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cptroot

698 karma · joined February 11, 2015

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/cptroot; my proof: https://keybase.io/cptroot/sigs/7NYzDwS4rCWbDmXkfjDs20FjcGK4QMDJg9ew6O6ddlY ]
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cptroot··on Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects
Good news, there's a line in the "Coming from Rust"[1] page that says

> You never annotate a function signature unless you want to for documentation purposes.

so it sounds like function annotation is still an option for the purposes of communication, just no longer required in all cases.

[1] https://loonlang.com/concepts/from-rust

cptroot··on Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects
Neat! I think the website could use a bit more information about how the "global" Effect handlers work, and whether it's possible to opt-in to that functionality yourself when writing Effects.

That being said I took a look at the roadmap and the next major release is the one that focuses on Effects, so perhaps I'm jumping the gun a tad. Maybe I'll whip this out for AoC this year!

cptroot··on Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court
Very few people voted for tariffs, specifically. They voted for a promise of a return to a world where they were on top.
cptroot··on Attention at Constant Cost per Token via Symmetry-Aware Taylor Approximation
I don't think this is an accurate characterization of the error magnitude? Their error plots (from appendix 3) are all showing `log_10(|Y - \dot{Y}|)` as having a median of ~-3 (difference of 0.001) and a max of ~1.5 (difference of 0.035), and this is with only 3 Taylor terms.
cptroot··on Amazon cuts 16k jobs
Would you like to elaborate why the math doesn't work out? An article explaining your position would be nice, but I'd settle for some broad gestures.
cptroot··on Steam "Offline" status leaks exact login timestamps (Valve: Won't Fix)
You do know that you don't have to have Steam turn on on boot, right? You can launch Steam only when you want to play video games.
cptroot··on California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years
Can I ask why you see this as a clearcut issue? Dams have environmental costs, upfront monetary costs, maintenance costs, and can't prevent drought if conditions persist for multiple years. Why are dams the best way to address drought?
cptroot··on How a French judge was digitally cut off by the USA
This is strictly false. Plenty of working age people went, and many brought their children.
cptroot··on Show HN: a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU – even in the browser
If you click into the code you can see that it depends on `wgpu`, which is a wrapper that uses whichever native API would be appropriate for the platform you're working with. If you run the native compiled version you won't be using WebGPU.
cptroot··on You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say
> which I agree is not the case with ICE under Trump, but that's a separate discussion

I find it hard to keep these discussions separate. If there is no humane way to deport illegal aliens in the volumes ICE is attempting, surely we must push back and say "stop". This facial recognition app is a farce, designed to give a veneer of correctness to racial profiling, and ICE must be prevented from using it.

cptroot··on Video game union workers rally against $55B private acquisition of EA
The same reason payday loans are illegal in 9 states. Companies who follow this pattern of behavior are more likely to go into bankruptcy.
cptroot··on The day my smart vacuum turned against me
Fun article, but the repeated use of what I'd call "AI punch-up language" is a little distracting.
cptroot··on Systems as Mirrors
This was a thought-provoking read. I'd be interested to see someone walk through an application designed with some of the duplication mentioned towards the end.
cptroot··on Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement
That sounds like a very interesting theory, with an actionable result. Do you have any links for more reading?
cptroot··on What is “good taste” in software engineering?
For others trying to find this, the author's name appears to be Richard W. Hamming.[0] [1]

[0] Of Hamming distance fame

[1] Here's a link to the Wikipedia article about the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Doing_Science_and_E...

cptroot··on Rupert's snub cube and other Math Holes
Every year Tom7 gives us another enigma, and this year it's a real enigma of an enigma.
cptroot··on Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"
I'm curious. Aside from this general criticism of Doctorow, do you have any specific criticisms of TFA's contents?

Any thoughts about whether reverse-centaurs are something that should continue to exist? Perhaps something about how the AI boom is going to produce miracles, as opposed to making us all babysitters forced to keep up with supersonic idiotic toddlers?

cptroot··on YouTube is a mysterious monopoly
Here's an unrelated post by the video game content collective Second Wind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpVnx4_yqTo

Here's a post from another youtuber about a recent video getting restricted: https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxcapSFGmm6m59kSEn62RGOZsmUEK...

cptroot··on ICPC 2025 World Finals Results
Does anyone know how long it will be until the input/output data packet is made available? I'm interested in taking a crack at some of these but know I always miss an edge case.
cptroot··on Hollow Knight: Silksong causes server chaos on Xbox, Steam, and Nintendo
No-one can know that for the next dozen hours or so. There were no early review copies, which means no-one knows if Silksong benefits from knowing the story, mechanics, or world of the first game
cptroot··on We put a coding agent in a while loop
Are you feelin' lucky?
cptroot··on The Block Stacking Problem
It is more likely that it is exceedingly difficult to write like this, even for simple topics like this balancing blocks problem. The further you get into an academic subfield, the less likely it is that you can even describe what you are pondering in plain English.
cptroot··on Genie 3: A new frontier for world models
People played Cyberpunk 2077 because it had oceans of engaging story, which _is_ the gameplay.
cptroot··on I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric
These two apps are not comparable. My guess is that 90%+ of people using Discord are doing so for the low-latency voice conversations with optional screen/game sharing.

Zulip does not have first-party voice chat. You would be more likely to get gamers to switch to a Teamspeak server.

cptroot··on Honda conducts successful launch and landing of experimental reusable rocket
[flagged]
cptroot··on Teaching National Security Policy with AI
This article says "the students did X", without providing any metrics to compare the result on. It's frustrating to again and again get articles saying "AI is great and speeds learning" without actually evaluating that learning process.
cptroot··on Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts
For what it's worth, the way you've phrased this question doesn't sound like you want to discuss any of these issues. It sounds like you have bones to pick with what people have said and want to argue about it.
cptroot··on CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)
The answer is mentioned in the article. Not all concerts want only people with means to attend. The venue might want to be accessible to low-income members of the community, or it might be a benefit concert, with free tickets and a donation drive.
cptroot··on The group chats that changed America
For what it's worth, nothing was leaked in this article except for the existence of these chats. There are no screenshots, and very few concrete details other than some information about membership timelines.

This article contains genuine reporting about the right-wing influencers working to shift the opinions of the richest people in the USA. That seems like a large amount of good to me.

cptroot··on The group chats that changed America
As always, Chris Rufo lays the game out in plain terms:

> Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”

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