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meisel

611 karma · joined February 10, 2020

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meisel··on Climate is accumulating 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of heat per second
What is the conversion to Nagasakis
meisel··on The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
Another more practical issue with using LLMs for Zig is that it’s a quickly changing language, meaning LLMs may generate code for an older version of the language.
meisel··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
Yeah the author really should’ve taken some responsibility here. It’s true that the services they used have issues, but there’s plenty of blame to direct to themself
meisel··on The Rise of the Em-Dash in Hacker News Comments
Gotta love starting the y-axis above 0
meisel··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
What % of users actually care that much about local LLMs? It appears to still be an inferior (though maybe decent) service compared to ChatGPT etc., and requires very top-end hardware. Is privacy _that_ important to people when their Google search history has been a gateway to the soul for years? I wonder if these machines would cost significantly less (or put the cost to other things, e.g. more CPU cores) without this emphasis on LLMs.
meisel··on The Om Programming Language
Yeah show me the 5-line HTTP server
meisel··on Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
Why did Ladybird even attempt this with Swift, but (I presume) not with Rust? If they're going to go to the trouble of adding another language, does Rust not have a better history of C++ interop? Not to mention, Swift's GC doesn't seem great for the browser's performance.
meisel··on Apple patches decade-old iOS zero-day, possibly exploited by commercial spyware
I wonder what the internal conversations are like around memory safety at Apple right now. Do people feel comfortable enough with Swift's performance to replace key things like dyld and the OS? Are there specific asks in place for that to happen? Is Rust on the table? Or does C and C++ continue to dominate in these spaces?
meisel··on Both GCC and Clang generate strange/inefficient code
If you're doing enough divisions with the same divisor, it'd be faster to do what compilers do for division by a known constant, where they multiply by an integer reciprocal and shift
meisel··on GPT-5.3-Codex
I wonder if their "5.3" was continuously being updated, with regenerated benchmarks with each improvement, and they just stayed ready to release it when claude released
meisel··on Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
My experience with AI with its predecessor, Xcode 26.2, was _really_ bad. One bug made it objectively unusable, and there were lots of fun issues/huge functionality gaps on top of that. Apple doesn't really seem to "get" agent-based coding, but I'm curious to see the results of other braver souls with 26.3.
meisel··on Julia
> Julia emits light, over an ever-changing spectrum

Haven’t heard of this feature in Julia lang, must be new in v1.12.4

meisel··on Zig Libc
> It’s kind of like enabling LTO (Link-Time Optimization) across the libc boundary, except it’s done properly in the frontend instead of too late, in the linker

Why is the linker too late? Is Zig able to do optimizations in the frontend that, e.g., a linker working with LLVM IR is not?

meisel··on Software Survival 3.0
> Gas Town has illuminated and kicked off the next wave for everyone

That sounds pretty hyperbolic. Everyone? Next “wave”?

meisel··on Package management is a wicked problem
This all just sounds like problems we see when making new features, of any sort, for customers. A feature is never objectively done, there are many opinions on its goodness or badness, once it’s released its mistakes can last with it, etc.

If this is a wicked problem, then so is much of other real-world engineering.

meisel··on It looks like the status/need-triage label was removed
To be clear, is AI actually at play here, aside from the fact that the repo is for Gemini? It just looks like two simple rules that interact poorly, that we could've seen in 2015.
meisel··on Test your square brackets
The real solution is that as soon as you need square brackets, switch to a better language than bash
meisel··on Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip (2024)
Looks like it beats everything in the large text compression benchmark for enwik8, but loses to several programs for enwik9. I wonder why that is.
meisel··on Chinese AI models have lagged the US frontier by 7 months on average since 2023
How much less? Their companies clearly have access to the latest GPUs.
meisel··on It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
What is with the annoying snow going over the text? That is a pretty “arbitrary” graphic element
meisel··on Huge Binaries
> Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist

I see this often even in communities of software engineers, where people who are unaware of certain limitations at scale will announce that the research is unnecessary

meisel··on Scientists discover beer bottle in the Mariana Trench (2024)
I'm curious what objects do/don't survive at the water pressure. I guess bottles are strong enough
meisel··on The Algebra of Loans in Rust
What does this sort of language complexity mean for future changes in Rust? In C++, its existing complexity makes new changes so much more difficult. Is Rust reaching a similar place?
meisel··on Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades
I think only a small percentage of users care that much about running LLMs locally to pay for extra hardware for it, put up with slower and lower-quality responses, etc. . It’ll never be as good as non-local offerings, and is more hassle.
meisel··on I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero
Is mining via CPU even worthwhile for the hackers? I thought ASICs dominated mining
meisel··on Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it
It wouldn’t be surprising if cars also record audio of conversations to use for ad targeting. It has already been conclusively shown that TV companies have done this.
meisel··on Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code
Are you interested in beating Linux performance-wise? Eg:

- Moving away from the too-small 4kb default page size (while having a good strategy for dealing with fragmentation)?

- Make it easy to minimize/track interrupts on a core, for low-latency contexts

meisel··on Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code
Really neat. Do you have any specific long term goals for it? Eg, provide an OS distro (using Linux drivers?) to provide memory safety for security-critical contexts?

Also, are there any opportunities to make this kernel significantly faster than Linux’s?

meisel··on Bring bathroom doors back to hotels
While we’re at it, bring back shower doors/curtains. It’s such a pain having this huge puddle outside the shower just because they decided it shouldn’t have one. It’s not so common to be missing one in US hotels, but it’s common internationally.

Edit: apparently the virus has spread, and some US hotels now don’t have them

meisel··on Await Is Not a Context Switch: Understanding Python's Coroutines vs. Tasks
How many people just avoid working with await in Python at all costs (e.g., favoring something like multiprocessing instead?). It’s always felt less comfortable in Python than in other languages
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