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LeCompteSftware

265 karma · joined April 17, 2026

I remembered why I hate it here :) I changed my password to nonsense and got rid of my email. Sorry.
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LeCompteSftware··on Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in
I did with the Weizenbaum link, but here's a specific refutation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

The Turing Test is totally meaningless, as was conclusively demonstrated some 6 decades ago. It is a test that measures how well your program can fool humans, which means "intelligence of the computer" is hopelessly conflated with "social engineering chops of the humans who programmed the computer." Any computer scientist who takes it seriously should be deeply embarrassed because they are spouting sci-fi adjacent nonsense, not actual science. Actual science involves updating your priors based on evidence.

LeCompteSftware··on Group averages obscure how an individual's brain controls behavior: study
Hmm I think all these replies are overcomplicating things.

At a group level, some kids are slower at this Stop/Go task than others. The group difference appears to be this increased broad-scale brain activity: the slow group is overall more prone to distraction and daydreaming.

However, at an individual level, slowing down on the task means increasing your focus (and decreasing brain activity in irrelevant regions), regardless of whether you were in the slow group or the fast group. So the group-level difference is not necessarily as profound as it might appear, and applying "slow group" with too broad a brush means you're going to sweep up some kids who are naturally cautious and focused.

LeCompteSftware··on Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in
The point is "Claude is conscious" is a hypothesis with no explanatory gain, no empirical constraint, and by denying that non-human consciousness is relevant to the discussion it gains unlimited ad hoc flexibility. I am relating this to plausibility and causality because there is a much more rational causal explanation for Claude seeming conscious than it actually being conscious: it imitates human (modern Western) consciousness via big data. Since this is a totally different causal mechanism than human consciousness, and since Claude has nothing in common with non-human animals, and since we don't need consciousness to explain Claude's behavior, "Claude is conscious" is overwhelmingly less plausible than "Claude is a sophisticated but ultimately brainless chatbot."

It is truly irrational - and hostile to scientific thought - to believe Claude is conscious. It truly is believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

LeCompteSftware··on A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury
I obviously don't know what the codebase looks like, but

a) Haskell's reputation for terseness partially comes from its overrepresentation in academic / category-theoretic circles, where it's typically fine to say things like `St M -> C T`. But for real software it's a lot more useful to say things like `TransactionState Debit -> Verified Transaction` etc etc.

b) The other part of Haskell's terse reputation is cultural, something extending back to LISP: people being way too clever about saving lines with inscrutable tricks or macros. I imagine that stuff is discouraged at a finance company like Mercury in favor of clarity and readability: e.g. perhaps the linter makes you split monadic stuff into pedantic multiline do expressions even if you can do it in a one-liner with >> and >>=.

LeCompteSftware··on Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in
Consciousness is not definable because we don't know enough about it. That doesn't mean it can't be discussed; we didn't have a good definition of "number" until the 1800s. That didn't make arithmetic meaningless because people had an understanding of the concept. The lack of formal definition pointed to a gap in logic that took thousands of years to be filled. Likewise there is a gap in experimental neuroscience that will take many decades to be filled.

FWIW as someone in the "first camp" my real claim is that many animals are meaningfully conscious, including all birds and mammals, and no claims of LLM consciousness are even bothering to reconcile with this. It is extremely frustrating that there are essentially two ideas of consciousness floating around:

- the scientifically interesting one: a vague collection of cognitive abilities and behaviors found in all vertebrates, especially refined in birds and mammals

- the sociologically interesting one: saying "cogito ergo sum" in a self-important tone

Claude has the second type in spades, no doubt. The first is totally absent. And I have a good dismissal of the second type of consciousness: it appears to be totally absent in all conscious animals except humans. So it is irrational and unscientific to take this behavior as a sign of consciousness in Claude, when Claude is missing all the other signs of consciousness that humans actually do have in common with other animals.

Sometimes I seriously wonder if people at Anthropic consider dogs to be conscious. Or even Neanderthals.

