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the_mitsuhiko

16,544 karma · joined April 2, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/mitsuhiko; my proof: https://keybase.io/mitsuhiko/sigs/duqRDxeBy97WrpVMvLJQoVQXx4RaI6jX0_g8_89TtWw ]
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the_mitsuhiko··on Tinnitus Is Connected to Sleep
This way: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4411996/
the_mitsuhiko··on AI and the Ship of Theseus
> You can't do that as easily with closed source software. Except, if you can read assembly, every program is open source. I suspect we're not far away from LLMs being able to just disassemble any program and do the same thing.

I have successfully created a partial implementation of p4 by pointing it at the captured network stream and some strace output. It's amazing how good those things are.

the_mitsuhiko··on AI and the Ship of Theseus
> Strange this with this whole incident apart from the rewrite/LLM part is the general misundrstanding of the licences. LGPL being a pretty permissive one going as far as allowing one to incorporate it in propriety code without the linking reciprocity clause

The short version is that chardet is a dependency of requests which is very popular, and you cannot distribute PyInstaller/PyOxidizer builds with chardet due to how these systems bundle up dependencies.

[1]: https://velovix.github.io/post/lgpl-gpl-license-compliance-w...

[2]: https://github.com/indygreg/PyOxidizer/issues/142

the_mitsuhiko··on AI and the Ship of Theseus
> The real test would be to see how much of generated code is similar to the old code.

I have looked at the project earlier today there is effectively no resemblance other than the public API.

the_mitsuhiko··on AI and the Ship of Theseus
Maybe, but the LLM did not recite the chardet source code so that argument does not appear to apply here.
the_mitsuhiko··on AI and the Ship of Theseus
> "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?

Just because things are not as one wants, does not stop that desire to be there.

> When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision.

Potentially, potentially not. I used to release software under GPL and LGPL but changed my mind a few years after that. I did so in part because of conversations I had with others that convinced me that my values are closer aligned with permissive licenses.

So engaging in a friendly discourse with a maintainer to ask them to relicense is a perfectly fine thing to do and an issue has been with chardet for many, many years on the license.

the_mitsuhiko··on Operational issue – Multiple services (UAE)
UAE. Abu Dhabi
the_mitsuhiko··on When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
> OpenClaw doesn’t support it. Pi doesn’t support it.

It's maybe not optimal to conclude anything from these two. The Vienna school of AI agents focuses on self extending agents and that's not really compatible with MCP. There are lots of other approaches where MCP is very entrenched and probably will stick around.

the_mitsuhiko··on Tesla registrations crash 17% in Europe as BEV market surges 14%
That's a demo, not a feature in a consumer car you can have today. It might launch, it probably will, but if I buy a Tesla in Austria today, I will not have it.
the_mitsuhiko··on Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness
Sharing extensions is very much the philosophy. Using them however is less so.

Pi ships with docs that include extensions and the agent looks there for inspiration if you ask it to build a custom extension.

Looking at what others publish is useful!

the_mitsuhiko··on Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness
I too would like to know what a good UX looks like here but I have doubts that the permission prompts of Claude are the way to go right now.

Within days people become used to just hitting accept and allowlisting pretty much everything. The agents write length scripts into shell scripts or test runners that themselves can be destructive but they immediately allowlisted.

the_mitsuhiko··on Tesla registrations crash 17% in Europe as BEV market surges 14%
There is no FSD in Europe.
the_mitsuhiko··on Tesla registrations crash 17% in Europe as BEV market surges 14%
In many ways I’m impressed they sell that much. They basically just sell one model here in a space with a ton of competition.

Also since there is no FSD here and the European autopilot they have is not competitive with the travel assist type offerings from other brands.

the_mitsuhiko··on Writing code is cheap now
If we want to continue to ship at that speed we will have to. I’m not sure if we should, but seemingly we are. And it causes a lot of problems right now downstream.
the_mitsuhiko··on Writing code is cheap now
I'm going to shill my own writing here [1] but I think it addresses this post in a different way. Because we can now write code so much faster and quicker, everything downstream from that is just not ready for it. Right now we might have to slow down, but medium and long term we need to figure out how to build systems in a way that it can keep up with this increased influx of code.

> The challenge is to develop new personal and organizational habits that respond to the affordances and opportunities of agentic engineering.

