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groos

494 karma · joined November 11, 2020

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groos··on Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
I'm not sure why people seem to be under the impression that writing a compiler means that the language the compiler is implemented in should have "low level" features. A compiler is just a text -> text translation tool if you can leverage other tools such as an assembler and never needs to access machine level instructions. E.g., Pascal compilers have traditionally been written in Pascal, hardly a language which conjures up a "low level" image. Even when an assembler isn't available, all your implementation language needs to support, in terms of "low level" features, is writing of bytes to a file.

But manipulating instruction and file formats and such can be tedious if your language doesn't have the right capabilities but it's not impossible.

groos··on Ban the sale of precise geolocation
Most people don't realize how bad geolocated data is for a free society. I can buy data from a broker, geo-fence your house address, and then I'm able to see all the places where you went, who you associate with, and identify all you associate with by tracking them to addresses. All of this happens with anonymized device identifiers. It is the wet dream of a company such as Palantir and all governments who desire absolute control over their populations.
groos··on Clean code in the age of coding agents
The high level language -> assembly seems like an apt analogy for using LLMs but I would like to argue that it is only a weak one. The reason in that, previously, both the high level language and the assembly language had well defined semantics and the transform was deterministic whereas now you are using English or other human language, with ambiguities and lacking well-defined semantics. The reason math symbolisms were invented in the first place is because human language did not have the required unambiguous precision, and if we encounter hurdles with LLMs, we may need to reinvent this once more.
groos··on Revealed: Face of 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal from cave
I wonder have the reconstruction techniques been verified by a double-blind experiment to reconstruct the face of a homo sapiens from a skull with a known photograph. Otherwise, you're just wondering how much of it is just artistry and how much solid, verified technique.
groos··on Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight
Here's one way to do it.

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

groos··on Tony Hoare has died
I've had the good fortune to attend two of his lectures in person. Each time, he effortlessly derived provably correct code from the conditions of the problem and made it seem all too easy. 10 minutes after leaving the lecture, my thought was "Wait, how did he do it again?".

RIP Sir Tony.

groos··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
I have a strict policy of no Meta glasses for guests in my house. Socially, they're poison.
groos··on Topological Naming Problem
My statement was accurate as of _when_ I moved away from FreeCad. I'm happy they merged the RealThunder work. But they dilly-dallied for a long time while people were demanding a fix and one was available. Doesn't speak well of their org politics.
groos··on Topological Naming Problem
Glad to hear it as I moved away before 1.0 happened. RealThunder had other enhancements as well, if I remember correctly. I wonder if those were taken up as well.
groos··on Topological Naming Problem
It's what caused me to move away from FreeCad to OnShape. Never had an issue in OnShape but got hit with it every time in FreeCad. The sad thing is that there was a fork for a long time which had addressed this problem, and added other nice enhancements as well, but they never merged that work. I guess every org has political problems and FreeCad is no exception.
groos··on Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
Because Tesla Clown-in-Chief asked if humans could drive with just visual input, why can't a Tesla? C-in-C conveniently ignored that, to begin with, humans have binocular vision, and his cars had none. Also conveniently ignored were the facts that human eyes have immense dynamic range, are self-cleaning, and can move to track objects of interest. On top of this, humans also have hearing, which helps gauge danger. Many of these things could be filled in by Lidar but since C-in-C apparently had a revelation from heaven, possibly caused by drugs, lidar had to go.
groos··on Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
In university, one year, our building started smelling like there had been a sewage overflow. Pretty soon, everything around started smelling like this - the stores, restaurants, cinema, etc. in central campus was stinking. It was soon found out that the decorative Ginko trees planted in the central part of campus were fruiting (probably for the first time since planting) and the fruit was getting crushed underfoot and carried everywhere. The smell took a few weeks to go away.
groos··on -fbounds-safety: Enforcing bounds safety for C
Microsoft's SAL annotations are meant to inform the static analyzer how the parameters are meant to be used so any violations of the contract can be diagnosed at compile time. The LLVM proposal is different in that it is checked at run time and will stop your program before it makes an out of bounds access. Static analyzers can obviously use the information in the type to help diagnose a subset of such problems at compile time.
groos··on Intermittent fasting may make little difference to weight loss, review finds
In a couple of days ~2 billion people world-wide will begin intermittent fasting, done from dawn to sunset, for a month, which is one of the components of the month of Ramadan. Nobody does this to lose weight, or even changes their diet, yet everyone loses some weight. 5lb is typical. Most people who fast Ramadan also gain it back afterward because they didn't make any changes to their diet, which points to the effectiveness of intermittent fasting to lose weight.

