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grumdan

343 karma · joined January 27, 2018

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grumdan··on Biohacker seeking immortality afflicted with incurable 'stomach eating' disease
> but he is a good guy

That definitely doesn't seem to be the case, especially if you look beyond his bio-hacking endeavors. His treatment of employees and ex-partners seems pretty horrible: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/technology/bryan-johnson-...

grumdan··on Why take a compiler course? (2010)
For many languages there are mature parsers out there that can be reused (e.g. Google's Closure compiler or babel for JavaScript, or the Soot framework for Java that also simplifies more advanced code analysis). In the worst case, it's sometimes possible to interface with the standard compiler for the language directly (for example, the TypeScript compiler provides TypeScript APIs for its parser/type checker/etc.). I believe for C++ for example, a Clang plugin (https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangPlugins.html) would have been a plausible way to implement something like this.
grumdan··on The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
It doesn't work super well during live collaboration, but Overleaf does allow git access to the underlying document: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/how-to/Using_Git_and_GitHub
grumdan··on Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?
Programming-related humor is pretty tricky. I once told a UDP joke, but nobody got it..
grumdan··on Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?
How did the Three Wise Men find their way to baby Jesus? A Star. (This joke works better when spoken out loud instead of written)
grumdan··on Rust Ownership Rules
One example that comes to mind is type state [0]. I'm not aware of any other language (including those with support for dependent types, like Agda) where these properties can be checked without external static analysis tools and the problems they bring.

[0] https://yoric.github.io/post/rust-typestate/

grumdan··on Why does the Librem 5 phone cost that much?
> If only Jolla devs had kept their promises of open-sourcing more of their code.

I think that's a big part of the answer to why it hasn't caught among techies. When I tried using it (shortly after release), there were numerous issues in their default apps that nobody could fix because they are proprietary and Jolla didn't seem to have the resources to handle all the bugs.

I'd wager that if it had been open source, the early adopters would have put some time in to fix a lot of the bugs.

In retrospect I'm pretty pissed at them for not being honest and upholding their promises. In my book they're basically con artists that just tried to get the Linux community's money by saying "open source" without actually meaning it.

grumdan··on Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
Well two differing conventions above are both for x86, so you can't "match x86".
grumdan··on Thoughts on Rust bloat
You can provide this implementation yourself easily enough though. I agree it's maybe not ideal that this needs to be done for every Trait you want this behavior for.
grumdan··on Dependent Haskell Is the Future (2018)
At least now we are checking that two pieces of saying what we want a program to do match up. It's less likely to get both the implementation and specification (in the form of types) wrong. Whenever the program fails to type-check, it will make you think about both bugs in the type and bugs in the code, even if the latter is more likely.
grumdan··on Linux Journal Ceases Publication: An Awkward Goodbye
> At the same time we finally got a phone that is built with some security in mind (Librem).

If it ever materializes. It's already more than half a year behind schedule and after preordering it close to when it was announced, I'm very skeptical I'll ever receive it.

grumdan··on The Law Isn't Ready for Psychedelic Medicine
I guess I shouldn't use terms that could also have a precise chemical meaning. My understanding is that they cause similar effects to LSD, but analogue is probably not the right word for it.
grumdan··on The Law Isn't Ready for Psychedelic Medicine
I agree that prohibition does cause a lot of issues.

This makes even less sense since one difference is that there is no equivalent to "alcohol poisoning" with LSD. A dose at which LSD is physically toxic is so high (200 times a recreational dose) that it's incredibly unlikely to take by accident. As far as I know, there are no known overdose deaths due to LSD.

