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mastry

486 karma · joined June 22, 2016

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mastry··on Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
This is an amazing collection. Thank you.
mastry··on Exclusive – Anthropic sets up biology lab as it ramps AI drug program
Surprising considering the CEO's recent warnings about the risks of AI [1].

[1] https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/anthropics-ceo-says-ai-risks-...

mastry··on I resigned from Anthropic today
Not refuting your overall point, but the son wasn’t killed. They reunite at the end of the movie.
mastry··on Claude Is Down
Time to try out Antigravity, I guess.
mastry··on Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need
See the links I listed above. None of those features solved a language problem as large as the lack of sum types. It baffles me that they even spent time on them before providing a feature that is in such high demand (and has been for more than a decade).

I understand that you shouldn’t always give users what they ask for - but this is something that has picked up steam in other languages because it’s actually useful and makes code bases easier to maintain.

mastry··on Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need
Yep, this is exactly the approach we take. It works ok-ish, but it’s far from elegant. In our case ‘read’ is ‘Switch’. I think it’s a fairly common pattern in C# these days.
mastry··on Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need
> We're discussing Windows and all its ad-ware/invasive changes, and someone brings up C#

I brought up C# because the article discusses a Microsoft Windows design philosophy that I feel is also reflected in their approach to C#. It’s a Microsoft thing.

I agree with you that the examples you mention were great additions to the language! But I still think the C# design team has some seriously screwed up priorities. My theory is that this one year cycle they are on is hampering their ability to make changes (like sum types) that require more than a year of work.

mastry··on Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need
Yes, very clunky. One of the big issues with this approach is that switch expressions still require a default branch because there’s no way in C# to express a completely closed set. This makes future changes to the set (sum type) hazardous.

They continue to fiddle with design approaches to solve this. See https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/meetings/2025...

mastry··on Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need
Here are some. I’m not saying these are all completely useless, but all of them should have taken a back seat to sum types.

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...

mastry··on Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need
They're doing the same thing with C#. The amount crap they have added to that language over the years is mind boggling - yet, we still don't have sum types which is the one thing that every C# developer I have worked with _really_ wants.
mastry··on Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]
Ah - that's good to hear. Thanks for the extra information.
mastry··on Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]
> Kodak aims to conjure up cash by ceasing payments for its retirement pension plan.

I assume this means payments to retirees. It's a good reminder that (if you can help it) you should not rely 100% on any external source (including the government) for your retirement income.

mastry··on Reading articles and tweets about 'AI replacing devs' makes me feel depressed
This will make you feel better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152
mastry··on Zuck plans to replace Mid-Level engineers with AIs this year
Exactly. See also recent SalesForce comments along these lines.
mastry··on Happy New Year 2025
Happy new year from the US South y’all.
mastry··on NHC Is Unavailable
Seems to be back up now.
mastry··on Is AWS S3 having an outage?
I wonder if this is related to the NHC outage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41771629

mastry··on NHC Is Unavailable
The National Hurricane Center website has been returning "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" for a while now.
mastry··on Tesla Semi fire in California took 50k gallons of water to extinguish
Is that unusual? Nothing in the article compares it to other fires. Honestly curious.

Also, this was a little ironic…

> The Tesla truck, driven by an employee, was headed to the company’s battery factory in Sparks, Nevada

mastry··on Book Review: "2040" by Pedro Domingos
I eagerly await the release on Apple Books.
mastry··on Official proposal for Type Unions in C#
C# has default interface implementations now, that can be used to create mixins...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/advanced-top...

mastry··on An African Superstate: The East African Federation (2022)
2022
mastry··on No physics? No problem. AI weather forecasting is already making strides
NOTAMs are issued for every weather baloon.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/notam_ht...

mastry··on Another Upcoming SciFi Series from Apple: Neuromancer
After what they did to Foundation, I’m not feeling very optimistic about this.
mastry··on Appeals Court: FBI's Safe-Deposit Box Seizures Violated Fourth Amendment
Almost three years to come to this conclusion?
mastry··on Ask HN: Strategies for Organizing a Messy Hard Drive?
Delete "Downloads". Everything in there is probably outdated (or soon will be) and can be downloaded again anyway.

Move the clutter to a folder in your cloud storage account. Configure that folder so it doesn't sync to your local device(s). In a few years you'll wonder why you still keep it around.

mastry··on .NET Blazor
There actually are several C# to JavaScript transpilers out there but none are well-maintained with a strong following (compared to Fable). Some examples are...

https://github.com/theolivenbaum/h5

https://www.dice.com/career-advice/exploring-bridge-net-c-ja...

https://www.infoq.com/news/2015/02/duocode-csharp-javascript...

http://jsil.org

I wonder if the community just isn't interested in this approach.

mastry··on Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)
Quite manually, actually. I ran an image search on DDG for "Amazon 404 cat" and looked through the results for a kid's drawing.
mastry··on Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)
Maybe this is it?

http://telcontar.net/Screenshots/worldwidewonk/Amazon-404-eh...

mastry··on Quetzal-1 Satellite Goes Open Source
A slightly cheaper option…

https://untamedscience.com/blog/gopro-to-space/

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