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em-bee

10,514 karma · joined August 27, 2018

software developer / trainer / mentor / CTO on demand

contact me for mentorship, training or project work opportunities:

embee+hn at societyserver dot net

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em-bee··on Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
ask supercomputer earth. it will figure it out in ten million years provided the computer doesn't get destroyed before that by that hyperspace bypass the vogons are planning.
em-bee··on The Chinese Voice Actor Forced to Prove He's Human
i'd love to join a cooperative myself. there exist a number of them. they mostly seem to do outsourcing/contract work. i suspect that they don't attract investors because the profit distribution would be different from the usual start-ups.
em-bee··on OpenAI Forked Git on GitHub
this started happening after a longer downtime. i see one or two of those per day. so far it has not been a bother. it's not like it's posting everything now, and the stuff i click on is interesting regardless most of the time. more concerning is that occasionally i notice a submission that should have been shared in the channel but isn't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48732582 for example.

i suspect they replaced the bot that picks the posts and either the new bot is simply buggy or it has another algorithm that picks posts by growth rate maybe?

em-bee··on GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years
that's the original post by the actual authors. that's the one that should be upvoted. they broke the title rule though.
em-bee··on Software Engineer's Firing Ruled Illegal in a Rare Win for a Tech Worker
what/where did you move to?
em-bee··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
wait, how did the scala team end up with only 2 years of professional programming experience? did the original developers all leave?
em-bee··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
what i expect to change with LLMs is the benefit you get from automated testing. which is really what LLMs need. tools that tell you something is wrong may not speed up a human developer, but they will allow LLMs to make corrections by itself until the warnings go away. so while it may not be worth it to a human developer, it may well be worth it for an LLM.
em-bee··on Europe's Largest Unions Demand Right to Cancel Work on Days Above 30C
breaks are not work time. you are entitled to breaks, but unless they are quick bathroom breaks they don't count as work, and in places where you have to stamp in to start work you actually have to stamp out for each break. at least that's the law in germany. since germany is one of the countries with stronger employee protection globally, i can hardly imagine any country offering more than this.
em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
only if it's cheese or tofu.
em-bee··on Europe's Largest Unions Demand Right to Cancel Work on Days Above 30C
is it really an alternative? i'd rather do a 4 hour night shift without breaks than working 8 hours like this in the heat. what am i supposed to do with a 45 minute break? if i am a bricklayer or example, i'd still be stuck on a badly cooled construction site. seems totally not worth it to me. even worse considering that normally breaks are not paid.

if we assume that this is the middle of the day, so i work 2 hours normally, then 4 hours with 45 minute breaks and then another 2 hours normally, i might as well just work 2.5hours normally, take a 3 hour break and then work another 2.5 hours normally.

so no, really, i don't see any benefit in that arrangement.

em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
an attack is not personal because it encompasses the whole person, but because it targets an aspect of that person. for an attack to be not personal it would have to target a category of people.

"software developers are stinky managers" is not a personal attack. neither is "managers are stinky", but "you/he/she/etc are something" is personal. it may not be an attack though if it is still part of a generalization: "you are a stinky manager because all software developers are stinky managers". but the article is not making that generalization, and therefore it's not just personal but also an attack.

em-bee··on Europe's Largest Unions Demand Right to Cancel Work on Days Above 30C
take 45min breaks for every 15 minutes of work

i guess you meant the reverse?

em-bee··on Garnix Is Joining Shopify
it was posted on may 28th. that's a 6 weeks warning. still not ideal, but hopefully they made sure that users got notified directly too.

btw "garnix" means "nothing" in german. translating the article to german makes for a funny reading: "nothing is shutting down, nothing is open sourced" ;-)

em-bee··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
just curious, can you point to more details to what happened with scala3?
em-bee··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
i read that too, but i am highly skeptical. i wish the author would investigate that claim and provide some actual examples substantiating it.
em-bee··on Scarf has moved away from Haskell
my understanding is that the [python] community has not yet aligned on typing nearly as well as the TS community has

this is undoubtedly true.

