the__alchemist

Would love to hear more.

What are those agents doing? I am out of the loop. Bitcoin mining? Blogging? Reddit bots?

Barber-surgeon doesn't have the same vibe, I suppose.

The infrastructure-getting-hacked thing is wild to me! Something went very wrong early in the design process!

Could you please elaborate your thought process here? For example, are you claiming the author was using obsolete tech for one reason or another? Or making a pretentious artistic choice? Or do you think these were taken in an earlier period, then misatributed as being from the 1970s?

Valid. The good news is it's a nicer experience once you click through those. (Be careful; there are a few tricks where the "skip" button changes position and emphasis). Then sometimes a Windows update will make you go through part of it again; once every 3 months or so.

Show me more than 8 items in the recent history list, so I don't have to manually navigate to the same directory repeatedly (Claude)

Notes:

  - Hue lights still slap, "just work", and have proved to be reliable over time. They are a big upgrade over non-dimmable, non-temp-changeable bulbs, or buzzing dimmer switches from ages past.

  - Home Assistant's UX is poor

  - I should probably try some of the temp control and security camera tools

Most importantly: These systems can be useful and have a good design without being cloud. A microcontroller and good user interface can be a big upgrade over a "dumb" system, without evoking the internet, or a Linux etc operating system.

I agree with that historically auto-vertorization does not seem to work reliably. I'm not sure about your broad claim.

Thoughts on an abstraction over ARM and x86, at 128, 256, and 512-bit widths which, either in a manual or automatic way (The latter more challenging) makes your floating point computations 4-16x faster with minimal restructuring? I think that's doable, and a nice goal of SIMD.

I am using my own lib, `lin_alg`, which apes core_simd for floating point values, and extends the concept to vectors and quaternions. I will eventually replace the floating point portions with core::simd upon its arrival in stable Rust.

Downside: It's currently x86 only.

I lamented patterns of what I consider over-use of the type system in Rust (This applies to other languages as well). There is a balance: I prefer this over-use/strict use (e.g. implementing a custom non-empty Vec type) over not using typing at all, but a big margin!

Balance in all things?

Another take, from the primary example: This is what `unwrap()` is for. I understand that the author is looking at this from a correctness and safety(?) perspective. For practical purposes, I would unwrap here. If it's less trivial than the example, unwrap with a comment explaining why it's fine.

Another angle: Unfortunately, the `first()` method being fallible here is just an issue of using an imperfect method/datatype here. This is where the author gets in to a non-empty-vec custom type. Then you are balancing using a more correct type that takes custom wiring vs a std lib thing everyone understands and takes no setup. I would lean towards this setup if I were using this non_empty_vec.first() unwrap pattern a number of times in the code base; then the setup would be worth it, at least for my own code bases. If I were exposing this in a lib others would use, I would keep the standard Vec so as to be more transparent for others.

In both views: "This is what unwrap is for" does it for me in all cases I've encountered to date. Maybe for aerospace or safety critical systems, I would have a different take.

A third take: I notice this trend in the rust community. It's not my cup of tea. Keep things simple, easy to maintain, and don't let "correctness" get in the way. In this example, I don't think it gets in the way, but I have seen this mindset lead to it getting in the way, especially in embedded, where mapping the Owernership model to hardware ends up in messy patterns and surprising assertions about embedded-101 concepts like DMA being "unsolved", "no good way", "difficult" etc.

Rust provides tools to make sure specific logic is correct if it passes the compiler. People sometimes go overboard and assume you have to type-maxx your code, regardless of complexity added by doing so.

I suspect the subject line to this "Where you decide where to place things" is a step away from D2; I find that fussy in D2!

Note: For many (most?) of these, I'm not sure how to answer them, and am choosing arbitrarily; there is a trend of multiple (2-3 generally) all seeming reasonable and/or similar, and I am going with the flow of which I choose.

If I understand you correctly, you are using Covid-19 as a means to justify any position (or broad classes of them) which is convenient to you. I say this because you're using it in a broad way, and making an appeal to specific prejudices.

I do not think this is right; Kahn Academy, MitX, opencourseware etc are treasures.

An operating system is software which provides useful things for interfacing arbitrary software with hardware. For example:

  - Providing a memory allocator
  - Providing threads which manage how the CPU cores are used
  - Interacting with network hardware, the motherboard's RTC, memory address mapping etc
  - Scheduling arbitrary software to run simultaneously
  - Providing a file system
  - etc

> Why do we have modern operating systems? It’s not simply to “provide access to hardware resources”; plenty of embedded systems do that with runtimes that have no business calling themselves an “OS”. No, the core purpose of a modern operating system is to partition different applications off from each other, and carefully control how they can communicate.

