torginus

Rust is not the end of history. One of the difficulties with the language lies exactly with porting existing code written in an OOP style to idiomatic Rust, as those codebases weren't written with ownership in mind.

Such rewrites will contain judicious uses of Cell, RefCell, unwrap() etc. which make for ugly code that's not exactly simple to understand and might even have some landmines (crashes).

Getting rid of these requires a subtantial amount of engineering effort, which I'm not sure how well these LLM manage.

Given the nigh-universal experience of LLMs producing an ungodly mess when left to their own devices, I have my concerns.

> And Chinese labs openly publishing so much of their methodology destroyed any hope, which was inevitable

I think the secrecy doesn't make sense. People swap jobs between labs so I'd say the big players can' really keep secrets for long, and any secret sauce advantage gets incorporated by competitors in a major product cycle at most.

But I guess they are good enough to isolate multiple instances of the same code, ran by the same customer in parallel.

This is highly interesting considering AWS invented the MicroVMs for lambda, yet node on lambda is dog slow (both in latency and throughput). I can traumadump on request. I bet they could use some of this tech especially since their use cases are often not too dissimilar (auth validation, rule checking etc)

I haven't heard of Chlumský or MSDF before, but I think a lot of people have been aware of the technique before he published his paper, thanks to Valve's TF2 text rendering paper:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120505013814/https://www.valve...

The pdf details only simple SDF, but in the closing paragraphs, it mentions the weakness of the technique and mentions how it can be solved with multiple SDFs, but the exact technique wasn't showcased.

Which led to people trying to reverse engineering it, and making their implementation, for years (it's Valve after all). Including me. Not sure if what I came up with was exactly MSDF, but certainly there are a lot of implementations out there.

I remember getting the advice in kindergarten that to make a girl like me, I had to pull her hair.

Wasn't aware this advice translated to international diplomacy.

This is like asking how many times can a politician can break his word before people vote for the other guy.

It's more like voting for public officials. Shareholders can vote to fire a CEO if they feel he's not acting in their best interests no mattter if that's the case or not.

It would be much cooler if it had a sub for something from Mistral.

My feeling is Anthropic doesn't exactly have a lot of political capital with the Trump administration to push their policies into law.

Nerds suck. They are smelly, have bad posture, manners, never leave their rooms and are generally unappealing.

They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data, or lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.

Plus there is only so many of them.

I think that's by design - they're going to IPO soon so if they can get a significant percentage of users to switch from the $200 to the $500, they can 2.5x projected revenue.

I get your point, but in my experience, predatory ads are the most dangerous things elderly need to watch out for.

It's absolutely appalling just how many ads show up on the most boring and mainstream sites, and just how many of them are just straight up fraud or scams. I think ad blocking is a fundamental internet safety issue, if you want to hand a laptop to an older relative, and ChromeOS doesn't do anything against scam subscriptions.

I've used some engineering programs that were appalingly buggy for any application, never mind how much they cost - but once you managed to fight through the bugs, they did the thing they were supposed to reliably, and you could trust the results.

This is not true for vibecoded stuff.

I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything, in fact it's worse, since browsers are usually heavier than real apps.

But you get less functionality, and have to hack into it even if you can to make it your own.

They're even worse for browsing, as you can only install addons and adblockers allowed by Google, which are deliberately gimped.

At least we get to enjoy freedom on our PCs - the smartphone-ification of computers is a worrying trend (this applies to games consoles too).

Yeah there are some gamedev treasures in C#, owning to the fact that Microsoft created the Xbox Live Indie Games program back in the X360 era, which meant you could ship games to customers with generally little oversight and meddling - this was WAY before Steam did something similar, and even before the iPhone app store.

The catch was that you had to use C# and XNA (which was a wrapper for gaming related APIs like DirectX, XAudio and XInput, generally considered to be very good). This meant there were a lot of hardcore libs made for C# gamedev (BEPU physics is from that era, and there were things like very good UI frameworks).

Tons of games were made with XNA, and its open source ofshoots, MonoGame and FNA power some of the greatest indie hits (Stardew Valley, Celeste, Bastion and other Supergiant titles, Terraria come to mind).

Imo this is one of the main reasons Unity went with C# in the first place.

> Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens

Question is - are these things good enough that restaurants actually use them? I would be surprised if they were.

They probably did, but this is the exact wrong reaction. Trust me, they're famous in China too.

Sorry for the aside, but I noticed half the usecase of AI is fixing the awful DX.