(However, there are analogues to LSD that are toxic: 25I-NBOMe and 25C-NBOMe).

grumdan··on Why Generics?
I have found Rust to be a nice middle-ground for this. Sure, the borrow checker takes some getting used to, but it features an ML-style type system (though I still miss some extensions to Haskell's type system available in GHC), rock-solid tooling, and a comprehensive well-documented standard library. The high quality of third-party crates also surprised me. Whether the C-like syntax is sane is debatable though.
grumdan··on Why Generics?
> because all existing implementations are bad

I'm also not sure why in OOP-land, generics are this crazy experimental weird feature, when in functional languages, people figured out how to implement parametric polymorphism (the original term for generics) in quite reasonable ways. I get that subtyping adds some complexity, but overall I don't understand why such a basic way to build abstractions is so controversial in (some) OOP languages. If anyone has some context on why this is more difficult to have in Java-like languages, I'd be curious to hear it.

grumdan··on How is it like to be a dev in Iran
I was asking if you think it's equally bad for gay people in Iran and the west, or worse in Iran. Your first statement sounded like you think it's no better in the west, and the second one like you think Iran is worse.
grumdan··on How is it like to be a dev in Iran
> [...] is as worse as hanging them

> I know that Iran is worse

Which one is it?

grumdan··on Preserving Laptop Stickers on MacBooks
> Everyone already agrees with you.

That's really not my experience. A significant portion of people I meet, including technical people, articulate some form of "I have nothing to hide, so I don't care" when the topic comes up.

grumdan··on Rsync, GUIs, power, control, design, and decisions
While disk space may not often be an issue (though small SSDs are commonplace), RAM usage certainly is an issue if every little tool is an electron app.
grumdan··on YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube
If that were such a big factor, then allowing guns wouldn't make a difference, as criminal could still choose to carry a knife for this reason.
grumdan··on Choose Boring Technology
I know the comment you replied to was in jest, but he did actually say quite the contrary (at least according to Theravada, one major Buddhist tradition): He in several places said the point of all his teachings was to help people put an end to suffering; he only taught the particular things he taught because according to him, they were the best/only way of reaching that goal.

Some schools even go so far as to say that the Buddhist path is something to let go of as well at the very end of the process in order to truly reach enlightenment. It's only a tool to get there.

grumdan··on Freeing My Phone from Google
Still not as good as Google Maps, but I find maps.me (also open-source and based on OSM data) significantly nicer than the default OSM client for Android (I think it's called OsmDroid or something similar).
grumdan··on Without a GUI: How to Live Entirely in a Terminal
Having a good shell (like zsh) that shows available flags with descriptions when hitting tab goes a long way toward not having to remember tools' flags.
grumdan··on Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client
I really recommend Amethyst, which is an xmonad-like tiling window manager for OSX. It's still not as configurable as xmonad, but certainly nicer for me than the default WM:

https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

grumdan··on Consumers Are Becoming Wise to Your Nudge
This reminds me a lot of Charles Stross' talk at 34C3, where he described corporations and competition between them as "human-powered AIs" that maximize profit as their only goal, similar to how a neural network only blindly minimizes a loss function.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIgJ64z6Y4

grumdan··on My MacBook Pro exploded and burst into flames
I wonder if they have grounds to sue, over Apple producing an unsafe product.
grumdan··on Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
The two vowel lengths sound too different to me (native speaker) for this to really work. The difference is the difference between aː vs a in IPA. I'm struggling to find a similar vowel length example in English and Wikipedia only has examples with an Australian accent. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Contrastive_vowel...

grumdan··on Facebook picked Rust to implement Libra
One point is that the rewrite itself costs developer time that could be spent on something else.

Aside from that, rewriting something in C++ based on code in a higher-level language with better abstractions might cost additional developer time, maintainability, and quality.

grumdan··on Presenting the Eshell
A minor addition to what the article says about ipython: You can run arbitrary shell commands there without system() by prefixing them with !. It even supports using python variables as in `a = "some_dir"; ! cd $a`.
grumdan··on Cellebrite claims it can unlock any iPhone, many new Android phones for police
True, except that fingerprint sensors can often be fooled and you cannot change your fingerprint once it becomes "compromised". For instance, anyone who ever visited the US, at least as a non-citizen, will have given their fingerprints to CBP.

I think this only works for an attacker model that excludes reasonably sophisticated attackers. I expect this to thwart pickpockets or muggers, but not the police or anyone more sophisticated than that.

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