There is one difference between Ramadan fasting and modern intermittent fasting: Ramadan fasts are 'dry' fasts no water is imbibed and the alimentary canal stays completely unstimulated for long periods of time.

groos··on Tesla ending Models S and X production
My 8 yo M3 has radar and it still is active since the yellow radar symbols light up when passing by obstacles. It's also used to figure out obstacles in the front and back and if disabled, the relatively poor cameras on my car would not be able to figure out the distance to the next car in the front.
groos··on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?
What a non sequitur.
groos··on Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
Deflation is never going to be allowed to happen even if economic conditions allow it. The reason that the Federal Reserve wants inflation at ~2% is so that nobody hoards cash in their home and instead spends it before it loses value or puts it in a bank to lend to the economy or invests it. Deflation would mean that you could hoard cash and it would grow in value, leading to less money available for economic growth.
groos··on The Supply Chain Nightmare Before Deployment
Storm in a teacup - wait, is tea Canadian or British?
groos··on The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
I looked but AliExpress makes it impossible to locate even specific sellers, like BohrOptics, who I found to have consistently good quality (bought a beam splitter and fused silica ball lenses from them).
groos··on AI is wiping out entry-level tech jobs, leaving graduates stranded
The death, maybe, but not the lack of hiring. At $BIGCORP, where I work, I haven't seen an externally hired junior dev in at least 2 years in an extended team of ~100 people.
groos··on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
Short names are a figment of the age of teletypes when you had to repeatedly type things out. This hasn't been the case for at least 3 decades. Most good shell+terminal combinations will support autocomplete, even the verbose Powershell becomes fairly easy to use with shell history and autocomplete, which, incidentally, it does very well.

If you are repeatedly typing library names, something is wrong with your workflow.

Niklaus Wirth showed us a way out of the teletype world with the Oberon text/command interface, later aped clumsily by Plan 9, but we seem to be stuck firmly in the teletype world, mainly because of Un*x.

groos··on The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
Excellent. I might have a go at this myself. Was there a particular AliExpress seller that you got the mirror from?
groos··on The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
I'm sure he didn't explain it because almost nobody knows what it is (or even how to interpret the interferograms he showed) and learning to figure optics takes years and entire books are written on the subject.
groos··on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
Fine. Name it sodium-crypto.a or sodium.crypto.a or whatever. The author's complaint does hold water.
groos··on I wasted years of my life in crypto
It's the usual story of technology divorced from morality.
groos··on Everyone in Seattle hates AI
My esteem of Seattle area engineers compared to Silicon Valley engineers has just gone up.
groos··on Everyone in Seattle hates AI
It's not just that AI is being pushed on to employees by the tech giants - this is true - but that the hype of AI as a life changing tech is not holding up and people within the industry can easily see this. The only life-changing thing it's doing is due to a self-fulfilling prophecy of eliminating jobs in the tech industry and outside by CEOs who have bet too much on AI. Everyone currently agrees that there is no return on all the money spent on AI. Some players may survive and do well in the future but for a majority there is only the prospect of pain, and this is what all the negativity is about.
groos··on Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
> I'm happy my Tesla does a decent job of having the screen be quite dark at night but the headlights are quite bad with the horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it.

Turn on your fog lights? At least in my 2018 M3, they illuminate the sides as well.

groos··on There has to be a better way to make titanium
This point was also briefly mentioned in the article, but I think is other half of the equation: even if Ti is made cheap to manufacture, it's use will still remain problematic as it's brutal to machine and form, which increases manufacturing costs drastically.
groos··on X5.1 solar flare, G4 geomagnetic storm watch
This aurora looks predominantly red. The last big one had pinks and greens easily visible to the naked eye. I wonder what causes the difference.
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