bounds checks are one, yeah, but I was also thinking about the tricks c++ could play with optimising undefined behaviour, as well as unsafe patterns involving shared access and pointer aliasing that a human could determine was safe in that specific case but that the rust compiler would balk at. and maybe it wasn't actually safe in which case the rust code would have the last laugh.
tbh while the astra announcement in that link had some good stuff it was scattered through so much boilerplate marketing speak that I had to force myself to read it and look for the content. I found the gemini blog post in the OP a lot more readable and engaging.
but that's a side issue; my main point is that you are underrating the impressiveness of getting a safe rust port of a highly optimised c++ library even nearly up to par with the original. the tradeoffs rust makes for memory safety cost it some of the raw speed of c++ even with all the zero cost abstractions and purely compile time guarantees they have. (tangentially i wonder if ats (https://www.cs.bu.edu/~hwxi/atslangweb/) would be a good candidate for LLM assisted ports; it seems way more advanced than rust and might actually get c-level performance with safety, but it's really hard to write.)
there was already an optimised c++ library and a rust port that was safer but less performant; they managed to get a new rust version that recovered a lot of the performance gap. sounds pretty damn good to me!
I have never understood the whole "this is a winner take all game" mentality - the sheer size of the pie is so great that from a purely rational standpoint companies should just be trying to productively get a slice of it and be profitable. winner-take-all is just greed/capitalism run amok, where it is not enough to be profitable, you have to own the entire market (and presumably extract rents)
grew up in dubai in the 80s, and we went to a beach in fujairah once which had not just a wonderfully starry sky, but the most amazing bioluminescence in the ocean. don't think i've experienced both things together since then.
by "inventing" they mean that no one higher up in the org is going to tell you what your team needs to be working on, you need to do user research and discover the issues for yourself, and then come up with the right set of features that will solve those issues.
the pacing and consistency are atrocious, unfortunately. I loved the first six books, hated the seventh, and straight up abandoned the series halfway through book 8. tempted to do a full read through now that Sanderson has completed the series in a way that people seem happy with but it's a lot when I know I'm going to run into at least those two bad books in the middle and possibly more after that.
I'm on book 3 of Romlyn Domingue's "Keeper of Tales" trilogy. One unusual touch I liked is that each book is written in a different person - book 1 is a second person autobiography written as the protagonist talking to her past self, book 2 is third person with a different protagonist, and then book 3 is a continuation of book 2 but with the voice switched to first person.
what you are arguing for is objectively extremely bizarre. if you take a step back, this is what is playing out: company C makes a device. it needs an operating system to run software, so they add it. if there was no operating system the device would be useless and no one would buy it. now person A buys said device. it's theirs, they have paid money for it, they own it. person B writes some software. it runs on the device's operating system. they want to sell it to person A. person A wants to buy it from them. why should company C be involved at all? I found this super weird and distasteful when game consoles were allowed to use this business model, and am even more taken aback that general purpose computers get away with it.
> I think I'm a pretty skilled programmer, or I'm at least good enough at interviewing to convince other people of that, but it's pretty obvious from comparing LLM generated code to code I'd write myself that in many domains LLMs are superior to me.
there's an important caveat here - LLMs absolutely can write better code than me, but they can also write far worse code, and often don't seem to be able to tell the difference. I find myself spending a lot of time prompting the bots to refine their code in specific ways that I only know about because I read the generated output.
there was an old riddle I saw on usenet, "there is a key I use for one of its intended purposes several times a day, but when it stopped working I never missed it. what key was that?". the answer was the caps lock key, one of whose intended purposes was reverting back to normal after accidentally pressing it to go into caps mode.
I've been using it happily for longer than that! I do remember having to tweak the default search behaviours when I first installed it but it's been largely problem free ever since.
reminds me of the time when you got strips of fn key binding cheat sheets for various popular software packages like lotus 123 and wordperfect, and keyboards came with a space to hold them.
I just recently read the novelisation of "shada"[0]. it was altogether delightful, and reminded me of the time in college when I was a huge fan of dr who novels despite never really getting into the TV show.
agreed! I'm actually pulled in different directions; I love the nostalgic value of physical books and enjoy possessing them as artefacts, but I vastly prefer the experience of reading an ebook, especially the page turning with one finger.