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svieira

1,865 karma · joined August 24, 2010

Outline of the man: * Catholic, Virginian.

Outline of the programmer: * Python, JavaScript, Scala, C#, Java.

Ad Jesum per Mariam

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svieira··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
> So the other trick is the Easel compiler assigns an implicit ID to things like sprites so that it will replace rather than add the second time around

Is the ID computed based on the shape of the expression at runtime or on something else?

svieira··on How I fell in love with Erlang
You may be one of today's lucky 10K.

https://github.com/cloudozer/ling

Erlang on Xen.

But also one of today's unlucky 10K as it hasn't been updated for 10 years.

svieira··on LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
Given that everything the LLM can do it learned from human descriptions of the space ... one would have to posit a very inefficient language for that model not to do something with those billions of parameters. But when you fly because of a bunch of balloons sprinkled with magic fairy dust are pulling you up, the magic fairy dust is still at work.
svieira··on Modular monolith and microservices: Modularity is what matters
Depends on what you consider a language. There are a lot of DSLs out there and once you add a couple of configuration files for Jenkins / Git{Hub, Lab} / Bazel / Buck and Vagrant / Docker / Bash and so on you're already at 5 languages and you haven't even added the lethal trifecta of HTML+CSS+JS for your web front-end or Swift+Kotlin if you only want to roll on mobile.
svieira··on Thiel and Zuckerberg on Facebook, Millennials, and predictions for 2030 (2019)
Well, socialism also includes the National Socialists of various nations ... perhaps we should clarify our terms rather than using an ambiguous word?
svieira··on Doomsday scoreboard
Without distinction, which you're ignoring, you are correct. But "wholly" means several things depending on what you're referring to. You could mean:

1. Everything that is (in the "esse" sense) of Jesus must be both. This seems to be your position. This is also an immediate contradiction since then either God changed or Jesus' humanity always was. Variations of this position (since it has several) have been defined heresy for literally 1,500 years. 2. Jesus is both God and man completely (not "the appearance of man" or "a man apart from God, divinized by God at a later point"). This is the position of the Church.

https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1J.HTM

> 464 The unique and altogether singular event of the Incarnation of the Son of God does not mean that Jesus Christ is part God and part man, nor does it imply that he is the result of a confused mixture of the divine and the human. He became truly man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man. During the first centuries, the Church had to defend and clarify this truth of faith against the heresies that falsified it.

> 465 The first heresies denied not so much Christ's divinity as his true humanity (Gnostic Docetism). From apostolic times the Christian faith has insisted on the true incarnation of God's Son "come in the flesh".87 But already in the third century, the Church in a council at Antioch had to affirm against Paul of Samosata that Jesus Christ is Son of God by nature and not by adoption. the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is "begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father", and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God "came to be from things that were not" and that he was "from another substance" than that of the Father.88

> 466 The Nestorian heresy regarded Christ as a human person joined to the divine person of God's Son. Opposing this heresy, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the third ecumenical council, at Ephesus in 431, confessed "that the Word, uniting to himself in his person the flesh animated by a rational soul, became man."89 Christ's humanity has no other subject than the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it and made it his own, from his conception. For this reason the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God by the human conception of the Son of God in her womb: "Mother of God, not that the nature of the Word or his divinity received the beginning of its existence from the holy Virgin, but that, since the holy body, animated by a rational soul, which the Word of God united to himself according to the hypostasis, was born from her, the Word is said to be born according to the flesh."90

> 467 The Monophysites affirmed that the human nature had ceased to exist as such in Christ when the divine person of God's Son assumed it. Faced with this heresy, the fourth ecumenical council, at Chalcedon in 451, confessed: Following the holy Fathers, we unanimously teach and confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; "like us in all things but sin". He was begotten from the Father before all ages as to his divinity and in these last days, for us and for our salvation, was born as to his humanity of the virgin Mary, the Mother of God.91

And here is the kicker:

> We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division or separation. the distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis.92

svieira··on LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
> How can meat think?

Some of us used to think that meat spontaneously generated flies. Maybe someday we'll (re-)learn that meat doesn't spontaneously generate thought either?

svieira··on Thiel and Zuckerberg on Facebook, Millennials, and predictions for 2030 (2019)
> Socialism brought a lot of good things all over Europe in the 1900s

Just ask Poland!

svieira··on XSLT RIP
> The implementation is all agnostic about namespaces. It just expects XSLT elements to have tags that carry the xsl: prefix, but we disregard all namespace declaration for them.