em-bee··on Scarf has moved away from Haskell
what did you move to, and why?
em-bee··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
python has optional types too now. if you could get the LLM to produce typed python would it be any worse than typescript?
em-bee··on After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell
exactly, i find the article a wierd take. i would have thougt that being able to catch errors at compile time is the assurance that the LLM generated code is actually decent.

so does this mean that the LLM writes code that is so good that the compiler does not find any more errors?

or is it due to the nature of haskell that makes it hard to write bad code to begin with?

or just that because the haskell compiler catches more errors there is less broken haskell code for the AI to train on?

and what does that mean for the switch to python? if the python compiler/interpreter doesn't catch as many errors do we even know that the code is good?

or is this more like the belief if the LLM can generate good haskell code, surely it can also generate good python?

what's the solution here? speeding up the haskell compiler? if that were easy, would it not already have happened?

personally i still don't trust LLM code generation. i didn't learn haskell yet, but what i hear about it makes me more likely to trust that LLMs can generate good haskell code than python.

i believe the future in LLM code generation is code that can be proven to be correct. proving code correct has been a research topic at some point.

em-bee··on Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
and new shells are developing features to handle structured data like json:

here is an elvish shell command that converts a freetube playlist from json into a list of urls grouped by author:

    for i (cat 'freetube-playlist-favorites.db' | from-json)["videos"] { 
      mkdir -p $i['author']
      print http://youtu.be/$i['videoId'] >> $i['author']/get }
here is one to get a list of devices connected to my zerotier network

    curl -s -H "Authorization: token <redacted>" "https://api.zerotier.com/api/v1/network/<redacted>/member" | 
      all (from-json) | 
      order &key={|d| put $d[name]} | 
      each { |device| 
             var t = (printf "%.0f" (/ $device[lastSeen] 1000))
             if (> 20000000 (- (date '+%s') $t))  { 
               print (date -R --date='@'$t) $device[config][ipAssignments] $device[name] "\n" } }
those are not scripts saved in a file. i run these directly on the commandline. ignore the elvish syntax, focus on the ease of accessing values from the json data. those are just two examples, though i recently discovered an ls replacement that optionally outputs json, that will be interesting to use.
em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
in larger/popular projects the reputation tends to eventually become public as we can see in this thread. for smaller projects read the discussions and responses to bug reports.
em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
the point is that such language attracts people who have a high tolerance for such language. not all of them are going to be assholes, but tolerating assholes is also bad.
em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
Is calling someone a "stinky manager" a personal attack?

yes!

em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
linus torvalds was eventually told that his tone was not acceptable and that he needed to learn to tone it down. linux grew despite linus tone, not because of it.
em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
you are right, to many people feel far to comfortable writing like this. but my reaction is to double down and be more active to counter this kind of expression and make it clear that this is not welcome. it worked with linus torvalds.
em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
if you use my code you owe me to honor my license, unless that licenses explicitly frees you from that obligation.
em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
you cannot even "shameless copy" from something that is asking the world to copy from it

yes you can if you do not honor the license that the original was released under.

that's why we use FOSS licenses in the first place

some FOSS licenses are intended to insure that the code remains open even after modification. that's used by anyone for anything under the same license.

em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
giving away thousands of hours of work does not entitle you to be abusive to your users and contributors. i am entitled to walk away from your project if i don't like your tone.
em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
you have to if you want to continue to attract users and contributors. if you don't care about that then feel free.
em-bee··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
he doesn't owe it, but his writing reflects on him and the project. personal blog or not, the writing shows his personality, and that in turn affects how comfortable i am using a project led by this person. if this was just one of many zig developers then it would not matter as much, but as this is the founder and leader, his personality has a major impact on the project as whole. especially in how it attracts contributors, and how long those contributors will stay around.
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