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senfiaj

642 karma · joined September 18, 2023

https://waspdev.com
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senfiaj··on ADHD, autism or complex trauma? [pdf]
I've no experience living in Asian countries but asian cultures seem to be workaholic / ambitious and obedient. At least in South Korea many children's childhoods are ruined by insane educational pressure, lack of recovery time and sleep. In Korean culture, a child's success is directly linked to the family's social status. And I can only imagine the level of suffering among those children, let alone neurodivergent ones.

Japan seems to have a similar problem, although a less extreme version.

senfiaj··on ADHD, autism or complex trauma? [pdf]
>> I never had an issue with ADHD growing up in Asia. Nobody friggin cares. It's only western people making a huge deal outta nothing.

Interesting, I thought that Asian countries are the most hostile countries towards neurodivergent people.

senfiaj··on How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs
I think since LLMs make code generation cheaper, we are left with more complicated, often more socially demanding tasks. Programming is becoming even less "leave me alone and let me write code" (on average). This can lead to burnout for many people, but this exploitative capitalism doesn't care.
senfiaj··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
Yes, that was my point. Amputations are quite uncommon, they usually lead to death (blood loss / infection, starvation, vulnerability to predators, etc) For relatively intelligent species they are even more avoidable. Regeneration would add very little benefit from natural selection point of view. Most body parts are durable enough for survival and reproduction.
senfiaj··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
Exactly, limbs are quite large portion of the body, that's why many think salamanders would have no problems with regenerating all other smaller body parts. And that's not the case.
senfiaj··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
Regeneration is unlikely to warrant eternal life. In the wild, most animals die before even showing serious signs of aging. Even if regeneration increased lifespan, poorly adapted individuals would still die.
senfiaj··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
Most of the body doesn't regenerate because there was not enough evolutionary pressure. Even with regeneration you could still easily die from some severe injury, blood loss or disease. While salamander regeneration is impressive, it has its limitations. For example, no known adult salamander can regenerate an entirely removed eye. Also if you chop a salamander, it will not regenerate like a Planarian worm, it will just die. And a fun fact, Axolotls can regrow a limb yet cannot regenerate an adult eye lens.

Also, although the article is mostly true, there are some inaccuracies:

>> Neurons and cardiac muscle cells don't reproduce after childhood

There is some evidence showing a slow cell turnover in cardiac muscle, estimated around ~1% per year in young adults, falling toward ~0.5% in older people. Most neurons don't regenerate, but there an evidence that some parts of the adult brain (such as hippocampus) still produce new neurons, although the number is very low.

Liver regeneration is not perfect either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOv7Sr3X-eo .

senfiaj··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
In theory yes, but it requires enough discipline and knowledge. A language that makes it harder to write bad code still has an advantage over a language that doesn't care about bad code.
senfiaj··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
>> Will this really make coreutils more secure?

In the long run yes. Sure, many logic bugs happen in Rust programs as well, but memory safety bugs are another level of hell. At least many classes of exploits will mostly be impossible. Also, Rust program failures tend to be more predictable. For example, in C/C++, if you do out of bound writes in an array or writes in a freed memory block, the behavior is undefined. The program might crash, the memory might be silently corrupted, or nothing might happen at all. In a normal (non unsafe) Rust code these kinds of issues are either prevented by static checks or become explicit runtime panics.

While the migration could be done more gradually, 26.10 is not an LTS release and is not considered stabe enough. The next LTS is 28.04, so I hope there is 1.5+ years for things to stabilize.