Just for a start. It's a tiny polyfill for a tiny subset of the thing that is XSLT 1.0.

svieira··on XSLT RIP
"The sandbox" in this case is their ability to execute WASM securely. It's a necessary part of the "modern" web. If they were planning on also nuking WASM from orbit because it couldn't be made secure, this would be another topic entirely. There's nothing they're maintaining just-for-xslt-1.0-support beyond a simple build of libxslt to WASM, a copy block in their build code, and a line in a JSON list to load WASM provided built-ins (which they would want anyway for other code).
svieira··on Doomsday scoreboard
Actually, that _is_ the position of the Church, funnily enough. Jesus is both God and man. These natures are distinct in Him, while being entire and wholly what they are (the God-nature is not diminished or changed by admixture and human-nature is not absorbed by the totality of divinity). One person, two natures.
svieira··on The new calculus of AI-based coding
> It did make me feel really productive and clever while doing it, though.

And that's the greatest trap of this whole thing. That the _feels_ are so quickly diverged from the actual.

svieira··on The new calculus of AI-based coding
No, a proof proves what it proves. It does not prove what the designer of the proof intended it to prove unless the intention and the proof align. Proving that is outside of the realm of software.
svieira··on You already have a Git server
This sounds like submodules, but I'm guessing it's completely orthogonal ... multiple distinct remotes for the same _repository_, all of them checked out to different sub-paths; does that result in all the remotes winding up with all the commits for all the shared repositories when you push, or can you "subset" the changes as well?
svieira··on Fast TypeScript (Code Complexity) Analyzer
Oh, it does. That's what experience teaches you - that the measure is not the target.
svieira··on Doomsday scoreboard
Yep - you're still missing the distinction. Jesus is the person. This person has two natures (we've been working with the "being a judge and a doctor" analogy here and both can be operative together, as when the judge is hearing a case where his knowledge of medicine has bearing on his ability to judge the situation). One nature is immutable, the other is mutable. Nothing contradicts there. "Jesus, in His human nature, changes. God the Son (His divine nature) does not change." But you can make it sound contradictory, just as you could say (if we make "The doctor does not judge, but the judge does" sound contradictory if we say "Susan does not judge but Susan judges!") It is not a logical contradiction for two distinct things to be distinct.
svieira··on Doomsday scoreboard
> But to be entirely human is to be corrupted by original sin, doomed to judgement and eternal separation from God.

This is false, fortunately. "Human" and "sin" are not necessary to each other. Sin is not natural to man. The gift of original justice could not be passed on from Adam to his children because he threw it away. This lack of a gift is what is called "original sin" and its effects include all of the disordered expressions we find ourselves inclined to from birth. But this lack of a gift is not necessary to being human.

Which allows God to take on human nature without being in the state of sin ("like us in all things but sin"), but accepting the punishment for sin (death) to redeem us and offer a new gift of mercy that restores the original gift of justice for those who accept it. Since God is outside of time, He can even give the fruits of that gift "before" that gift is realized in time (Elijah, Mary).

svieira··on Doomsday scoreboard
> A normal person according to Christianity is closer to having two natures in the way you describe, because their body is mortal while their soul isn't.

AH, THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM! Cartesian dualism isn't the best lens to view human nature through and it makes talking about Christ's nature harder than it needs to be. The human person is a being whose nature is body+soul. The separation of the soul and the body at death is an evil brought about by sin. Put another way, death is injurious to human beings, not natural to them. (See https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3164.htm#article1).

Jesus is fully man. His human nature is body+soul. His human soul is immortal, as all human souls are. Unlike other human beings (other than Adam and Eve before they sinned) He was not subject to death as a punishment for sin, but He accepted it on our behalf. When He died, he really died. His soul and His body were separated and for three days He could be spoken of as "not a man". See https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4050.htm#article4 for the details. Follow that up with https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1075.htm#article4 for how that relates to us. One particularly striking quote - "[c]onsequently, to say that Christ was a man during the three days of His death simply and without qualification, is erroneous. Yet it can be said that He was "a dead man" during those three days."

