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rpnx

209 karma · joined March 1, 2021

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rpnx··on The Two Factions of C++ (2024)
> no real language will spent 4 entire years and is still stuck in version 0.0.0-0.

Strongly disagree. I too thought that it would be easy to implement a new language in 1-2 years. I started the current Quxlang codebase (under a different name) on Dec 27, 2022. In 2026, hundreds of commits and hundreds of thousands of lines of code later, I still don't have a feature complete language.

I also rewrote the syntax, mainly because C++ parsing is a nightmare... Although my choice was very different...

rpnx··on The Two Factions of C++ (2024)
Worth noting, Carbon is just an experimental language, I see no evidence it's being used widely or replacing C++.
rpnx··on The Two Factions of C++ (2024)
This is why I'm building Quxlang.

C++ cannot evolve easily without breaking backwards compatibility.

I started Quxlang because I saw the writing on the wall for C++. Doesn't mean C++ isn't good, but it has issues and needs improvement.

Somehow I managed to implement working modules, C++ doesn't seem to have that yet, although the C++ build system is horribly broken.

We'll have to see how it compares when it's more complete and ready to use. I don't have oop/inheritance yet which is also important for a C++ alternative.

rpnx··on Ask HN: Can we direct AI on our personal projects during work hours?
Mainly /goal mode of complex project/prompts. Example: https://doxygen.rpnx.net/cortado/ was nearly a one-shot for GPT 5.6 sol and took well over 1 hour for the first prompt before finishing.

But anything to do with compiler development tends to leave the AI spinning its wheels for quite a while.

Edit: Checked the time on that one, I confused it with Compress taking 3+ hours for 1 prompt and another couple of hours each for the next few prompts... Cortado was still well over 1 hour for the initial prompt though...

rpnx··on Ask HN: Can we direct AI on our personal projects during work hours?
Obviously using work equipment is a no-no. I'm also in agreement on point #2 aside that I think it's okay to discuss such topics e.g. during lunch in the same way you may discuss any other random topic at lunch.
rpnx··on Should We Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent?
No, we should make standard time permanent.

Daylight savings time is bad for our bodies particularly in the winter.

It also makes noon even more out of sync with solar noon.

rpnx··on Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning
It is worth noting that if the Air Conditioner is powered by electricity that came from solar panels, the net heat produced compared to letting the sun heat solar panel colored ground is exactly 0.

Air Conditioners do not produce a net heating effect unless you power them by burning fossil fuels.

rpnx··on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline
Good. Reduce population growth until housing buildout can catch up with population. Trying to create more babies and allowing immigration when there aren't enough homes is dumb.
rpnx··on GCC Operation Compile 200-ish LOC at -Os: Mission Failed (badly)
Ran across this while writing the Quxlang compiler frontend. Was wondering how GCC/Clang solved this problem... turns out at least with regard to GCC... they don't!
rpnx··on GCC Operation Compile 200-ish LOC at -Os: Mission Failed (badly)
200-ish line C++ file with no user-defined templates generates around 90k assembly lines with -Os enabled.
rpnx··on Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
GC was removed from the C++ standard in C++23 because all the compilers were like "hell no" and it was an optional feature so they could get away with not adding it. So this optional feature never actually existed and they removed it in later standards.
rpnx··on PinePhone Pro [GNU/Linux smartphone] has been discontinued
Pinephone pro... The phone was not specced well enough and had issue. Hoping the FLX1 isn't vaporware.
rpnx··on Personal care products disrupt the human oxidation field
That isn't how chemistry works.
rpnx··on Idea: Zerid Indexing
A document proposing terminology to describe 0-based indexes in unambiguous language.

For example, considering a sequence like [5, 4, 7, 8, 2]

What is the 4th element? 8, but if I asked what is the "0th element", you would answer 5, but that is the 1st element. The document introduces the terminology of the zerid element (0id element), oneid element (1id), etc. to handle 0-based indexing.

rpnx··on The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
I think this honestly has more to do with moslty Chinese sellers engaging in review fraud, which is a rampant problem. I'm not saying non-Chinese sellers don't engage in review fraud, but I have noticed a trend that around 98% of fake or fraudulently advertised products are of Chinese origin.

If it was just because it was cheap, we'd also see similar fraud from Mexican or Vietnamese sellers, but I don't really see that.

rpnx··on The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
I actually disagree. I think that people will pay more for higher quality software, but only if they know the software is higher quality.

It's great to say your software is higher quality, but the question I have is whether or not is is higher quality with the same or similar features, and second, whether the better quality is known to the customers.

It's the same way that I will pay hundreds of dollars for Jetbrains tools each year even though ostensibly VS Code has most of the same features, but the quality of the implementation greatly differs.

If a new company made their IDE better than jetbrains though, it'd be hard to get me to fork over money. Free trials and so on can help spread awareness.

rpnx··on You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown
Stainless steel can be welded... just not easily and cheaply.
rpnx··on Async Rust is not safe with io_uring
This is a simple problem I have met and dealt with before.

The issue is the lack of synchronization between cancellation and not handling cancel failure.

All cancellations can fail because there is always a race when calling cancel() where the operation completes.

You have two options, synchronous cancel (block until we know if cancel succeded) or async cancel (callback or other notification).

This code simply handles the race incorrectly, no need to think too hard about this.

