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weinzierl

28,704 karma · joined May 2, 2010

My name is Ludwig Weinzierl and I'm an engineer and programmer.

Interests:

* Rust

* Robots

* Machine Learning

* Cybersecurity

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weinzierl··on Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have
"have used text in history"

That's how Unicode started but nowadays Unicode expresses things that are only used because Unicode itself introduced them.

And this while many important things in the "have used text in history" category have been unfinished or not tackled at all.

weinzierl··on Mold Linker Version 3.0.0 Release – Rewritten in Rust
wild's primary purpose is incremental linking, which it incidentally does not support at all, while still being faster than mold by a long shot.
weinzierl··on Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have
Unicode was mostly OK when it wanted to encode multi languages. It started to get a mess when thought it needed to do more.
weinzierl··on The first fully implanted cochlear implant reaches patients
When I first heard about Cochlear Implants I thought this is magic. That we can replace a part of the body that does some calculation mechanically with a real time computer simulation of it blew my mind.

Nowadays these implants must be quite common. At least I encounter people wearing ones regularly. If their life can get more convenient with an implantable version this is fantastic news.

weinzierl··on So you think you could be an electrician?
This article gives a good and comprehensive picture but leaves out one, in my opinion important, aspect.

It starts, rightfully, by pointing out risks to health and physical harm. It later goes into depth describing how automation (the nail gun example) has changed the game, and especially how dexterity is in much less demand than it used to be.

It fails to point out that the same automation has made most blue-collar jobs much safer. Where I live, the paragraphs from the beginning, where everyone knows someone with a serious injury, ring true from my childhood in the 70s and 80s, but not anymore.

That seems like an important part of the picture when comparing blue-collar work then and now.

weinzierl··on Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel
Counterproductive for whom? The stance of the kernel developers is that whether a bug is a vulnerability or not depends on intended use. They say, we do not dictate use, therefore this decision is out of scope for us. This makes kernel development more focussed and productive.

I would argue that it is more productive for the enduser as well. Not making a decision they cannot reasonably make is better then blindly believing in a decision that is likely wrong for your usecase.

weinzierl··on How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
I once heard (and don't know if it's still true) that the biggest compile-time sinks are macros and codegen.

Both are kind of outside the Rust compiler's influence. Macros can be almost arbitrarily complex: you pay for what you order. Codegen is LLVM, and that's a fixed choice. You can use Cranelift to get around it, but then you pay elsewhere.

Also, generics and monomorphization regularly come up in these discussion, while common wisdom seems to be that cost for the additional static analysis over other languages like C++ is no a major contributor.

Regardless, it's nice to see performance improvements in the compiler, even if you have to cooperate to benefit from them (e.g. by keeping your macros light and use less generics).

weinzierl··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
I agree in a sense, and the writing for this has been on the wall for some time. In my circles, many learned some Mandarin at one point or another.

The difference from the past is that the US has always been a melting pot, while China is pretty much a closed society. If you’d emigrated to the US, you always had a good chance of blending into that diverse society no matter where you came from. Assimilating into the homogeneous Chinese society will take generations.

For me it’ll be either the westernmost end of Europe or one of the better parts of South America, in the hope that they will prosper modestly in the shadows of the upcoming conflicts.

weinzierl··on What makes software development engineering
I thought so too, but I lost that argument a couple of years ago and was persuaded that "Ingenieur" alone can't be challenged.

Unfortunately I don't remember the details. I'd be happy to learn I was right after all;-)

weinzierl··on What makes software development engineering
Yes, but at least in Germany the "Dipl." makes the difference. I think it'd be OK to call yourself a "Software Engineer" without a degree and this is what many people do.
weinzierl··on Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
I think the issue is even simpler. When NVIDIA ended his advisory relationship in 1996, he had 90 days to exercise his vested options. That deadline passed nearly 30 years ago, regardless of whether vesting took one year or four.