Jesus is also fully God. His divine nature is perfect and unchanging. His divine nature is immutable (not merely immortal) and was not subject to death. Thus Jesus was subject to death in His human nature not in His divine nature.

svieira··on Doomsday scoreboard
> He is both things in the same way at the same time

Not quite. He has a divine nature and a human nature. There is only one person, two natures, analogous to one person two job titles. He has both natures, fully.

> Did he die or didn't he?

Having two natures, he can experience things that people without two natures cannot experience. Like the experience of death in His human nature that in no way affected His divine nature (analogous to "experiencing censure as a judge, but still being able to practice medicine"). Fortunately, death isn't a cessation of human nature, merely an interrupting of part of its actuality (that is, an evil). You and I will still possess a human nature after we die. Just as we both would possess a human nature if we lost part of our bodies, we still possess a human nature after we lose our bodies completely in death.

svieira··on Doomsday scoreboard
It's not inherently self-contradictory for us to say "Jesus revealed Himself as the Son of God and the Son of Man ... how can we properly speak about that?" https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4002.htm#article2 - now that requires a lot of extra distinctions that we don't normally think about when thinking about being and essence, but it's certainly not impossible.

"Mr. Archibald Potterfarthing is at the same time the Chair of the Committee and at the same time its most senior ranking member". Accidents, naturally, but co-existing in the same space-of-being. It turns out that "person" and "nature" are distinct (who knew?) and that it is possible for there to be one person with two natures just as well as there can be one person with two titles. But that presumes you believe the authority of the one who told you this - if not, it's useless to talk about it, because why would you ever need to distinguish person and nature unless you had encountered the reality of Christ? Nothing else we have encountered in the universe has (as far as we are aware) two natures. But nothing else behaves like a singularity either - uniqueness is not a proof of non-existence.

svieira··on Show HN: CSS Extras
A single global namespace makes you start doing interesting and horrible things when you need to divide it.
svieira··on [dead]
> Liquibase Community is now licensed under the Functional Source License (FSL). See LICENSE file at the root of the distribution for details.

https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase/blob/4fa3d8b6f9d987c6...

svieira··on Why the push for Agentic when models can barely follow a simple instruction?
Replace 'new hire' with 'AI|LLM' in the updated post for a very sad outcome.
svieira··on Tangled, a Git collaboration platform built on atproto
It's actually its own distinct version control _system_. And yes, it is Fossil SCM: https://fossil-scm.org/
svieira··on Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?
Nice story! My guess is that the site was https://yout.com/ given your profile. Does it still run Flask?
svieira··on Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at
Quite impressive, thank you for sharing!

Question - this loads a 2 MB JS parser written in Rust to turn `x => x.foo` into `{ op: 'project', field: 'foo', target: 'x' }`. But you don't actually allow any complex expressions (and you certainly don't seem to recursively parse references or allow return uplift, e. g. I can't extract out `isOver18` or `isOver(age: int)(Row: IQueryable): IQueryable`). Why did you choose the AST route instead of doing the same thing with a handful of regular expressions?

svieira··on Working pipe operator today in pure JavaScript
Thrush is the "T combinator" - I believe that the "Thrush" name comes from To Mock a Mockingbird by Raymond Smullyan [1].

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Mock-Mockingbird-Other-Logic-Puzzles/...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic#In_computing

[3]: https://leanpub.com/combinators/read#leanpub-auto-the-thrush

svieira··on Vibe engineering
Then it turns out that your CI gates are green because your tests are all subtly broken, the code you've been reviewing doesn't matter and the code you haven't been reviewing is what's broken in production. You learn from that and rebuild the universe, but now you're compute-limited from rebuilding your agents to deal with the underlying issue in your tooling and you have to dig yourself out of a hole you dug with a large derrick using nothing but a shovel.
svieira··on The Machine Won. Can Humans band together before it's too late? [video]
In brief, the thesis of this video is: 'the machine is the cycle of advertising dollars paying for "engagement" rather than anything more meaningful. This leads to optimizing for "engagement" which results in the creation of polarization rather than the polarization happening first and the unpleasantness afterwards. Notice the machine. Talk about the machine. Then we can decide what to do about it.'
svieira··on In C++ modules globally unique module names seem to be unavoidable
> But as you say, this doesn't solve the problem of including multiple versions of the same module.

The solution that Java has for that is literally re-writing the bytecode of version A to be "in a different module" and re-writing the bytecode of the code that depends on version A to use the "new" module. That's not going to fly for C++ as I understand it, but maybe I'm missing something.

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