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mftb

823 karma · joined February 2, 2021

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mftb··on Ants: Who looks after the injured in a colony?
Thank you for saying this. I've been saying this for years. No one listens.
mftb··on Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving
It's GNU Readline[0] or similar. It's all over the place, on Linux at least. Being GNU it defaults to emacs, but the vi support is also excellent. The first thing I type in any foreign bash is 'set -o vi'.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline

mftb··on GentleOS – Classic operating system with a lovely retro GUI
I generally agree with you about UIs (if by shit you mean they've thrown away a ton of utility), but I don't think his video was bs, maybe just moved too far from it's original context.
mftb··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
For some reason your reply immediately caused me to imagine Ross Geller shouting into the phone, "Operator", like the, "Pivot" scene from friends.
mftb··on Why are neural networks and cryptographic ciphers so similar? (2025)
This is a good and useful breakdown. There are lots of ways to get an education and continue learning.
mftb··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2026)
Location: California

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Résumé/CV/LinkedIn: Available upon request

Email: hn[dot]canteen389[at]passmail[dot]net

Technologies: C/C++, Go, C#, Microsoft .Net, Java, XML/DOM, HTML, ASP/ASPX, PL/SQL, TSQL, JSP, JavaScript/TypeScript, JQuery, React, OOP, Client/Server Networking

Hi I'm Matt, Software engineer for ~20 yrs, VP of Engineering for ~10 yrs. Extensive experience in both Server-side and Front-end Engineering.

mftb··on We Will Not Be Divided
Stand your ground.
mftb··on Snake on a Globe
gg
mftb··on Undb – Private first, unified, self-hosted no code database
DB engine appears to be sqlite. It's in the tags on the main page and there's a file full of sql to create what looks like a sample db in the data/ dir.
mftb··on Spectral Contexts in Go
Choosing to name variables with a single character has nothing to do with syntax. At most it could be considered idiomatic, but there's no reason to slavishly follow every idiomatic choice, just as there isn't in natural language.
mftb··on Lessons from Creating a VSCode Extension with GPT-4
Ah, good eye, ty.
mftb··on Lessons from Creating a VSCode Extension with GPT-4
I appreciate your write-up, it was well done. How long did you spend on this? I'd be most interested to know how long, not counting writing the blog post.
mftb··on How much memory do you need to run 1M concurrent tasks?
See response to sibling comment.
mftb··on How much memory do you need to run 1M concurrent tasks?
I think I just responded too hastily. I am working in Go. There is file IO going on in addition to the calculation (which because of a NAS or whatever could also be network IO). As a practical matter I had never felt the need to offer cancellation or timeout for these use cases, but I probably should, so mea culpa.
mftb··on How much memory do you need to run 1M concurrent tasks?
You've misunderstood how go routines work. You need to put the "go" keyword before the function call in order for it to be run concurrently.
mftb··on How much memory do you need to run 1M concurrent tasks?
This isn't true. I have use cases that don't require cancellations or timeout. The tasks I'm running don't involve the network, they either succeed or error after an expensive calculation.
mftb··on Hundreds of millions of stars turned into a map of GitHub projects
To me this is proof that doing a good visualization is really an art. I saw this on hn for a couple hours, but really didn't think much of it. As soon as I clicked through the funny names, and "continents" brought a smile to my face.

I guess my little project is too small to make it, but now I too aspire to join the great nation of Golandia.

mftb··on Four questions concerning the internet
I never said I stopped reading anything.
mftb··on Four questions concerning the internet
Manipulators frequently admit their manipulations, knowing that they work on you anyway. There's nothing novel there.
mftb··on Four questions concerning the internet
From the linked post:

> I cheated a bit there, I admit. I changed one of the words. The name that the saint used in that passage was not ‘Ahriman’. It was ‘Antichrist.’

That's manipulation. That's gross. That's a shame. There are some interesting ideas in the post.

mftb··on DeepFloyd IF: open-source text-to-image model
This was an excellent summary, ty.
mftb··on Show HN: ScrapScript – A tiny functional language for sharable software
Surprised, none of the more functionally minded have jumped in. Looks interesting, I'll be taking a look, when it ships.
mftb··on Boot to Vim, Vim as Pid 1 (2014)
lol, the nuclear option. You don't mess around, but really, I think the answer is, never quit Vim.
mftb··on Boot to Vim, Vim as Pid 1 (2014)
That's the spirit! (but I can't help it if you've mistaken a cleverly disguised web browser for a text editor.)
mftb··on Boot to Vim, Vim as Pid 1 (2014)
...but then the difficulty of quitting Vim becomes a feature. Can't crash the system by exiting, if you can't exit (taps head meaningfully). /s
mftb··on Boot to Vim, Vim as Pid 1 (2014)
> As we all know, nobody uses emacs.

Ha! Old school. It's boring now that we're all pals.

mftb··on Peter Gabriel: AI competition statement
That's awesome. That's exactly the kind of thinking that turns L's to W's.
mftb··on Peter Gabriel: AI competition statement
Peter Gabriel is fucking courageous. I love it. I'm a 50+ programmer. I can absolutely feel this shit pressing on me. Good. Are people right that there are ethical concerns, absolutely. We need to get busy realizing the potential and dealing with the issues.
mftb··on MiniGPT-4
I also got middling results. I gave it a novel NASA picture of the moon passing in front of the earth, taken by the Deep Space Climate Observatory Satellite, so an unusual vantage point. First it was just wrong, and said that it was a picture of a crescent moon taken from a mountain top, or something like that. Not terrible at least it recognized the moon, but wrong. I tried to give it a chance and corrected it with the additional info that the picture was taken from space. It then did better, but on the last line it threw in that it was not a photograph, but a rendering of some sort, which again, is just wrong.

More and more I get the impression that people are so taken with the chat interface that they are grading these models more favorably than is warranted.

mftb··on Evaluating the Logical Reasoning Ability of ChatGPT and GPT-4
Yea, I definitely wasn't trying to quantify it's value. ChatGPT definitely appears to be proving valuable to people. I was just challenging the idea that so far it's acting in a tutor/instructor/mentor type of role. While it seems like an interesting direction to take these LLMs, so far I haven't observed them doing that.
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