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amoss

625 karma · joined June 23, 2014

Just a typical compiler enjoyer. https://github.com/amoss
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amoss··on Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute
Alternatively you may want to be a passive investor using the current rules for index inclusion, rather than having them altered to favor this loss-making trashcan on fire.
amoss··on DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
> The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this.

This reads as a strongly closed minded claim that has been "whitewashed into corporate appropriate speech" by an llm. If you cannot understand any validity to the other side of a debate then you are not engaging in discussion, no matter how your claims are dressed up.

amoss··on Ferrari Luce
That is the ugliest Ferrari I've ever seen.
amoss··on College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
kind of wild that you think there has been no shift in culture between 1970 and 2020
amoss··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
with a mastercard from a swedish bank that is the experience that i get. all online transactions pop up a page from my back with qr code, this is authenticated through an app that shows me the transaction details and requires pin confirmation.
amoss··on Everything in C is undefined behavior
Dead code elimination is run multiple times, including after other optimizations. So code that is not initially dead may become dead after propagating other information. Converting dead code into an error condition would make most generic code that is specialized for a particular context illegal.
amoss··on Starship V3
Nobody said one rack. Your entire rant is misguided. He analyzed what it would take to put one rack on one starlink like package in order to build a constellation.
amoss··on Starship V3
Later in the video he runs through the changes needed for 100kw per rack.
amoss··on Appearing productive in the workplace
The details might bury his point rather than illustrate it. The driving theme throughout seems to be that a tool tuned for correct syntax, with deep understanding of semantics will look like a Dunning-Kruger machine. The specific errors that the author's colleague was oblivious to don't add any weight to that general point, they only explain one specific instance. It's classic omega-consistency.
amoss··on Appearing productive in the workplace
feels like this comment could be shorter
amoss··on Zig → Rust porting guide
Take it gently, the poor thing doesn't understand the difference between code and talking about code.
amoss··on Why are neural networks and cryptographic ciphers so similar? (2025)
In addition both have a property similar to dispersion. In crypto each change to an input bit should cascade through as many output bits as possible. In ML each output bit should depend on as much of the input bits (and hidden layers) as possible. So they both feature a similar maximization of entropy.
amoss··on Agentic Coding Is a Trap
> rollout will be incremental and it will self monitor by defining success conditions at rollout time.

This sounds a lot like allowing an LLM to define tests as well as implementation, and allowing the LLM to update the tests to make the code pass. Recently people have come to understand (again?) that testing and evaluation works better outside of the sandbox.

amoss··on Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"
and then we start to embed comments

// concatenate pairs of parameters, e.g. x and y become xy

// the pairing of open and claw is vital to understanding the function

amoss··on The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood
"in a wild or unsupervised state" seems like a particularly apt description of children. it does not seem to be derogatory: language really should be evocative as often as literal.
amoss··on Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
There are standard convex assumptions to handle incompleteness, decidability etc, i.e. the results are an over-approximation that terminates. Picking a approximation that is precise enough in the properties that you care about is part of the challenge, but it is an in-band problem. There are no hard edges between the theory and reality.

As with most engineering problems the out-of-band issues tend to be the hardest to solve. Models of the part underneath the interesting part need to be complete/accurate enough to make the results useful. Compare it to crypto where people do not usually try to break the scheme - they try to break the specific implementation of the scheme because the weakest points will be at the interface between the theoretical construction and the actual concrete instantiation of the device that it will run on.

amoss··on Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
The article describes fuzzing the library, this execution requires a program to be compiled. Typically fuzzing involves a minimal harness around the payload (a single call into the library in this case). There is clearly a bug in this program, and it does not exist in the minimal harness. It must be in the library code, which was covered by the proof.

The bounded, specific codebase that you refer to is typically the library *and all of its dependencies*, which in this case includes the Lean runtime. This is why formal verification is difficult: the proof chain needs to extend all the way down to the foundations. In this case the original gushing claim that everything was verified is incorrect and premature. The article seems like a good exposition of why.

amoss··on Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
What is the program?

There are two different answers to this question, and which one is "correct" depends entirely on the context of who is asking it.

1. It's the code that is specific to this program that sits above the run-time layer (internal view, that most programmers would take).

2. It's the code in the binary that is executed (external view, that most users would take).

The key question does not seem to be "was the proof correct", rather "did the proof cover everything in the program". The answer depends on whether you are looking at it from the perspective of a programmer, or a user. Given the overly strong framing that the article is responding to - highlighting the difference in this way does seem to be useful. The title is correct from the perspective that most users would take.

amoss··on Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
But is fair to state that the verification was *incomplete*, which is what the article does.
amoss··on We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
I would use this tool. Ship it
amoss··on We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
It's the old broken. Clearly it must be replaced with the new hotness.
amoss··on SpaceX files to go public
Cybertrucks. Electric semis. Full self driving. Battery city.

I'll leave up to the reader to put them on the appropriate list.

amoss··on SpaceX files to go public
I've watched Patrick's videos for enough years that I know he is not, but I still wonder from time to time. His voice is incredibly flat and uniform, he always uses fake backgrounds and there is extremely high use of jump cuts in his edits.
amoss··on Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains
no database for this project - the data model has a simple text representation so it gets serialized out to a folder/file layout on disk that goes into version control. single self-contained binary: contains the web/websockets server, backend logic, parser/serialization. there is a separate component in python that sits behind an internal network connection to handle an execution sandbox.
amoss··on Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains
You may be surprised by how much easier it is to dump the framework/stack and just write it from scratch. I say this because I too work on compilers and have a crud app as a personal project. The first versions were a nightmare in various frameworks and since I switched to a C++ backend / vanilla .js frontend it has been incredibly easy to write.
amoss··on 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews
The rate was 1% so this does not mean that "many" people are using LLMs despite claiming not to.
amoss··on 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews
This comment doesn't seem to fit the discussion at all?

The discussion is not about humans using LLLs to write papers. It is about humans who agreed not to use LLVM in reviewing papers, then did exactly that.

amoss··on The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ
As the DJ is an interface to shuffle, and the author specifically wants to listen to unshuffled music the lack of intelligence may not be entirely in the AI.
amoss··on New iPad Air, powered by M4
No side profile pics on the page. My only concern would be can it lay flat on a table for taking notes or does it have a camera bulge that makes it wobble?
amoss··on You don't have to
I would imagine that the target audience has an attention span and literacy level that allows reading sixteen thousand words without too much trouble.
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