jamiejquinn

Interestingly, most large-scale atmospheric models I know of use a (mostly) incompressble fluid approximation, even though air is obviously compressible at human scales. It just isn't at the flow speeds and length scales of global-scale fluid models. Where compressibility is important for those models is where density changes due to temperature. Look into the Boussinesq and anelastic approximations if you're interested!

Newer emulator or even a recompilation of an old one. I'd bet there are a few modern compiler tricks that would help even on decades old CPUs.

If he was an entirely rational being I would agree, but he clearly wasn't and he did hold both views that Scottish identity isn't worth anything and Scots are essentially identical to the English.

Let's be serious, I'm not saying Orwell would be out enslaving Scots given the chance, but saying Scottish culture IS English culture is intentionally erasing a culture and is a racist statement, not unlike the common view that all of Africa is culturally homogenous.

Disregarding genuine differences between cultures and intentially treating those cultures as identical is racist. Turns out he did come around later in life - https://www.thenational.scot/news/23716840.george-orwells-an...

I fundamentally agree with you. I don't think responsibility is quite the right word. But if they don't seem to care about a massive portion of their users, why are they building gnome at all?

An important collection of essays but I struggled to get over his racist claim that the English, Irish, Welsh and Scots are essentially all the same. Probably a good thing since I'm now much more inclined to be questioning of other parts of his writing.

Or that gulf doesn't exist for the problems they are trying to solve?

Absolutely sublime attention to detail. Reminds me of the series on fonts in Josh Ge's blog on Cogmind (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/09/cogmind-fonts/)

CUDA having had such a wide moat for so long has completely warped the GPU software ecosystem. There just isn't any incentive for Nvidia to meaningfully contribute to any external, standards-driven effort like SYCL or OpenCL. Real shame because it leads to a tonne of duplicated effort as AMD and Intel try to reimplement the exact same libraries as Nvidia (and usually worse because neither seem to prioritise good software for whatever reason).

Delightful, I'll play about with both, thanks!

My understanding is all of Google's AI is trained and run on quite old but well designed TPUs. For a while the issue was that developing these AI models still needed flexibility and customised hardware like TPUs couldn't accomodate that.

Now that the model architecture has settled into something a bit more predictable, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a little more specialisation in the hardware.

Can't agree more. I hope someone puts some work into a less painful way to manage strings in std. I would but I don't manipulate strings quite enough to support usecases more than basically concatenation...

I ran a pretty vanilla xfce setup from about 2010 until 2024 until I moved to i3. Xfce is great generally, pretty easy to backup and share the whole config, ideal collection of apps. I'm sure gnome and kde have more features but for a good, solid, predictable desktop experience, cannae beat xfce.

Ditto... I love Zig as a language but I worry the high-level community builders (including Andrew) are a little too antagonistic to foster a positive, tolerant, patient community in the long term. In saying that, my infrequent interactions in the reddit and discord are always pleasant.

Snap! I also played around with closures a tonne in Zig. Definitely possible but not... ergonomic. Haven't ended up using them much.

And agree with allocators; in C I always considered using custom allocators but never really needed to. Having them just available in the zig std means I actually use them. The testing allocator is particularly useful IMO.

Never used Go but if it's Zig-like I might give it a shot! Thanks!

For many languages I agree, especially languages with steep learning curves (e.g. Rust, Haskell). But zig is dead fast to learn so I'd recommend just nipping through Ziglings and seeing if its a language you want to add to the toolbox. It took me only about 10 hours to pick up and get used to and it has immediately replaced C and C++ in my personal projects. It's really just a safer, more ergonomic C. If you already love C, I maybe wouldn't bother.

Has it changed how you program in other languages? Because that to me is the true mark of a thought-shifting language.

I agree, I love zig but the things that make me program differently are features like excellent enum/union support, defer and comptime, which aren't readily available in the other languages I tend to use (C++, Fortran and Python).

One recent HN post I loved recently was on Arthur Whitney's insanely terse C code[0]. I personally find it beautiful, and many others did, but many did not. So it goes.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777

Perl I used in 2008 or so but not since. Haven't come across Perl 6.

The article's claim of Zig being a "totally new way to write programs" is quite mad but I'd like to make a different claim: Zig's own development is a totally new way of writing programming languages (or is at least very rare).

While I don't wholly agree with all choices made by Andrew and the Zig team, I greatly appreciate the care with which they develop features. The slow pace of deliberating over features, refining them, and removing unnecessary ones seems in sharp contrast to the development of any other langauge I'm aware of. I'm no language historian though, happy to be challenged.

Wow, Raku looks like a really interesting language, I'd never heard of it before!

Have you used it in any large projects?

I completely agree. One of Zig's big competitors, Odin, has a more explicit syntax for this where `0..<5` is an open interval and `0...5` is closed.

I don't know if taste is the correct word here but I agree with the spirit of the article, especially the parts on tinkering being a form of practice. Play (in the form of enjoyable tinkering) is such a powerful motivator in learning. In saying that I've found two big limitations with this style of play-based learning:

1. It can easily devolve into meaningless tweaking (see author's point about touching dotfiles) which can still be satisfying but not very impactful. 2. It's hard to maintain motivation when something stops being fun. This is where external motivators like bosses, clients and scoreboards (e.g. Advent of Code) are actually valuable...

Nah, I wouldn't say this is rude or even a ragebait title. It's completely accurate and to the point...

Aye, the fact that the WHOLE system would cost trillions to upgrade doesn't stop anyone from upgrading it slowly in this way. The problem will still exist in 50 years, any progress is better than none.

If you've tried it and it doesn't fit, that seems fine, it's all just personal workflow.

For me it's pure speed at getting to where I need to go. My notes live on workspace 1, my main workspace on 2 and browser on 3, so I'm just a single key combination away from most of what I need. Can still alt+tab if I like.

Oh did I get frustrated seeing "to make incremental compilation simpler to implement" in the latest 0.15.1 release notes...

I have no doubt incremental compilation will make many large projects easier to compile, and perhaps it really is the future of all compiled languages, but you're right, it's being wielded as a janky dismissal of many good ideas.

I've been using jsonnet while developing a game to describe all in-game objects, items, creatures, biomes, structures, etc. It's just great. At the data level I can do complex things I'd otherwise have to implement in the engine.

Haven't used other similar tools to compare to, all I can really say is it's a damn sight better than writing JSON (comments and trailing commas? yes please!).

ML I get, but what do you think the legitimate value of crypto is to humanity?