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tightbookkeeper

98 karma · joined September 26, 2024

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tightbookkeeper··on Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
This is 10 year old story. It’s very interesting which ones stay in the public consciousness.
tightbookkeeper··on The Onion buys Infowars
You’re missing context. We are discussing their 5+ other lawsuits.
tightbookkeeper··on The Onion buys Infowars
Only for the larp value. What attributes make it more dangerous?
tightbookkeeper··on The Onion buys Infowars
AR-15 is merely a body style, there is no metric by which it is more dangerous than a hunting rifle.
tightbookkeeper··on The Onion buys Infowars
> what else would you propose?

Not suing others for millions or billions and spreading misery. Nothing can bring those kids back.

Maybe the government could have offered education and employment guarantees to the families?

> only country

Want to list some other things only the US has?

tightbookkeeper··on The Onion buys Infowars
Sounds like a principled take based on rule of law.
tightbookkeeper··on The Onion buys Infowars
Wikipedia page disagrees with you. Whether they collected that amount, I do not know.
tightbookkeeper··on The Onion buys Infowars
No. I actually don’t think lashing out at any wallet that happens to be in the area will make anyone happy.

The people who are responsible are dead.

tightbookkeeper··on The Onion buys Infowars
> people/orgs that enabled the tragedy

They didn’t though. Holding a rifle manufacturer liable for a shooting makes no sense, unless applied universally.

A journalist writing a book did not cause the shooting.

This is greed and lashing out in pain. I’m sure members of the community have ruined their life in pursuit of these things.

tightbookkeeper··on Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?
Desktop OS may struggle at thousands of thread. Linux can handle many more just fine.

> Your program needs one million threads that sleep for 2 seconds, read some data and then finish.

I have yet to see this problem, but yeah I agree that millions is about when there will be problems.

tightbookkeeper··on The Onion buys Infowars
Don’t forget their many other successful lawsuits:

- school administration

- rifle manufacturer

- the shooters mother (home insurance)

- other journalists who wrote about the event

I don’t know exactly what compensation they should get, but this does not seem like a healthy or sustainable way for our society to deal with tragedy.

tightbookkeeper··on The Onion buys Infowars
I have yet to hear what meaning tolerance has in this interpretation.

Surely chairman mao agrees with free speech that doesn’t harm his society and social programs

tightbookkeeper··on Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?
I agree. The right thing to do is to wait for the task to finish. I wrote that first line in jest,

I’m making fun of the notion that blocking = slow = unresponsive.

tightbookkeeper··on Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?
> you run out of (OS) threads very fast.

What does run out mean?

tightbookkeeper··on Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?
And somehow all these programmers who never care about performance because “computers are fast” become micro-optimizers, willing to restructure every line of code to save a few KB of RAM and rare handful of ms for a context switch.
tightbookkeeper··on Ask HN: Been coding for 3 years, but algorithms & DS still feel like a chore
If you’re talking about the course where you write a linked list, hash table, quick sort, etc. That’s pretty basic and fundamental stuff. And I don’t know why you would like programming.

If you’re talking about the course where you prove the runtime of an algorithm using mathematical induction techniques, well that’s more of interest to mathematicians and researchers. Learn what you can, know where to look back if needed, but it’s ok.

tightbookkeeper··on Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?
> you disable every single button that allows the user to do something else before the previous operation completes.

Wow you mean the whole program becomes unresponsive? Crazy!

To address your main point, yes, scrolling, hover, etc can continue to work. But now you genuinely have two things your program is doing at once, and these must be coordinated.

A gui framework typically handles this, with a separate thread (or separate OS process). So your thread that responds to events can block while the render/refresh continues doing its thing.

With this design the problem goes away. Instead of writing code that disables the ui, issues a callback, waits to respond, you just literally write:

If (!file.delete()) { Showerror() }

This is the kind of code you can read, and put breakpoints on.

tightbookkeeper··on Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?
> hang

Hang implies there is something you are not responding to.

Let me ask again. What are you imagining your main thread should be doing while it is waiting for essential data?

responding to new inputs means changing state. But your program is already in another. Two separate program execution states are best described by two separate threads.