This gets at the core of it; i.e. you don't need anything in that list above to run software, but it's useful when you want third party software to run on the hardware, and multiple pieces of software co-existing with each other, and running without special hardware knowledge.

So, to this point, I agree with the article/author on this distinction. I think differences arise from how different people use computers, and perhaps I quibble with the title more than the contents. There is many software I run and write which I imagine will continue relatively unchanged (or changed incrementally) for decades. Broadly, GUI creative software, media consumption etc. CAD, EDA, structural biology/bioinformatics software, games, media consumption (video, text etc), IDEs. I suppose another highlight is that I never personally understood the appeal of terminal-based software that many software programmers love. (Not just software programmers: bioinformaticians love CLI-based workflows too, i.e. piping stdin/out around)

I would love Android/iPhone competition! Although I imagine the same obstacle of "How do I get my societal-connections functionality to work in a way where I'm not excluded" will continue to be a problem in the short term, at least. (Banking, communications, NFC payments etc)

It is wild to me that you would use any GPOS for something like this instead of dedicated firmware for the task. This is evoking similar reactions to when I read articles about infrastructure being hacked remotely: Something must have taken a wrong turn with the architecture design for this to happen!

I would investigate if the $20/month plan is good enough for your use: The token-based plans usually work out to be much more expensive than the monthly ones. Or get both the Anthropic and Codex $20/month plans. I don't know if this makes sense compared to your current use case, but there is a very good chance it does given how much the per-token plans cost. The primary use case for them is enterprises that aren't allowed to use the monthly subscriptions.

The default system for Rust libs is ZeroVer: https://0ver.org/

I thought Air was JB's multi-model interface? What is Junie? (I see the buttons, but am very confused by JB's AI offerings in general)

Is it worth the ~10x extra cost over the subscriptions? (This is obviously a leading question). Also, I think you can use OpenAI's subcription login with Air, but not Claude's.

> what's the meaningful distinction now?

SBC is a PCB which includes ports for power, I/O, often other parts like sensors on it. Esp32 is a MCU. You can put an Esp32 on a PCB and call it an SBC. (Although semantically SBC usually refers to something that runs a GPOS, but perhaps that's flexible or changing)

Yea - I think this is one of Rust's core use cases.

It's a family of microcontrollers by Espressif. A microcontroller (MCU) is a type of integrated circuit (IC: physical appearance: Black rectangle of epoxy with exposed metal tabs). It has, in the same IC, a CPU, RAM, non-volatile FLASH memory, and a collection of peripherals which vary depending on the MCU. These usually include I/O protocols, ADCs, DACs, DMA controllers, math processors etc.

Stated another way: An MCU, like the ESP32, is a tiny computer, sans the hardware you physically interface with it.

The computing power, and memory is much lower than your desktop or laptop PC (or mobile phone), but if you are using it to run a dedicated task, instead of using a big OS like Linux or Windows, it can complete the tasks really fast (often microseconds) and with minimal power use. This is because it's easy to program to do exactly what you need, with nothing competing for the hardware.

A note on ESP in particular compared to other MCUs: It's one of the only (Or was?) options which has Wi-Fi integrated into the MCU itself. It's a good default if you want that.

> Although we don’t yet know its function, the system that Claude discovered has a set of characteristics that have only ever been found together in a handful of other systems, all of which are programmable and perform operations like cutting, copying, and pasting DNA. Beyond CRISPR, which has already transformed science and medicine, several other such systems are now in development as promising tools.

It's not novel, and they don't know if it means anything. They published it here for PR purposes.

Anecdote: I do it not because I want a custom feel, but because I want my programs to work on Windows, Linux, and Mac without any special per-OS work. Granted, perhaps the framework I've been using could use native APIs smartly instead of its own...

FWIW I think your Rust + Qt route is fantastic. I've been using Rust + EGUI myself, but have Qt in mind for future projects.

Very few software engineers make more than $300k a year. That's top ~1%.

Yea; not even close in the USA. There are exceptions like SV high-salaried tech jobs compared to pediatrician, but generally MDs make much more than software engineers and similar.

What I think your underlying point is: it's no longer seen as the most straightforward pipeline path to high salary, career stability, social status, and dating prospects. I'm not convinced it's true (or not true) that this is fading, but I think that's the core of the matter you bring up. I also suspect that this varies significantly from country to country. I.e. it's central to US and Canadian MDs, but less so in other places.

After reading your reply here and the one I was responding to, I think I understand (You spelled out) the disconnect; the post I replied to was about Vitamin-D-Maxxing, which isn't something I had in my cross check. My primary concern is "Which times should we do outdoors things to prevent sun damage [photoaging + cancer]" (And/or "Do I need to apply sunscreen before going out now / how long can I stay out)