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dbdr

502 karma · joined July 31, 2013

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dbdr··on Claude Opus 5
> Noted for next time.

Is that just something it says, or will that actually affect how it will behave next time?

dbdr··on Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL
That course was posted just yesterday, in case you are interested in the discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49022038
dbdr··on Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample
In an ideal world, that would be true, but the actual world is very far from that. As an extreme example, AI is very useful to automate scamming people.
dbdr··on Advertise in ChatGPT
"ads will no longer look like ads" (in the future). Ads are clearly marked in the first step, but will likely be more and more blended over time (or worse, biasing the model and therefore the output itself). That's the logical future, because that's better for the advertiser, which is the paying customer.

That already happened on Google search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003372

dbdr··on Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list
" Microsoft is scanning the inside of password-protected zip files for malware"

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/micro...

dbdr··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
My point is that this was a minority of 46.7% making that decision (because of a technicality that has been pointed out already). In a dictatorship, a minority of 1 against a million or more makes all the decisions. Even though you can say 46.7% and 0.0001% are both below 50%, it's missing a lot of nuance to claim they are of the same nature.
dbdr··on Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it. Every time I’ve interacted with them or hear how they talk about Rust, I just don’t like it.

I wonder if it's not that different people have entirely different experiences:

If you are outside the rust community, you'll mostly interact in the context of language flame wars, "why don't you just rewrite it in rust", etc. That is, you interact with the (small) part of the rust community that is most likely to want to dismiss other languages and want to brag.

I consider myself in the rust community, on reddit, the rust forum, etc, and I find it extremely well-meaning, inclusive, supportive of beginners, thoughtful, and generally a very pleasant bunch.

dbdr··on Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
> Even in C++, with appropriate rules, restrictions and discipline you can write programs that are guaranteed to be at least as safe as any Rust program

If by discipline, you mean running something akin to the borrow checker in your head, that's essentially tautologically true. The issue with that is that it's mentally draining and/or you will still make mistakes sometimes.

dbdr··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
It's absolutely legitimate to be upset. However, identifying a lawfare trick in a close vote to a dictatorship is serious hyperbole. I'm afraid that's counterproductive.
dbdr··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
You are assuming an infinite productivity boost, i.e. that no programmers at all are needed to make programs.

A more realistic scenario is that programmers are still needed in the foreseeable future (for some definition a what a programmer is, even if it's "understands software enough to be able to write good prompts and judge the results"). So the question is how the productivity boost compares to the increase in the amount of software being made.

dbdr··on Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report
That's revenue though. Fixed costs for hardware is probably much higher. If we looked at profits, the percentages would probably look quite different.
dbdr··on The Future of Email
What about automated signup confirmation emails, just as one example?
dbdr··on German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
Agreed. The problem is that people are used to do search, which returns hits from clearly identified sources. Suddenly, Gemini is interpreting your query and generating its own response. It's an entirely different product. If I expect to find a source, this was just wasted inference. It's especially problematic that the LLM result is the top result, since we all know how much that matters.

It's fine to have Gemini as an option, it's also fine to have a combined result page, that should just be something people are able to chose if they want that (even persistently if they want). It should just not be the default.

dbdr··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
If a pesticide is banned to use inside the EU, it should also be banned to import into the EU products that were grown using that pesticide.
dbdr··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
Only an idiot would drink when they are not thirsty. Nothing to do with his job being to lie and manipulate opinion.
dbdr··on Show HN: Gitdot – A better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust
> the misguided idea among some that as long as a dependency isn't through FFI, it doesn't count as a dependency, is one of the things I dislike the most about Rust culture

I have not heard that idea a single time. There's definitely the idea that FFI dependencies "count more" / add more baggage (because there's a bigger risk that the build fails, it's harder to investigate memory safety, ...). Absolutely not that a non-FFI dependency "does not count".

dbdr··on C++: The Documentary
That's absolutely correct. Wild to see it downvoted without explanation, while you preemptively mentioned the tradeoff that you do need to worry about correctness in that case (just as much as in C/C++), but that only applies to a small part of your codebase, so it's still a huge benefit.

The only downside is that unsafe rust is more verbose than C/C++.

dbdr··on C++: The Documentary
> If you are the 'systemizer' type and like to have an extremely precise mental model of the thing you write down to the last bit, nothing beats C++.