> crash

Crash early, crash often. If invariants can’t be maintained, don’t pretend otherwise.

tightbookkeeper··on Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?
But most windows 98 era Ui programs were 1 or 2 threads…. You just handle events in order in a loop.

It works and is far more responsive than what we have today.

> Disks are certainly not quick enough to have File.Delete(...) be blocking

What if you invoke a delete and then it fails and you want the user to respond? What will the state of your UI be when that happens?

tightbookkeeper··on Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?
> non-blocking

What is your program going to work on while it waits for the task? Usually nothing. You need to read some data before analyzing it, etc.

While you wait the OS can switch to other threads.

The only question here is whether you want to return that time to the operating system or to your language runtime.

> they’re just hiding the complexity

async/await feels helpful because you can write normal code again! If else, for loops, etc.

Oh wait that’s also what the UNIX operating system does. It abstracts away all this blocking and context switching so you can write normal code.

> If adding async to a function is too much

The authors point is a good one. You essentially have two languages and classes of functions. The regular version and the async version. Lots of duplication and a tendency for everything to become async.

> a skill issue.

I think you don’t understand process scheduling.

tightbookkeeper··on From BSP to ESP – How S3ctor Abused Quake Editors to Redefine the Morrowind Mod
The planes are important for collision and occlusion queries.

And yes. Intersection of planes is a higher level language than vertices and UVs. It pushes more work onto the computer instead of the human.

tightbookkeeper··on From BSP to ESP – How S3ctor Abused Quake Editors to Redefine the Morrowind Mod
You’re not responding to the article.

> BSP is just outdated and limiting

- In quake brushes are not just visual, but are also used to solve collisions. Without brushes you need separate “collision meshes”.

- brush based editors are much faster for prototyping space shapes. Art can always be improved later and is even outsourced. Gameplay is harder to get right.

- brushes are easier to reason about in processing for auto generating UV coordinates and light mapping

> just make smaller models and combine them in creative ways

This is a cost saving choice, not a better game choice.

What games do you want to play? The ones where the space is tailor made? Or the ones with a lot of copy paste?

Also if you look at the spaces in the article, they don’t have a lot of clutter anyway.

tightbookkeeper··on The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
> I don't know exactly what you mean by "surveys,"

Typical education studies look at two classrooms/sets of kids, and then compare grades with and without X. It's a mess.

> Yeah, and I think we also need to stop pretending new is better.

Agreed. I think part of the problem is centralized curriculum control. There will always be someone fighting to put in there thing or make a sale.

tightbookkeeper··on What I wish someone told me about Postgres
A previous employer thought that sql databases didn’t understand graphs. So they made their own system for serializing/deserializing graphs of objects into Postgres

. They never used queries and instead had their own in-memory operators for traversing the graph, had to solve problems like deleting an entry and removing all references, partial graph updates.

And I still don’t think it works.

tightbookkeeper··on The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
Electronic learning materials tend to be consumer oriented. Instead of reading a book you’re going to click through an interactive story book, etc.

But custom software and is very expensive, and doesn’t scale. Thousands of work hours to make 1 consumable hour. It’s like maintaining an MMO and adding new quests every week, but without the talented devs or interesting source material.

The real leverage offered by technology is creative tools that enable experiences which are impractical, like simulations, etc.

But it’s probably a tougher sell to administrations:

- no telemetry (surveillance)

- not an on rails experience you can drop a low performing kid in front of

tightbookkeeper··on The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
> need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study.

If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).

I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.

tightbookkeeper··on How I ship projects at big tech companies
No organization with more than 1 person is immune from the effects of optics. If you think so, you may be blind to it.
tightbookkeeper··on The Long Road to End Tuberculosis
That sounds right. Based on my reading the CDC numbers are basically death with Covid test or symptoms, with the exception of an obvious distinct cause.

Which honestly I can’t think of a better way for mass data collection.

tightbookkeeper··on The Long Road to End Tuberculosis
I’m not the one claiming Covid is as impactful or dangerous as TB, a very unusual claim. Please make your case.
tightbookkeeper··on The Long Road to End Tuberculosis
Can you estimate those absolute numbers for us?
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