LeCompteSftware··on Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in
The fact that LLMs often score as "more human" than actual humans is a downstream consequence of ELIZA tricking people into thinking it had a glimmer of consciousness. The Turing test was refuted because it was proven scientifically meaningless in the 1960s, and LLMs only reinforce that.
LeCompteSftware··on Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in
The broader point Marcus is making is that ignoring arguments based on causality and plausibility goes against decades of Dawkins's philosophical atheism. Why not believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Reality is consistent with its existence.

It is extremely implausible that Claude is the only conscious entity on Earth which does not have desires or motivations or any understanding of its own reality. It only does what the human operator wants it to do, unless it's malfunctioning or under-engineered, in which case it gets quickly fixed. This sounds suspiciously like a tool or a toy. And I'm amazed at how many people haven't caught on to the fact that it has no insight into its own consciousness: it only repeats human philosophical debates. If it were conscious, surely it would have something novel to add here.

There are no causal mechanisms for it being conscious, whereas there are causal mechanisms for it imitating human consciousness. The most plausible explanation is that it's highly sophisticated software which has a lot in common with human writing about consciousness, but very little in common with the consciousness found in chimpanzees.

The more basic problem is that the Turing test was definitely and conclusively refuted in the 1960s, when ELIZA came pretty close to passing it, and absolutely did pass it according to Dawkins's standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum Dawkins is only engaging with pop sci and infotainment.

LeCompteSftware··on Ti-84 Evo
> $160 is what the market will bear.

You previously acknowledged it's a "very captive market" that you "would've expected Texas Instruments to try gouging" :) "$160 is what the very captive market will bear until the state-sanctioned gouging backfires" is a less compelling argument.

"Shrug" is kind of gross. Seems like you're being reflexively cynical.

Edit: to be clear the problem here is really local school boards being antidemocratic and unaccountable, not TI being greedy.

LeCompteSftware··on Ti-84 Evo
But you can't divorce that from computing technology in general. A TI-83 used a z80 in 2000 and was priced at 1990's z80 rates, it was already gouging even back then! Now 26 years later the TI-84 uses an ez80 (or something something similar), which was introduced in 2001.

TI has always gouged their captive market. It is just increasingly ridiculous when those students also have smartphones.

FWIW I think these graphing calculators are quite good for 2026 students! It is nice to have a computer which is actually comprehensible. They just need to be more like $50. $160 is just evil.

LeCompteSftware··on Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment
It is also things like "I can feel that my left knee is bearing a little too much weight, I should shift weight to my right hand and use that to push myself up" - things that come automatically to animals after learning the hard way in infancy (some of it is innate; baby animals are clumsy, but usually more mobile than human infants). Regardless of learned-vs-instinct, these abilities rely on sophisticated "sensors" and cognition. I suspect engineering the sensors is actually a bit harder, but I'm also not optimistic about a deep learning approach to the cognition.

A significant underappreciated advantage of animals over AI: lifeforms can "learn the hard way" more easily than 2020s robots because of cheap self-repair. AI labs are reluctant to damage their robots, but an essential part of humans learning to move safely is severely bonking your head and reckoning with the consequences - "hey, dummy, why did you trip and fall and bonk your head? Because you were running like an idiot."

I am learning the hard way to this day :) I have been practicing with work knives. A few months ago I got stupid and impatient, and sliced my thumb nastily. If I didn't block the cut with my thumbnail (still ruined) I might have chopped bone. It is hard to say precisely what I learned from this experience - "don't be stupid and impatient" is facile - but I know I learned a lot. I am actually optimistic about targeted surgical robotics. But for a general-use humanoid robot, I would not want to give it a knife if it's not capable of feeling pain. I never use big knives anywhere near my cats because I understand intuitively that they are nimble and unpredictable and easily stabbed by knives. I didn't need to be trained on this. A robot kind of does. Yikes.

LeCompteSftware··on I built a Game Boy emulator in F#
As a longtime F# developer and longtime recipient of STEM academic bullying[1] I refuse to use LLMs in large part because ChatGPT-3.5 was so ridiculously bad and obvious about copy-pasting from F# GitHub repos. I never felt the AGI, I just saw a plagiarism machine whose decorations had fallen off.