I would say the same thing of Rust.

dbdr··on Meta repeatedly snubs EU body over Facebook and Instagram user bans
The URL of the source for the last link is not working, this is the updated version: https://boingboing.net/2010/09/14/damning-zuckerberg-i.html
dbdr··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
However they are literally changing the rules of what "the entire market" means to include those companies sooner that they would have been when people bought those indices.
dbdr··on Malicious npm packages detected across Red Hat Cloud Services
min-publish-age in cargo is coming:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/3923-carg...

dbdr··on Legal action forces Facebook whistleblower to sit in silence at Hay festival
If it's the algorithm, I'd be curious what other parameter it could be.

If it's people flagging, is there a good reason to do that? Otherwise, I would still call it nefarious behavior by people abusing the flagging mechanism in order to bury this story.

dbdr··on Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16
Peer review is imperfect, for sure. What alternative method do you recommend?
dbdr··on Legal action forces Facebook whistleblower to sit in silence at Hay festival
[meta] I was surprised this fell off the front page. The post has "131 points, 3 hours ago, 39 comments" and sits at rank 55. Number 2 on front page has "41 points, 4 hours ago, 0 comments". I don't want to assume something nefarious without reason, but that seems counterintuitive. Are there other parameters that can explain this ranking?
dbdr··on Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16
One issue with this is that it's a non-peer-reviewed critique of a peer-reviewed scientific article. It's of course still possible that the critique is correct and the article is wrong. However, you'd need to deeply understand this critique, and be at least as qualified as the reviewers to be able to convince yourself of that (or have a good reason to believe the reviewers deliberately accepted a flawed paper). Am I missing something?
dbdr··on The Green Side of the Lua
This paper is relevant:

Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: How Does Energy, Time, and Memory Relate?

https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/pap...

This is the main summary table:

    Energy                  Time                    Memory
    (c) C 1.00              (c) C 1.00              (c) Pascal 1.00
    (c) Rust 1.03           (c) Rust 1.04           (c) Go 1.05
    (c) C++ 1.34            (c) C++ 1.56            (c) C 1.17
    (c) Ada 1.70            (c) Ada 1.85            (c) Fortran 1.24
    (v) Java 1.98           (v) Java 1.89           (c) C++ 1.34
    (c) Pascal 2.14         (c) Chapel 2.14         (c) Ada 1.47
    (c) Chapel 2.18         (c) Go 2.83             (c) Rust 1.54
    (v) Lisp 2.27           (c) Pascal 3.02         (v) Lisp 1.92
    (c) Ocaml 2.40          (c) Ocaml 3.09          (c) Haskell 2.45
    (c) Fortran 2.52        (v) C# 3.14             (i) PHP 2.57
    (c) Swift 2.79          (v) Lisp 3.40           (c) Swift 2.71
    (c) Haskell 3.10        (c) Haskell 3.55        (i) Python 2.80
    (v) C# 3.14             (c) Swift 4.20          (c) Ocaml 2.82
    (c) Go 3.23             (c) Fortran 4.20        (v) C# 2.85
    (i) Dart 3.83           (v) F# 6.30             (i) Hack 3.34
    (v) F# 4.13             (i) JavaScript 6.52     (v) Racket 3.52
    (i) JavaScript 4.45     (i) Dart 6.67           (i) Ruby 3.97
    (v) Racket 7.91         (v) Racket 11.27        (c) Chapel 4.00
    (i) TypeScript 21.50    (i) Hack 26.99          (v) F# 4.25
    (i) Hack 24.02          (i) PHP 27.64           (i) JavaScript 4.59
    (i) PHP 29.30           (v) Erlang 36.71        (i) TypeScript 4.69
    (v) Erlang 42.23        (i) Jruby 43.44         (v) Java 6.01
    (i) Lua 45.98           (i) TypeScript 46.20    (i) Perl 6.62
    (i) Jruby 46.54         (i) Ruby 59.34          (i) Lua 6.72
    (i) Ruby 69.91          (i) Perl 65.79          (v) Erlang 7.20
    (i) Python 75.88        (i) Python 71.90        (i) Dart 8.64
    (i) Perl 79.58          (i) Lua 82.91           (i) Jruby 19.84
dbdr··on The Green Side of the Lua
Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: How Does Energy, Time, and Memory Relate?

https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/pap...

dbdr··on Migrating from Go to Rust
GC pauses are not the only reason. At the very least, raw compute performance and lower memory usage are also valid reasons in some contexts.
dbdr··on CUDA-oxide: Nvidia's official Rust to CUDA compiler
Learning Rust is more alike to learning a new programming paradigm (e.g. functional when you only know imperative) than a new language with different syntax only. If you ignore that and try to jump directly to writing code more or less the same way as you used to, it will be painful. So take it slow and follow along with The Book (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/). It all makes sense eventually and is very much worth it!
dbdr··on Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
> Very little will change in Hungary with the new government.

Are you aware the new government is not even in power yet?

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