding to it, he has the gall to open with "Sorry I missed your replies (life gets busy)".
SubjectToChange··on WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?
I don't see how OpenSSL can recover from it's 3.0 disaster. They would basically have to write off the past few years of development work and start over from version 1.1.1
SubjectToChange··on WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?
The blog author seems like a real piece of work. He ghosts the WolfSSL maintainer for over 160 days and when asked to open a new, more specific issue, he instead chooses to write a blog post denigrating the project. The WolfSSL maintainer was nothing but courteous and helpful throughout the entire exchange.

>...they aren't really interested in RFC compliance.

Yeah, well "feld" can't claim to be "interested in RFC compliance" either when he ghosts the issue for months and chooses to write blog posts instead of opening a new issue. Good grief.

If this is what the FreeBSD community is like, I want nothing to do with them.

SubjectToChange··on Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity
I like how ZFS doesn’t have “bugs”, it has “defects”.
SubjectToChange··on Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025
A CPU produced after a certain date is not guaranteed to have the every ISA extension, e.g. SVE for Arm chips. Hence things like the microarchitecure levels for x86-64.
SubjectToChange··on Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025
More aggressive optimization is necessarily going to be more error prone. In particular, the fact that -O3 is "the path less traveled" means that a higher number of latent bugs exist. That said, if code breaks under -O3, then either it needs to be fixed or a bug report needs to be filed.
SubjectToChange··on Python is not a great language for data science
Mathematica recently added the Tabular command, for what it’s worth. I haven’t used it much yet, but it seems to be quite capable.
SubjectToChange··on What’s so great about excellence? (1981)
"They didn't showing up to practice. If they did show up to practice, they weren't practicing hard. If they did practice hard, they didn't have the commitment and drive to win. Trust us, we did everything right, it's the players (we chose) who let everyone down."

Yeah, this sounds like a coaching staff trying to prove that they don't need high-end talent bailing them out, only to find out otherwise.

SubjectToChange··on What’s so great about excellence? (1981)
It seems like you have misunderstood the author of the article.

The point of the MacArthur Foundation is basically to launder the MacArthur name in the eyes of the public. So that when people see "MacArthur" they associate it with prestige and — more importantly — the excellence of its recipients, not its sleazy origin. Hence why recipients are only chosen when they have proven that their names are useful for the MacArthur Foundation.

In your example, the MacArthur Foundation wouldn't be giving out scholarships to high performing students, they'd be giving money to people like Donald Knuth. In other words, people who have already shown that they didn't need the money to be successful and don't really need the money to continue performing at a high level. Of course, it isn't a complete waste, but it doesn't go towards developing the next Donald Knuth. The MacArthur Foundation isn't "promoting excellence", it's "celebrating" the excellence in which it took absolutely no risk in developing. As the author says "The enterprise is not merely silly, but snooty: an exercise in invidious distinction for its own sake."

SubjectToChange··on Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
>I don't see myself ever not being a driver.

Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving.

>It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods.

>I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,...

The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".

SubjectToChange··on Cheap yet ultrapure titanium might enable widespread use in industry (2024)
Molten iron can be poured in open air. Doing that with titanium will yield a distinctly different results.
SubjectToChange··on My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)
+1 for Minion Pro, Minion Math, and PragmataPro. Those fonts have been my preferred defaults for years now. While they are expensive, it is worth it to write in a beautiful font and to compensate the artistic work that went into making them.
SubjectToChange··on Systemd ParticleOS
God forbid you used cgroupsv1 for anything when poettering unilaterally decided to punish everyone with a 30 second delay for using it.

Intentional time-delays are a nice middle ground. Yes, it is annoying to the users who've ignored all prior deprecation warnings, but it's better than those same users being "surprised" when support is removed entirely. Maybe you'd consider it less of a "punishment" if systemd dropped support for cgroupsv1 outright instead of inserting a time delay, I believe the opposite.

SubjectToChange··on Usability Improvements in GCC 15
The problem is that "weird CPUs and embedded systems" are not mainstream platforms, nor do they have a lot of money behind them (particularly for open source development). Hence, there is little motivation and/or resources for anyone to develop a new backend for LLVM when a mature GCC backend already exists. Moreover, the LLVM developers are weary to accept new backends for niche platforms when there is no guarantee that they will be maintained in the future.
SubjectToChange··on Usability Improvements in GCC 15
GCC still for Linux distributions using glibc or any other library with many "GCCisms". Also, I'm not sure whether or not Clang is ABI compatible enough for enterprise customers with some rather extreme backwards compatibility requirements. Still, I can imagine a future where glibc can be built with Clang, possibly even one where llvm-libc is "good enough" for many users.
SubjectToChange··on America Chose Not to Beat Sputnik into Space
Where the Soviets were first, the US was typically very close behind (sometimes by just a few days). However, US space missions were of significantly greater value while Soviet missions were often just good enough to claim whatever "first" they were going after.
SubjectToChange··on Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
The "About" screen indicates "Wolfram 14.2"

Mathematica (MMA) and the Wolfram Language (WL) used to be the one and the same. But now a user could be using WL in a web based notebook, through Wolfram Alpha, or even on SystemModeler.

The brand name “Mathematica” isn’t going anywhere, not after nearly forty years. It’s basically marketing being like “how do we communicate updates to WL as not just being updates to MMA?”.

SubjectToChange··on Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
Have you opening Mathematica recently? Or visited the product page for Mathematica[1]? The only change has been branding the language itself as the “Wolfram Language” where Mathematica is just one of their product offerings.

[1]: https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/?source=nav

SubjectToChange··on Wolfram: Learning about Innovation from Half a Century of Conway's Game of Life
And yet because Wolfram has a perpetual money machine called Mathematica, he’s got a huge megaphone to advocate for himself.

Wolfram primarily posts to his blog and occasionally publishes a book. He’s not exactly buying a marketing blitz with all of his money. Wolfram Research itself is primarily focused on other things too.

I don’t know what it is about Stephen Wolfram that drives people crazy. Yes, he’s self aggrandizing, but he’s hardly unique in that respect. Simply read past it or roll your eyes and move on. But apparently there are more than a few people who can’t help themselves (even this thread is an example).

SubjectToChange··on Coq-of-rust: Formal verification tool for Rust
Software Foundations is quite a comprehensive series on program verification.
SubjectToChange··on Coq-of-rust: Formal verification tool for Rust
The linked discussion is upfront about the name change, if it wasn't already obvious.

https://coq.discourse.group/t/coq-community-survey-2022-resu...

SubjectToChange··on Coq-of-rust: Formal verification tool for Rust
Using (formal) specification languages doesn't guarantee a specification is "correct" either.

You have to write more code, and in a different language, but unlike just testing you can actually prove that invariants hold for all possible inputs.

Formal verification is needed to show that the code actually implements a specification. If anything, a formal specification is really good for generating test suites for the implementation code.

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