Hacker News Reader

archargelodon Efficient C++ Programming for Modern 64-bit CPUs: Chapter 4/part 2

Looks like a human to me. But some of the public gists on that account suggest a case of AI psychosis e.g. [1] [2]

Also [3] (this is obviously written by AI, but the fact that he publishes it all in public is concerning):

> Claim: The straylight/nix reimplementation is the greatest feat of software engineering in history, normalized by time and resources.

> IF I COULDN'T BE PART OF THE GREATEST, I HAD TO BE THE GREATEST MYSELF

[1] - https://gist.github.com/b7r6/bed1551cc2bb6551eb279b68c5db8de...

[2] - https://gist.github.com/b7r6/193a89d393dd5508c22ca4e6595cdb5...

[3] - https://gist.github.com/b7r6/418ccfe6cf3ac57ad9a100dde560fae...

archargelodon When I reject AI code even if it works

Then it's probably small enough - where you don't need a help of AI, and should do it yourself.

My position is that AI could be useful to find the potential places for these changes, but it should be someone who's capable of thinking to implement them.

archargelodon When I reject AI code even if it works

You can't. You must prove it. And I don't mean that you need a rigorous scientific proof - that would obviously be too hard to do for every single function/library/program.

Human developer can work on a program incrementally, ensuring at each step that it is mostly correct.

But LLMs can't think, they fake reasoning and explore problem space in random walk until they stumble into something that looks like a solution. And these "solutions" will have hilarious and absolutely unexpected failure modes.

archargelodon When I reject AI code even if it works

"In the discrete world of computing, there is no meaningful metric in which "small" changes and "small" effects go hand in hand, and there never will be." - E.W.Dijkstra (EWD1036)

archargelodon [dead]

It's very depressing seeing a badge "made by a human" slapped on what is obviously AI-generated text.

archargelodon GameBoy Workboy

> but what do you do with it?

Yes, emulators up to PS1/NDS. There are also many bespoke and commercial linux games that run on these devices via portmaster[0] (for commercial games you need to provide your own files).

I use my 34XX clamshell to listen to podcasts and audiobooks in rockbox [1].

If you take some time to setup alternative OS (e.g. MuOS) there is a good video player and even terminal emulator available with root shell.

And of course, you can write your own games and apps to run on it (SDL, pico8, Godot, Love2D, etc).

[0] https://portmaster.games/

[1] https://portmaster.games/detail.html?name=rockbox

archargelodon GameBoy Workboy

I would've got one if it wasn't so pricey for these specs. You can get a cheap Anbernic for 40-60$ running linux, with decent ARM CPU and a good backlighted screen.

archargelodon I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys

My TV does have an audio jack. It's a cheap dumb TV. And almost all of my electronic devices have a 3.5 mm jack. You won't find it in top flagship models, but plenty of budget devices still have it.

archargelodon Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI

> People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done.

I don't think we're talking about bans. The word Jihad, in Islam means struggle and usually it's accompanied by a religious "war", but not necessarily violent (see below).

> jihad , In Islam, the central doctrine that calls on believers to combat the enemies of their religion. According to the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth, jihad is a duty that may be fulfilled in four ways: by the heart, the tongue, the hand, or the sword. The first way (known in Sufism as the “greater jihad”) involves struggling against evil desires. The ways of the tongue and hand call for verbal defense and right actions. The jihad of the sword involves waging war against enemies of Islam. [0]

Maybe people can't win against machines, but they sure can fight e.g. by refusing to interact with AI online, at their job, vandalizing mass surveilance cameras, etc. etc.

[0] - https://www.britannica.com/summary/jihad

archargelodon Zig: Build System Reworked

The spirit of Pascal lives on in Nim.

It's arguably the closest modern language (with a sizeable community) to the Wirthian languages.

archargelodon Zig: Build System Reworked

> For the rare exceptions, I make a C lib

The problem is that most people using Python don't have enough expertise in C to do the same.

It also kinda destroys the argument that Python is good if your solution for performance is to use a different language alongside it.

archargelodon Zig: Build System Reworked

That's actually a great argument for Nim[0]. Easy interop with C, native-speed performance, and a syntax very close to Python in both readability and how quickly you can get something working.

Batteries included, automatic memory management without a conventional GC and metaprogramming - is a really cool combination.

[0] - https://nim-lang.org/

archargelodon On Rendering Diffs

Is this really a hard problem? Rendering some text with coloring?