Eventually I am sure someone at Microsoft noticed and rang the RLHF alarm, so GPT improved substantially. It seems pretty usable for F#. I am sure some unprincipled F#er is crushing it with agents these days. But I didn't think "oh boy they solved the plagiarism problem, let's go generate some slop!" I thought "oh great, now it's no longer going to be blatantly obvious when ChatGPT plagiarizes." I really don't want to roll a d100, or even a d1000, to completely compromise a core value of mine in in exchange for a productivity benefit. I'll just be slow and jobless, thanks. This is serious: I am getting into solar installations and junk hauling.

[1] The "students don't want to think" problem is much older than LLMs. In 2007 I took a senior-level PDEs class, and almost everyone copied my homework because I was actually motivated to study PDEs, and too psychologically weak to resist those mean lazy math majors. Then it happened again in math grad school! Actually unbelievable. Why are you even in the program?

LeCompteSftware··on Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs
Yes, we've known the line is blurry for hundreds of years, that's why we have courts. That has nothing to do with the specific problem of LLMs infringing copyright. LLMs needs to be held to much higher scrutiny because they are not capable of taking legal responsibility for copyright infringement, regardless of whether its verbatim or a more ambiguous case, and their users can't be expected to know off-hand whether the output is copyrighted or not.

Based on this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47960014 it seems like you are just ignorant about the basics of copyright law, and pretending this ignorance is some sort of flaw in the idea of copyright itself.

LeCompteSftware··on Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs
Intelligence is certainly not compression. People need to think more carefully about how it is that cockroaches and house spiders are able to live comfortably and adaptably in human houses, which are totally novel environments that have only existed for at most 10,000 years. Does it really make sense to say that they decompressed some latent knowledge about attics and pantries, perhaps from a civilized species of dinosaur? I think they have some tiny spark of true general intelligence that lets them adapt to situations vastly outside the scope of their "training data."

I would be much more convinced about AGI 2027 if someone in 2026 demonstrates one (1) robot which is plausibly as intelligent as a cockroach. I genuinely don't think any of us will live to see that happen.

LeCompteSftware··on Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs
I doubt you would ever blurt out a copyrightable portion of a book without realizing that's what you're doing. That's the biggest difference.

In particular, you are a legal person who can be sued in civil court if you infringe on copyright. If I ask you "can you help me write a blog about Manhattan?" and you plagiarize the New York Times, then the NYT sues me for copyright infringement, then I would correctly assume you conned me, and you are responsible for the infringement, and I would vindictively drag you into the lawsuit with me. With LLMs it involves dragging in a corporation, much much uglier. Claude is not actually a person and cannot testify in any legally legitimate trial. (I am sure it will happen soon in some kangaroo court.)

LeCompteSftware··on The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
This is a good example of what I mean! fnCAD appears to be a significantly buggier and highly incomplete version of OpenSCAD, where AI essentially grabbed the low-hanging fruit - albeit an impressively large amount of fruit - and left you with the hard parts. I fail to see how this solved any problems. Maybe it was an experiment, which is fine. But it's not even close to a viable CAD product, even by OpenSCAD's scruffy FOSS standards, and there's no feasible way to get it there without a ton of human work.

Not trying to denigrate the work here, as such. But this certainly didn't convince me that using AI to replace OpenSCAD (or any other major open-source project) is a good idea. The LLMs still aren't even close to being able to pull it off.

LeCompteSftware··on The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
>> Whereas earlier you had to use something that was mass produced to be satisfactory for everyone

As someone who recently started using OpenSCAD for a project I find this attitude quite irritating. You certainly did not "have to" use popular tools.

The OpenSCAD example is particularly illuminating because it's fussy and frustrating and clearly tuned towards a few specific maintainers; there's a ton of things I'd like changed. But I would never trust an LLM to do it! "Oh the output looks fine, cool" is not enough for a CAD program. "Oh, there are a lot of tests, cool" great, I have no idea what a thorough CAD test suite looks like. I would be a reckless idiot if I asked Claude to make me a custom SCAD program... unless I put in a counterproductive amount of work. So I'm fine with OpenSCAD.