It may be that some io_uring operations cannot be cancelled, that is a linux limitation. I've also seen there is no async way to close sockets, which is another issue.

rpnx··on Lead drinking-water pipes must be replaced nationwide, EPA says
To be clear, everyone alive today is still on average multiple iq points dumber than they would have been had we not burned tetraethyl lead 50 years ago, even though it has been banned for quite a while. Lead is THAT toxic.
rpnx··on Lead drinking-water pipes must be replaced nationwide, EPA says
Lead is toxic at any dose.

This means is damages your neurons in any amount.

Contrast to say, copper, which doesn't start causing damage until levels exceed a certain tolerable threshold.

While lead is toxic at any amount, low amounts of lead cause low amounts of damage. It doesn't change the fact that the ideal exposure is 0 and over 99% of people have about 5 to 10 times the bond lead levels found in remains of our ancestors, and that even relatively low lead exposure levels from breathing lead in the air from just air pollution are linked to dramatically reduced IQ.

rpnx··on Lead drinking-water pipes must be replaced nationwide, EPA says
I'll take microplastics over lead any day.
rpnx··on Lead drinking-water pipes must be replaced nationwide, EPA says
lead is extremely toxic even in small doses, microplastics are comparatively a non-issue.
rpnx··on Lead drinking-water pipes must be replaced nationwide, EPA says
It is a typical example of "I'm right so I should be allowed to bypass the democratic process and do whatever I want" thinking. It's quite dangerous.
rpnx··on The staggering death toll of scientific lies
This is the root of the problem.

Take the whole "saturated fat is unhealthy" thing.

Here's what happened:

Study finds that unsaturated fat is healthier than saturated fat, but all fat is associated with lower mortality vs carbs.

Repeated as "unsaturated fat is healther than saturated fat".

Repeated as "saturated fat is unhealthy".

This conclusion isn't supported by any research compared to carbs(!).

Same-calorie diet of high fat is healthier than one based on carbs. But we are often taught otherwise.

The saturated fat is bad (wrong) consensus is reached like a game of telephone.

rpnx··on When something that was working, suddenly doesn't work when demoing to others
Back in university, my compsci security project didn't work on the university wifi for some reason, if we used google chrome. Firefox worked fine. Some kind of weird proxy broke the website. But to this day I don't know exactly what happened.
rpnx··on Google Chrome has an API accesible only from *.google.com
Agree. I work at Google. I promise nothing happens quickly. It can take over a week to set up a new SQL database & client. Half coding (don't get me started on boq...) and half data integrity and criticality annotations for the data...

I don't know what setting up a new domain is like but I can't imagine it's something you "just do".

rpnx··on Show HN: QWANJI
I made something a bit similar to this when trying to make a new shorthand. It was made by translating to stenotype and then following rules to convert the stenotype runes to a kanji like form. Eventually I decided it wasn’t faster than existing shorthand, mainly because of the mental overhead of converting to and from stenotype.

I never coded it (I only used it a few times for handwriting before I decided it was bad) but it might be a cool project.

rpnx··on Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
The number of patents owned by startups is greatly dwarfed by the number owned by large companies. Furthermore, the competition opportunity for small businesses to offer similar products at lower prices greatly outweighs the value of patent invention.

Some people would say large businesses can make things cheap in a way that small businesses can't compete with. However, that turned out to not happen in practice as big companies chase huge profit margins, supported only by the government.

China doesn't have this problem the US does because they have weaker patent laws. Patents need to be eradicated ASAP or we will not be globally competitive. We are also harming humanity as a whole as the inventive utility of patents simply doesn't scale in proportion to the harms, with the large populations we have now, they are clearly harmful on balance.

The fundamental problem with patents is that the benefit has lower asymptotic complexity with respect to population size than than the harm does. When you exceed some population size, patents become harmful.

The utility of copying is N^2 since you have O(N) copiers and O(N) inventions to copy from.

The harm of patents is therefore O(N^2) since this is the copying that patents prevent.

What we find is that the benefits of patents seem to scale at most around some O(N /log N) ish metric. Doubling the population size increases the number of inventors, but the chance an invention was already invented by someone else increases as population size increases. Hence the benefits of patents scale worse than O(N). Applying that to the harm and we still get O(N(N/logN)) for harm and O(N/logN) for benefits. Clearly patents do not scale.

* Here I am using Log N as a substituite for the difficulty increase of finding an invention not already invented. This exact measure is difficult to estimate.

rpnx··on It was almost impossible to make the blue LED [video]
They didn't sack him, he quit for better pay.

In Japan companies rarely sack employees and employees rarely quit. People are expected to stay with the same company basically their whole life. That's why he didn't get fired for disobeying orders. Firing someone in Japan is somewhat socially taboo (just like quitting) and therefore rare.

In Japan, companies are considered to be like "family". It would be kind of a joke here in the USA, but in Japan there is a lot of loyalty in both directions.

Part of the reason they sued him is probably the butthurt of him quitting. Quitting, even for better pay, is kind of like a big "fuck you" in Japan.

rpnx··on AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server
Don't do this. Network firewalls are harmful. Let people configure their own firewalls on device. Having to VPN around network blocks is annoying to say the least. Network firewalls are harmful and just a lazy excuse for bad client security.
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