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compiler-guy

7,786 karma · joined May 11, 2015

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compiler-guy··on Allow Carriers on Planes
That’s not what the idiom “don’t do x for fun” is about.

The expression means that X is the best of unpalatable options to accomplish something else, where X is taken in a literal and narrow sense.

People don’t fly with babies for fun. They do it because visiting grandparents is fun, and driving isn’t a good option. Or, if it involves a trip across the ocean, the alternative would be sailing.

compiler-guy··on I don't want the details
The VP also needs to know if the fix will require some sort of resource reallocation, or if the timeline is long so they can deal with the other stakeholders, or whatever. These are all forward looking things that the details influence but the details aren't what matter.
compiler-guy··on Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
I agree with the 2023 decode there, but there is still a bit of a puzzle:

If someone knew to replace the battery just three years ago, I would expect they also would have enough knowledge to set the clock itself. Or at least explain what was going on. Maybe this person isn't connected with the building anymore. But I would expect the new owners would be able to contact the old owners for help on this instead of sending a generalized call for help.

compiler-guy··on German court rules Meta liable for scam ads on Facebook and Instagram
Because that's the way courts work. This court only had jurisdiction over Germany. It is possible that other courts with broader jurisdiction would rule similarly, but someone has to bring the case.
compiler-guy··on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up
It’s hard to imagine a company more all in on ai than Google. The pressure to use it is intense and they are throwing ai at basically every problem. If a proposal doesn’t have ai in the title somewhere it has no chance of funding.

I don’t really think it has made Google products better, but it is absolutely the expectation.

compiler-guy··on macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage
I do want (some, carefully curated as to certain usecases) AI. But I don't want to waste my diskspace for this AI.
compiler-guy··on macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage
Being short on disk space is a pretty good reason to not upgrade.

I would rather keep my personal picture library on my local disk (with backups, of course) than gigabytes and gigabytes of Apple models.

They were the ones who thought that 256Gb was a reasonable number. And it actually did work pretty well, until they wanted to fill it with models.

compiler-guy··on What Sun got wrong
The linux kernel didn't even gain SMP until 1996. Solaris was running circles around it both before and after that point. Solaris was vastly more mature and stable.

Of course, after that, Solaris just kept running in very expensive circles while linux went on to make steady progress.

compiler-guy··on The Hierarchy of Money
There are two commenting critics. So "multiple" is true, I suppose, but only quite weakly so. And there are more than 4x that many upvotes on the top-level comment. So I don't think it is as simple as "everyone is saying you are wrong."
compiler-guy··on The Hierarchy of Money
You are arguing a point I didn’t make.
compiler-guy··on The Hierarchy of Money
I certainly don't think anything like this actually happened. And the linked article doesn't really do so either. I do think it can be a useful illustration of what problem each technology solves.

In another thread you talk about how the internet really is a series of tubes. We all know that "tubes" can be a useful analogy for understanding certain things about circuits and things built upon them. But we also don't think that tubes are more than a very basic analogy. Tubes don't really do packet switching.

compiler-guy··on The Hierarchy of Money
This is obviously not an attempt at anything remotely resembling documentary history. It’s more of a just so story explaining what problem each step solved.

Unless of course one thinks that smooth gray stones from a riverbed two miles away reflects some historically significant point in money’s evolution.

compiler-guy··on If AI coding is lowering your code quality, you're not managing quality right
If everyone needs to give them roughly the same set of instructions to get good results, then those instructions should be built in.

Good defaults are expected in pretty much every other tool.

And “You just have to set it up carefully and properly” is pretty much saying that the defaults are never good enough.

compiler-guy··on If AI coding is lowering your code quality, you're not managing quality right
A sibling comment talks about needing a lot of setup and context for agents to produce good code. That’s both true and bizarre.

If the compiler that I write produces lousy code, I get bugs that I fix until it doesn’t.

And that is the most annoying thing about this revolution. It’s obviously powerful and transformative and I use in my job all the time.

But many, perhaps even most, purveyors seem intent on blaming their users when they have issues, rather than fixing their own bugs.