I just used Opus 5.5 for something other than coding, and after about a dozen chat messages (some of which were genuinely amazing), it got LLM brainrot, and started suggesting dumb, irrelevant stuff, ignoring previously established facts, and talking in PR doublespeak.

Huh, I guess when when AI leaders talk about their AI being unaligned, they meant the divs.

Generally, the Chinese don't have a good track record of supressing information.

As in they do the 'we have deleted tons of videos and posts about the thing that didn't happen last week', but it seems they haven't really managed to transcribe 'Streisand' into Han characters so far.

You don't have to move to such a place, but there are a lot of real estate that's not very hot, on account of not being near anything economically relevant, but are still pretty nice places.

If you don't have to work a day for the rest of your life, why should you care if a famous tech company has its offices 15 minutes away?

When I was fresh out of college, I got the advice to invest a part of my salary in bonds and stocks.

I luckily stumbled upon a good pick and basically a month's salary showed up on my account overnight. It's been a puzzling occurence morally speaking, that I gained so much money by essentially doing nothing.

While I certainly didn't mind the money and still don't I'm puzzled by the 'rich people' who inevitably show up in every discussion claiming 'dammit I worked for what I have with sweat and blood, while freeloaders and parasites loafed about! I deserve every penny I have'.

No you didn't (I didn't either), please shut up. I worked hard for a lot of stuff I cherish that made me very little money, and the place I own went up a lot in value, to which I had zero contribution.

My understanding is that Russia despite falling far from its USSR days, still had multiple times more capacity to make Iskander-s, than the US can make ATACMS (and Iskanders are way better too). The PrSM, the US based successor is just about to enter volume production, and will be years till they can be made by the hundreds.

At least that was the case before Ukraine started blowing up Russian factories. And for the rest of Europe, their capacities are somehow even worse.

And in any case, Russian missiles were a drop in the bucket compared to drones.

So building high performance missiles in a volume needed for sustained conflict is not something any military has managed to do so far.

(Not shilling for any side, just my honest opinion, plz dont dogpile on this, I don't care about any side's national greatness)

We have heard this so many times. The future was mechanized warfare, or missiles, or aircraft, or stealth jets. It seems that now in Russia/Ukraine, pretty much all forms of mechanized warfare have been rendered irrelevant and you can't achieve military objectives no matter how many bombing runs you conduct with your planes. And those planes are not safe either. Same goes for Iran. You still need the guys to go in.

Even before that, I feel like the abolition of conscription has changed the stock of American soldiers (who used to be prime-age males from all walks of life), to a much younger cohort where misfits and lower classes were overrepresented.

I think perception of American military strength rests somewhat on the image of the square-jawed, rugged soldier, which was very much a staple of combat propaganda, but used to be more like an embellishment of the truth, rather than outright fiction.

Video games of the 2000s-2010s, like the CoD series, have usually cast this WW2-Vietnam era image onto the GWOT era, with the heroic characters fighting in the middle-east this time. It was kind of surreal to see actual authentic footage of awkward gangly teens wearing the same uniforms.

I think language designers in general have realized that there's nothing particularly virtuous about a programming language with a syntax that's hard to parse.

Go and Rust (and Pascal) have cleaned up C's awful legacy enough that they're parseable with LL(X) parsers that don't have scary corner cases or polynomial behavior.

Agreed, and let me add that Pratt parsers are both powerful, and efficient, and the code is fairly easy to understand and write by hand (while being slightly more powerful than recursive descent).

No LLMs needed, and you can jump straight to coding, and you don't have to go through precedence shenanigans.

I think the true generational divide was between DOS and Windows. After spending an inordinate amount of time in DOS (making the journey to Borland C), it felt awesome that you could draw onto the screen, no questions asked. I made so many games and graphical programs just drawing to the screen and then reading the input in a loop, it worked great.

Then I transitioned to Windows, and had to contend with all the complexity.. What's a Window Class and how do you write an event loop to respond to window messages, why is this all so complex.. Why is MFC somehow not really better.

Having written a simple DOS GUI (that kinda looked like Windows), I had to discover that a Windows app of equivalent functionality took more and messier code.

And forget drawing to the screen, you had to grapple with GDI drawing contexts, it was slow and bad.. (Not like Linux was any better than this regard).

As for DOS, I have had the privilege of hacking together a bitbanging VGA adapter, so I know for a fact that drawing to the screen is really as simple as setting values in an array, then, scanning it out to the display.

Afair Star Trek AI is more like 'Ok Google', and generally doesn't really seem like very agentic, more like a computer with a voice interface, able to execute simple commands and answer simple questions.