He exercised the 15,625 options NVIDIA told him had vested. His claim now is that all 25,000 had actually vested, but NVIDIA’s letter gave him the wrong number. The letter was informing him of NVIDIA’s calculation; it did not change the option agreement. So the question is whether being given that incorrect information in 1996 gives him a claim today, despite both the exercise deadline and the statute of limitations having passed.

weinzierl··on Show HN: Doom or Bloom, map your AI worldview
Not sure. I just saw these people and thought this is not my crowd but I only realized later that the data is from X, so that's probably the main reason why.
weinzierl··on Show HN: Doom or Bloom, map your AI worldview
Thanks, I missed that, but OMG these are not the people I feel I have anything in common with.
weinzierl··on Show HN: Doom or Bloom, map your AI worldview
I'm in the incremental bloom quadrant and I knew that even before I took the test. It's not even that I'm hesitant about this. I mean, I don't know the future but the incremental bloom is by far the likeliest thing I can imagine.

That being said, it strikes me as odd how empty this quadrant is. Why?

weinzierl··on Amiga Screens: A Primer
As a kid the 70 Hz made a much more professional impression on me than the colors, but of course the colors were much cooler.
weinzierl··on Amiga Screens: A Primer
For everyone wondering why there are so many dollar values in the diagram: $ meant hex in the vernacular of the day.

(Could mean string too, but that'd a different story)

weinzierl··on Amiga Screens: A Primer
How do different resolutions (pixel sizes) work? I get that everything memory related (including color mode and depth) could be switched on a raster line.

In theory it should be possible to change the frequency of the video signal mid screen as well, but I have a hard time to imagine switching repeatedly every frame wouldn't have driven the monitors of the time crazy. Even multi-sync monitors needed probably a couple of frames to sync, right?

weinzierl··on Attention is all you have
W3C's Amaya browser [1] was as much an editor as it was a browser. Production and consumption were supposed to be symmetrical. This was the promise of the web.

Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.

[1] https://dev.w3.org/Amaya/amaya/AmayaPage.html

weinzierl··on What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
The responsible approach is to wait before stabilizing a language feature until a consensus is reached and until we are confident we will not have to roll back or change the feature and break existing code. This is what Rust does.

The discussion how to deal with transcendentals in Rust is ongoing and at some point there will be a conclusion.

weinzierl··on RSA-896
What does "scavenged idle capacity" mean here?
weinzierl··on What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
Determinism and host/target agreement are two different properties.

The Zig core team is apparently not concerned enough about the second point to forbid transcendentals at comptime and this is something that'd be hard to take back, because I'd break existing code.

weinzierl··on What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
If you disregard performance, yes. Unfortunately forcing softfloat everywhere would result in abysmal performance, so this is not an option.
weinzierl··on New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb
There is no pyramid, he is buried in a mountain.
weinzierl··on What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
You'd have to read the discussions the Rust community has about this to get a picture. It's complicated.

From what I understand, there is hope for sqrt but there is no consensus on transcendentals.

weinzierl··on English: A vs. An
I feel you. I live in Germany and we have many people whose mother tongue is a slavic language here and they all get it wrong to some degree.

I'd still like to encourage you to put some energy into getting it right because this mistake is very confusing for native speakers of a language that makes the distinction.

I cannot tell you how often I was listening to someone telling me a story about the thing where I sat impatiently waiting for them telling me which particular thing or person they ment only to realize they were not talking about something particular at all.

weinzierl··on English: A vs. An
The official rule I learnt in my English (as foreign language) classes is vowel = thee and consonant = thuh. That's it.

But I noticed that native speakers deviate from this at least in two cases:

1. Use thee to emphasize the following noun

2. When searching for the noun to say, they often get it wrong because they say something like "uh, thee, thee, thee, uh, book" and never sweat it.

Source: I watched a lot of Monty Python as a kid and John Cleese does this all the time.

weinzierl··on What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
Yes, but no transcendentals on floats. You can add them and the like but you cannot calculate the sine.
weinzierl··on What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
The practical value is that moving a computation from runtime to compile time can then be purely an optimization, rather than potentially changing its semantics. Think generated lookup tables or numeric constants. Ideally f(x) means the same thing whether evaluated by the compiler or by the generated program.
weinzierl··on What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
Endianness and pointer casts are the mechanical part and I would expect Zig to emulate them correctly.

Other parts, like floats are harder. This is where a difference shows. Rust is like: "Sorry, since we cannot uphold our guarantees, no transcendentals for you at comptime ", whereas Zig is chill about that and let you have your transcendentals even if results may differ between comptime and runtime. Different mindsets.

weinzierl··on What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
Determinism and host/target agreement are two different properties. I meant the second one.

It's something Rust guarantees (without me having to take care of it e.g. by manually branching) and Zig does not.

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