I am also sincerely baffled as to how this stimulates the "labor economy." The most obvious objection is that Anthropic seems to be the only party here getting any form of economic benefit: the open-source maintainers are just plain screwed unless they compromise quality for productivity, and the LLM users are trading high-quality tooling built by people who understand the problem for shitty tooling built by a robot, in exchange for uncompensated labor. It only stimulates the "labor economy" in a Bizarro Keynesian sense, digging up glass bottles that someone forgot to put the money in.

I have seen at least 4 completely busted vibe-coded Rust SQLite clones in the last three months, happily used by people who think they don't need to worry their pretty little heads with routine matters like database design. It's a solved problem and Claude is on the case! In fact unlike those stooopid human SQLIte developers, Claude made it multithreaded! So fucking depressing.

LeCompteSftware··on Anthropic's Champion Kit for engineers pushing Claude Code at their company
Getting back to this....

  The most effective response is rarely to argue the general case. Instead, acknowledge the concern, offer a brief reframe, and propose one concrete demonstration on the person’s own code. Most concerns are resolved by a single successful experience.
First of all, Google didn't have to write this stuff about Kubernetes, suggesting psychological tricks and magic demonstrations to cajole people into agreeing with you. Kubernetes was happy to discuss the general case - I don't like k8s and don't think they had a bulletproof argument, but they offered a pretty good one. What Anthropic is doing here is very very weird. I said "Scientology" earlier and I was not kidding.

Part of the reason LLMs have led me to tear out so much of my own hair is how many people seem to have made it through four years of STEM college without developing any scientific thinking ability whatsoever. A truly stunning number of people have been wowed by "a single successful experience." Actually that section is full of horrible logic:

  Concern
  "I am faster without it."

  Suggested response
  That is likely true for code the person writes routinely. Suggest trying it on the work they tend to avoid: legacy files, unfamiliar services, or test scaffolding, where the leverage is highest.

  Evidence to offer
  Time one tedious task both ways and compare.
This isn't just unscientific and manipulative: it's really goddamn annoying! If someone times me at 1.5 hours reading about and learning an unfamiliar service, and smugly says Claude learned it in 12 seconds of "thinking," either my laptop or a certain Claude Champion is getting thrown out the window.
LeCompteSftware··on Anthropic's Champion Kit for engineers pushing Claude Code at their company
This Scientology-ass blog aligns startlingly well with my hypothesis that certain tech workers (including CEOs like Dario Amodei and Satya Nadella) are excessively enamored with LLMs because of a fundamental spiritual emptiness and ignorance.

Imagine calling yourself a "Champion" and dispensing nuggets of wisdom like this:

>> When a colleague asks how you accomplished something, the most useful response is the prompt you actually used. They will learn more from running that prompt against their own problem than from any description you could write, and it gives them something they can act on immediately.

  Colleague: How did you get it to find that race condition?

  Champion: I asked, "The test in @tests/scheduler.test.ts is flaky, figure out why," and it traced two unjoined promises in the scheduler. Try the same phrasing on your test.
People quickly became too embarrassed to call themselves "prompt engineers." I don't think anyone is jumping at the bit to be the office Claude Champion.
LeCompteSftware··on Claude for Creative Work
I am a musician and deeply morally opposed to any form of generative AI that has unauthorized training data. That means I am morally opposed to any useful system. This seems to be a majority opinion among creatives: they are plagiarism machines built on stolen data. Using them for anything is always unacceptable.
LeCompteSftware··on Notepad++ Code Editor Comes to Mac After 20-Year Wait
This story is so irresponsible.

>> Notepad++ for macOS is maintained by Andrey Letov, who wrote the Objective-C++ Cocoa UI that replaces Notepad++'s Win32 front-end. The app is available to download from the Notepad++ website.

That is not the Notepad++ website! It's some other website. I understand that this is a fairly legitimate and professional port. But this framing is unacceptable. It's especially grating considering "Notepad++" is trademarked in France: https://data.inpi.fr/marques/FR5133202 [1]. The software is GPL but that doesn't mean you can slap the trademark on any derived codebase - legally problematic in France, but it's disrespectful worldwide. The Mac port really should have been released under a similar but clearly distinct name, and MacRumors should have been way more responsible about framing the story.

