otde

This seems like a stretch. While the main culprit is couching their accusations of slander in accessibility-oriented language as a way to deflect, there’s little to suggest “wokeness” is at play here in any respect, and to imply otherwise kind of gives away that you’ve already settled on a “culture war” lens, regardless of how well that maps to the story’s context.

I wonder if that’s not necessarily a negative thing. Much of the beauty of the open-source ecosystem comes from its (typical but not guaranteed) lack of explicit wealth incentives. It feels to me like the idea that wealth redistribution necessitates widespread poverty is almost purely speculative, though I’m happy to be corrected.

I feel like if this person was interested in “sparking a conversation,” they wouldn’t open said conversation with “I hate how bloated web abstractions are, but I guess they’re popular for some reason,” with the exact same digs at electron that have been rehashed in every HN comment section.

I agree, to be clear — I use many of said abstractions, and they’re often quite bloated and everything else this person is complaining about. This just doesn’t strike me as someone who’s asking for insight; it’s just complaining, and it’s fine to point that out.

The real issue is that the original brainfuck spec (as given by the Wikipedia entry) explicitly sets the sizes of each cell to a single byte —- which means many of the interpreters used for this benchmark are using incorrect cell sizes!

Thank you! Edited to fix.

I think this particular Julia code is pretty misleading, and I'm (probably) one of the most qualified people in this particular neck of the woods. I wrote a transpiler for Julia that converts a Brainfuck program to a native Julia function at parse time, which you can then call like you would any other julia function.

Here's code I ran, with results:

  julia> using GalaxyBrain, BenchmarkTools

  julia> bench = bf"""
      >++[<+++++++++++++>-]<[[>+>+<<-]>[<+>-]++++++++       
      [>++++++++<-]>.[-]<<>++++++++++[>++++++++++[>++
      ++++++++[>++++++++++[>++++++++++[>++++++++++[>+       
      +++++++++[-]<-]<-]<-]<-]<-]<-]<-]++++++++++."""

  julia> @benchmark $(bench)(; output=devnull, memory_size=100)
  BenchmarkTools.Trial: 
    memory estimate:  352 bytes
    allocs estimate:  3
    --------------
    minimum time:     96.706 ms (0.00% GC)
    median time:      97.633 ms (0.00% GC)
    mean time:        98.347 ms (0.00% GC)
    maximum time:     102.814 ms (0.00% GC)
    --------------
    samples:          51
    evals/sample:     1

  julia> mandel = bf"(not printing for brevity's sake)"

  julia> @benchmark $(mandel)(; output=devnull, memory_size=500)
  BenchmarkTools.Trial: 
    memory estimate:  784 bytes
    allocs estimate:  3
    --------------  
    minimum time:     1.006 s (0.00% GC)
    median time:      1.009 s (0.00% GC)
    mean time:        1.011 s (0.00% GC)
    maximum time:     1.022 s (0.00% GC)  
    --------------
    samples:          5  evals/sample:     1

Note that, conservatively, GalaxyBrain is about 8 times faster than C++ on "bench.b" and 13 times faster than C on "mandel.b," with each being the fastest language for the respective benchmarks. In addition, it allocates almost no memory relative to the other programs, which measure memory usage in MiB.

You could argue that I might see similar speedup for other languages on my machine, assuming I have a spectacularly fast setup, but this person ran their benchmarks on a tenth generation Intel CPU, whereas mine's an eighth generation Intel CPU:

  julia> versioninfo()
    Julia Version 1.5.1
    Commit 697e782ab8 (2020-08-25 20:08 UTC)
    Platform Info:  OS: Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
    CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz  
    WORD_SIZE: 64
    LIBM: libopenlibm  LLVM: libLLVM-9.0.1 (ORCJIT, skylake)

This package is 70 lines of Julia code. You can check it out for yourself here: https://github.com/OTDE/GalaxyBrain.jl

I talk about this package in-depth here: https://medium.com/@otde/six-months-with-julia-parse-time-tr...

Line Rider can be a source of income. My Line Rider Review cohost Bevibel, the creator of the 50-minute full-album track This Will Destroy you (ref https://youtu.be/qasxqKScOfY), does commissions full time in addition to their personal projects. Sometimes it’s small clients, sometimes it’s Disney. Helped them out with a music video for Guster once after the band saw a track they had already made to one of their songs. It’s a fun niche market.

A lot of line rider folks get this kind of reaction. I truly think there’s some kind of insecurity that gets triggered in people when they see someone doing something intricate and esoteric with obvious passion.

Is it a jealousy at not finding such a passion, or for being unable to dedicate sufficient time to make something of a similar scale? Is it that they see such passion as wasted because the subject in question doesn’t match their own interest? Do they not believe it is deserving of the eyes that are on it now?

You can speculate, but at the end of the day, making something, and showing it to the world like this, is an extreme vulnerability. The act of making something is often as valuable as the result itself.

hi conun long time listener first time caller here

question that I never got around to asking you when you were working on this: did the community meme about OII never being finished ever get to you? The line rider world is full of a lot of projects that never got completed (SamThePoor’s Cosmic Ultimatum, etc.). What kept you going on this, when so many other projects seemed to fizzle out, as the community kind of shrank and receded, before it really came back into the zeitgeist? I really respect the deliberation and thoroughness you take with each step when you start a project.

Heyo! I’m the other half of Line Rider Review, the video essay channel David mentions at the start of the article. I’m not quite the historian Bevibel is, but if you have any questions related to Line Rider or its history over the past decade, I’d be happy to provide additional context.

A lot has changed since I started doing Line Rider art in middle school (here’s an old one: https://youtu.be/h__96TEF85g and here’s more what I do these days: https://youtu.be/o2XMFgk3JQQ). Forcing myself to learn editing software in middle school eventually helped me land video editing gigs before I transitioned to software. Line Rider took me on a fun path to get there :)

David’s always been an innovator, and I love seeing his stuff show up in unexpected places (though HN is probably the least shocking place I’d find this article)

What’s mind-boggling is that Bezos is still a billionaire after all of the suggested changes. The amount this affects his day-to-day life is slim to none. He’d still get to be proud of his wealth in the new system!

I have a hard time feeling like large-scale preventable deaths of six figures of real human children is worth Jeff Bezos’ warm tummy fuzzies he gets when he thinks about being unfathomably rich. Instead of thinking about whether innovations like Amazon would have materialized in this brave new world where people can actually get their malaria treated and have access to clean drinking water, consider: how many people might have made something just as game-changing as Amazon, but died a preventable death, or lived on, but weren’t given the same resources to survive and thrive as someone like Bezos?

Thanks for reading, y'all!

I am quite new to anything lisp-y, but I did my best to honor the lisp wizards that came before me with this one.