I believe we're just making everything harder than it needs by constraining it to a browser interface. This would be trivial as a terminal application written in native code.

archargelodon Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira

> 1982

archargelodon Noroboto: Lying Fonts and Mitigation in Rust

> I’m fairly certain if you give any substitution cypher to an LLM it will decipher the message.

*with sufficiently long cyphertext

You can construct encoding in the way that every 2-5 words will use a brand new different key. Remember, Unicode is big enough to fit over 10000 English alphabets.

archargelodon I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

You can see the full work in his other blog post[0]. There you can clearly see that red circles coincide with vertical blue lines on the graph. And the very fine print in the bottom left corner explains that "Displayed years indicate when Coffee Maker computers were built". Overlapping the red points with title text is probably just a stylistic choice.

[0] https://www.dougmacdowell.com/hand-drawn-data-visualizations...

archargelodon Time to talk about my writerdeck

That did not help. Seems like slightly different UI and written in Rust are two main "features" over tmux.

archargelodon Time to talk about my writerdeck

Handwriting or using a typewriter is great if you're writing something solely for enjoyment of the process. But if you want to store, organize and use any of your writing in the future - you have to go digital.

archargelodon Bun support is now limited and deprecated

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence! Dijkstra (1970) "Notes On Structured Programming"

LLM generated code is garbage, not because it writes obvious errors. But because it lacks any kind of reasoning - Claude will gladly write you a solution for a problem you never had. Good luck fixing these kind of issues that will never be catched by tests.

archargelodon Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

> something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update

That's mostly problem of Arch/Artix, they're the bleeding edge, which is not always the best for stability. But no one said that rolling distro is supposed to always ship latest versions of everything. I've been using Void Linux past months - and while it's a rolling distro, it runs LTS kernel (mainline is also available) and maintainers are more focused on stable versions of apps than on faster updates.

archargelodon Flipper One – we need your help

What is the flipper market, anyway? I can only think of script-kiddies pwning neighbours wi-fi router and computer nerds buying it as a toy.

archargelodon GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

You can and should and I do glance at a diff of changes every time you update a vim plugin. To make this feasible - I only use a handful of plugins I *really need*.

archargelodon Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust"

> verification should be 100x more robust now that we can output code at this rate.

If you believe that having enough tests can save an LLM codebase - I have bad news for you. You can write a test for every single interaction ever written in typescript and it'd not be even close to 10% coverage.

archargelodon Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

I believe Ross Scott from Stop Killing Games have talked about this in one of his videos. Essentially, if they try to fight for online-required software or against subscription model in general - all software companies will fight against it. That's just too ambitious and has way less chances to succeed.

archargelodon Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book

I found this solution (actually, it's 4 solutions, each B is a different Bishop placement and at the same time it's the only 4 spots on the board not covered by queens):

    . B . . . . . .
    . . . . . . Q .
    . . . B . . . .
    Q . . . . . . .
    . . . . . B . .
    . . Q . . . . .
    . . . . . . . B
    . . . . Q . . .

archargelodon Linux Terminal Memory Usage

I've been using st-terminal[1] for 5-6 years at this point. It starts instantly, uses ~10mb of Ram and has almost zero latency. It's especially apparent on X11 without compositing enabled.

I tried ghostty the last year and I was instantly turned off by how much ram it hogs, but even more horrible was that it was using close to 10% cpu just sitting idly, doing absolutely nothing. It also felt at least twice as slow.

I need my terminal to display text, do scrollback and nothing else. I don't need gpu rendering, I don't need any fancy features, just be respectful to my system resources. Is it too much to ask?

[1] https://st.suckless.org/

archargelodon Louis Rossmann offers to pay legal fees for a threatened OrcaSlicer developer

Louis Rossman is right for repair activist and consumer rights advocate. He's an owner of a repair shop, that's mostly focused on fixing macbooks. On Youtube he started by posting repair tutorials, but then his content shifted from repair videos to macbook rants to him lobbying for right to repair law across many US states to covering general anti-consumer practices and offering money and support to people who fight against it.

archargelodon All means are fair except solving the problem

> stdout is only reserved for actual processed command output

If user asks a program to print help message, the help text is the processed command output!

archargelodon Mojo 1.0 Beta

> the thing I least like about Python is it's syntax.

For me it's the opposite - the only thing I like about Python is it's syntax. That's why I really like Nim - you get C speed, "comptime", metaprogramming, powerful type system, memory safety and code is often short and elegant.

Mojo seems interesting too, but so far they're mostly focused on ML stuff and not general programming. And I believe compiler is still not open-source?

archargelodon Nintendo announces price increases for Nintendo Switch 2

This might lead to less e-waste and resource-efficient programming. Not likely, but one can dream.