senfiaj··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
Well, chess is a sport where humans are supposed to compete. But math, programming, science are mostly not, and AI might affect economy, careers, etc.
senfiaj··on This Month in Ladybird – August 2026
Yeah, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory for desktop Linux if it conquers the desktop. You can't even use it normally without Google account.
senfiaj··on This Month in Ladybird – August 2026
Yes, this is what I'm saying. It's unlikely to be a replacement for the majority of average users but can be popular among people like us.
senfiaj··on This Month in Ladybird – August 2026
But I agree, it's impressive. My blog uses a lot of modern CSS features (such as nested selectors), and this latest version rendered almost perfectly. Much better than Servo. Still, this small gap is often the difference between a normal browser and a browser that is a pain. Safari has much, much better compatibility, but even then this browser is hated for it's quirks, because even much smaller compatibility gaps are quite noticeable.
senfiaj··on This Month in Ladybird – August 2026
The browser might reach 95-97% compatibility eventually. But the last 3-5% gaps are the most stubborn. Many of these 3-5% are not trivial API calls. They might be some subtle legacy quirks, timing/rendering things, etc. There is a lot of poorly written historical code that might be illegal by web standards but browsers are forced to support. Established browsers have decades of patches and regression testing.
senfiaj··on This Month in Ladybird – August 2026
The web standards are enormously complex compared to that time. Not sure if today's tooling can compensate this.
senfiaj··on This Month in Ladybird – August 2026
I am watching this project with interest.

It's impressive that they're doing such titanic work. However, I'm highly skeptical that they can create a real rival to established browsers. I'm sorry for telling this, but Web standards are simply too complex and huge. Ladybird to Chrome / Firefox is almost like Wine / ReactOS to Windows, that last 3-5% of gap actually differentiates a normal browser from a browser that is a pain for web developers. And it's the most stubborn part to be fixed. Also, keep in mind that it hasn't much market, at least IE had a significant market that forced the developers to support it (with all the hate).

https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-...

senfiaj··on C Is Not a Low-Level Language (2018)
Yeah, and also not every idiomatic C/C++ code is portable. Hardcoded structure sizes, assumptions about the byte order in integers or assumptions about alignments in certain data structures might cause headaches with porting the code to another CPU. Truly high level languages hide these details.
senfiaj··on You might be wrong about "The Year of Linux on the Desktop"
https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...
senfiaj··on Altair Basic Interpreter Source Code (1975) [pdf]
Me too. The 4K basic was quite limited in other functionalities (in order to fit into the memory). But that floating point module made it very competitive, although also made the execution slower. IMO Monte Davidoff is underappreciated.
senfiaj··on Altair Basic Interpreter Source Code (1975) [pdf]
I wonder were most of the comments added later? I guess they used pen and paper to write the ASM code and then enter it as machine code.
senfiaj··on Altair Basic Interpreter Source Code (1975) [pdf]
And the PDF is about 100MB.
senfiaj··on Hang on to Your Firefox
The html lists in the articles were not ok, the top bar search input as well. Chrome and FF were rendering fine.
senfiaj··on Hang on to Your Firefox
How old is Servo? 14? I just opened waspdev.com and the UI was quite broken. It can't even render a basic blog normally.
senfiaj··on Hang on to Your Firefox
Yeah, and when you think about the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine, we are very unlikely to see a new browser engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if a browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
senfiaj··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
Yeah, consider the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if an existing browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
senfiaj··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
If I remember correctly, ~10 years ago one of Waterfox's main points was 64-bit + Intel compiler with aggressive optimization flags. At that time Firefox was 32-bit only on Windows, at least the stable version. From my experience, it didn't feel faster. Actually, it felt slightly more sluggish, I guess pointers and some data structures become larger, so the browser used more memory and put more pressure on CPU caches. It's probably no longer relevant as all major browsers are 64-bit by default.
senfiaj··on What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)
>> The title says hunter gatherers.

Right, and also adds "with space age tools".

senfiaj··on What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)
Excellent article, largely agree. Another related issue is that we are not evolved for the modern stress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo1A45ShcMo
senfiaj··on Don't Wordle
You can use hints, after that I could find the right sequence

trash smash abash gnash quash clash

senfiaj··on AI Isn't Outthinking Mathematicians. It's Out-Remembering Them
This means some AI proofs might be impossible to comprehend by humans, right? I guess AI still lacks human intuition for many concepts, but AI might beat humans in narrow areas, such as discrete math and combinatorics.
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