General model improvement is going a long way here, but basic things like “ensure you use good style and programming practices” really shouldn’t be a thing users need to put in any .md file.

compiler-guy··on How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)
Not sure when it started, but the second chance pool has moderators putting stories that didn’t get much attention when they were submitted directly on the front page.

There may be some survivor bias here, but second-chance stories seem very front-page sticky to me. At least those I have recognized.

compiler-guy··on Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
"Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside."

But that doesn't mean that they really are all that different in the end. It reminds me a of joke as told by Emo Philips that I think is quite apropos:

==-==-=

A man was walking across a bridge when he saw someone about to jump. He ran over and said, "Don't do it! There's so much to live for!"

"Like what?" the person asked.

"Well, are you religious?"

"Yes."

"Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"

"Christian."

"Me too! Protestant or Catholic?"

"Protestant."

"Me too! What denomination?"

"Baptist."

"Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"

"Northern Baptist."

"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative or Northern Baptist Liberal?"

"Northern Baptist Conservative."

"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative Covenant or Northern Baptist Conservative Council?"

"Northern Baptist Conservative Council."

"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879, or Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1912?"

"Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1912."

The man stepped back, eyes narrowing, and yelled, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed the other off the bridge.

compiler-guy··on Mastering Layout Engines in Graphviz: Dot vs. Neato vs. Twopi vs. Circo
It's a sales website with a not-terrible hook.

Also AI generated diagrams with strange labelling doesn't persuade me much.

compiler-guy··on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
This true, but you can write the two separately if you want.

The disadvantages of writing them together are listed in the various parent posts. But some code authors really like the convenience of having the two in the same file.

compiler-guy··on An update on Wayback Machine access
It’s easy to write instructions that have the agent check once every fifteen minutes, or even once an hour, in perpetuity, which never sleeps. And people do write such instructions. A human can’t do that by hand for very long.

The problem is that it is hard to distinguish your one off (which seems perfectly fine) from the tidal wave of bad actors.

compiler-guy··on Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
That is the debate. And it is hotly contested.

The legal framework around all this is way too immature to make a definitive statement one way or the other. Anyone who says otherwise is speculating.

The only way to clarity will be legislation or court cases, because it really could go either way.

compiler-guy··on An update on Wayback Machine access
Not to mention that it solves none of the rate issues. If the scrapers are hitting your site 10,000 times a day, adding markdown isn’t going to change that at all.
compiler-guy··on An update on Wayback Machine access
I suspect most people would be ok with this if they could only do it at the rate and frequency you yourself can do it. The problem is largely one of scale.
compiler-guy··on There's a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Ruining the Internet
Many people believe the golden era ended in 1993 or early 1994.

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

compiler-guy··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
It would look a lot less like astroturf if the submitter let the discussion evolve instead of answering every criticism within seconds of it being posted.
compiler-guy··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
As I write this, the submitter has six comments out of twelve, most somewhat defensive. And all of them in less than thirty minutes. This seems very much like a marketing play, where the submitter is pretty determined to steer the narrative.

I recommend flagging.

compiler-guy··on Romania soccer introduces black card to 'combat abusive behaviour' from parents
I’m sure the league has considered less drastic actions, and in reality a group of administrators dealing with an ongoing problem know way more about possible solutions that are available and can possibly work than random HN commenters.
compiler-guy··on Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?
Trust me, I will never forget 8" floppies.

But in the context of drive lettering, although CP/M supported 8" floppies, MS-DOS never did. MS-DOS adopted the naming scheme, but not the boot style.

compiler-guy··on Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?
Even further back into time, before 3.5" disks, both A: and B: were 5.25" disks. And, although my memory is hazy, 3.5's were commonly slotted into B: at first, because no one had 3.5" boot disks until the drives became somewhat common.
compiler-guy··on Apple iPod Engraver (2019)
Many people don’t care about resale or pass-along value in the things that they own or gift.

And even if one does, then you just consider the diminished value as another cost of having the personalized item.

For many people, especially gift givers where the item is about far more than economics, it is worth it. And it is very unclear to me why "resale value" should trump about a million other considerations.

compiler-guy··on I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
People who own the click farms who get paid to run the ads when they are clicked on.

This type of fraud is almost as old as web ads themselves.

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