I don't think it's the habits that need to change, it's everything. From how accountability works, to how code needs to be structured, to how languages should work. If we want to keep shipping at this speed, no stone can be left unturned.

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/2/13/the-final-bottleneck/

the_mitsuhiko··on Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
Rust has cxx which I would argue is "good enough" for most use cases. At least all C++ use cases I have. Not perfect, but pretty damn reasonable.
the_mitsuhiko··on Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
Why would 200 contributors have to be okay with this migration? The project has a leader, the leader makes decisions.
the_mitsuhiko··on I’m joining OpenAI
In case you are referring to the picture: that was taken in Vienna at ClawCon.
the_mitsuhiko··on Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed
Also anything that reads environment variables.
the_mitsuhiko··on Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed
That's not really the issue. The stable API is incompatible with the API that will launch with 0.16. It's not really relevant if I'm playing with incompletely API, I want to know how I can migrate to it. I did not move yet to 0.16, but I wanted to see.

The migration pain will be the same once it launches unless they revert back, which does not seem likely at all.

But the point is: potentially every API is unstable.

the_mitsuhiko··on Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed
0.16 changes things around dramatically.
the_mitsuhiko··on Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed
> if you're a casual user (ie you don't follow the development) don't try incomplete APIs that not even the creators of fully know how they are supposed to work

From what I can tell pretty much everything can be broken at any point in time. So really the only actual advise here is not to use the language at all which is not reasonable.

> llms don't help when trying to make sense of the above

That has not been my experience. LLMs were what enabled me to upgrade to 0.16 experimentally at all.

> If you want to try new features before they land in a tagged release, you must engage with the development process at the very least.

No, that is unnecessary gatekeeping. 0.16 will become stable at one point and I don't want to wait until then to figure out what will happen. That's not how I used Rust when it was early (I always also tried nightlies) and that line of thinking just generally does not make any sense to me.

The reality is that Zig has very little desire to stabilize at the moment.

the_mitsuhiko··on Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed
I’m a casual user and the 0.16 changes scare me. I tried multiple attempts now, even with full LLM support to upgrade and the result is just a) painful and b) not very good. I have high doubts that the current IO system of 0.16 will make it for another release given the consequences of their choices.
the_mitsuhiko··on 11.8M EU citizens pay taxes to governments they cannot vote for
I am not saying that European citizens are saying they are saying they are European over their nationality, but that the trend towards a European identity is going up over time.
the_mitsuhiko··on 11.8M EU citizens pay taxes to governments they cannot vote for
EUROSTAT. They are running regular surveys. From when they stated to today, the affiliation with Europe went up. Some somewhat recent data is here: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2971

Given the dramatic amount of in EU migration that is not too surprising.

the_mitsuhiko··on 11.8M EU citizens pay taxes to governments they cannot vote for
Europeans are increasingly associating with Europe over an individual country. US citizens have been doing this for a long time. They are citizens of the US before the state they reside in.
the_mitsuhiko··on Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users
Exactly. Message-ID is not required.

An unrelated frustration of mine is that Message-ID really should not be overridden but SES for instance throws away your Message-ID and replaces it with another one :(

the_mitsuhiko··on Postgres Postmaster does not scale
But my reading of their jitter is a very narrow one for the actual connection to the database. They are still doing most of the work on the minute.
the_mitsuhiko··on Postgres Postmaster does not scale
I'm not working at this company but I found that these types of problems can often be simplified in the architecture.

> Most meetings start on the hour, some on the half, but most on the full. It sounds obvious to say it aloud, but the implication of this has rippled through our entire media processing infrastructure.

When you can control when it happens, you can often jitter things. For instance the naive approach of rate limiting users down to quantized times (eg: the minute, the hour, etc.) leads to every client coming back at the same time. The solution there is to apply a stable jitter so different clients get different resets.

That pattern does not go all that well with meetings as they need to happen when they happen, which is going to be mostly the hour and 30 minutes etc. However often the lead up time to those meetings is quite long, so you can do the work needed that should happen on the hour, quite a bit ahead of time and then apply the changes in one large batch on the minute.

You have similar problems quite often with things like weekly update emails. At scale it can take you a lot of time to prepare all the updates, often more than 12 hours. But you don't want the mails to come in at different times of the day so you really need to get the reports prepared and then send them out when ready.

the_mitsuhiko··on Agent Skills
They changed it. It was singular.
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