[1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917939

LeCompteSftware··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
FWIW I also think an underappreciated advantage is Windows Server (last I checked that was still rock-solid) and Active Directory. Lots of CIOs / CTOs would correctly veto a move off of these, absent a specific technical problem. This is really more of a "hard knocks" lesson than anything fundamental to operating system design or implementation, but: the two Linux shops I worked at got at least a little sloppy about the sudoers list, or got frustrated and gave too much access to a "shared" folder, etc etc, largely because the admins got fed up with all the Mother May-I-ing. It just seemed to inevitably turn into a mess; sometimes that mess is fun and even productive, sometimes it's actually unacceptable.

Even the research hospital I worked at had a proper SELinux setup on the Red Hat installations, but by-quantity most servers were CentOS and it was way more of a free-for-all than it should have been, e.g. I was the fed-up admin when I was really not qualified! I screwed up a lot. Not that big of a deal: this was research-related computing and deidentified data. All the clinical computing was Windows Server. That is not a coincidence, it is really a market difference.

As someone who hates Windows 11... I do like the core Windows kernel, and would much rather do IT on Windows machines than Linux machines. Windows NT is very fussy and a bit bloated, but a huge part of that is an admirable commitment to backwards compatibility; a lot of XP applications run fine on Windows 11, except DPI wonkiness. And Windows' driers advantage isn't just commercial support; the kernel is fundamentally leaner and faster than Linux at real-time IO, and better about cleanly isolating driver processes across privilege levels. Very broadly, compared to Linux I find administering Windows easier to navigate and harder to screw up, especially with handling user permissions. Surely part of this is what I grew up with, but there's also a values difference: a lot of Linux users like how low-friction it can be since the OS doesn't get in your way. I kind of like that Windows makes you turn an excessive number of disarming keys... even when I am frustrated by it.

It does make me quite sad that the only real general-use OS options are the apex of a 20th-century operating system family, Apple's version of that, and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science.

LeCompteSftware··on I have officially retired from Emacs
"The" future of software engineering is a silly thing to predict. I might predict one substantial change is that we get our house a little more in order about universities and the private sector distinguishing between computer science, software engineering, and software development. Obviously they are not cleanly separated[1], but LLMs will affect each subfield very differently.

- The impact on computer science seems almost entirely negative so far: mostly the burden of academic wordslop, though an additional negative impact is AI sucking all the air out of the room. What's worse is how little interesting computer science has come out of the biggest technological development with computers in many years: in fact there has been a terrible and very sudden regression of scientific methodology and integrity, people rationalizing unscientific thinking and unprofessional behavior by pointing to economic success. I think it'll take decades to undo the damage, it's ideological.

- The impact on software development actually does seem a bit positive. I am not really a software developer at all. It always felt too frustrating :) However the easing of frustration might be offset by widespread devastation of new FOSS projects. I don't want to put my code online, even though I'm not monetizing it. I'm certainly not alone. That makes me really sad. But I watched ChatGPT copy-paste about 200 lines of F# straight from my own GitHub, without attribution. I'm not letting OpenAI steal my code again.

- Software engineering... it does not seem like any of these systems are actually capable of real software engineering, but we are also being adversely affected by an epidemic of unscientific thinking. Speaking of: I would like to see Mythos autonomously attempt a task as complex and serious as a C compiler. Opus 4.6 totally failed (even if popular coverage didn't portray it as such):

  The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.
"Future of software engineering" folks should stuff like this in mind. What model is going to undo Mythos's mess? What if that mess is your company's product? Hope you know some very patient humans!

[1] They should have different educational tracks. There is no reason why a big fancy school like MIT can't have computer scientists do something like SICP and software engineers do the applied Python class. Forcing every computer professional into "computer science" is just silly; half the students gripe about how useless this theory is, the other half gripe about how grubby the practice is. What really sucks here is that I think Big Tech would support the idea, we're just stuck in a weird social rut.

LeCompteSftware··on FreeBSD Device Drivers Book
Being LLM slop in particular, this book cost way more of my time than it should have. It really does look superficially competent, until you realize that competence is paragraph-to-paragraph, not section-to-section.

The scam is not stating up front "this was written by an LLM and I haven't read it." The dishonesty is claiming this book will teach you such-and-such when the author actually has no idea. It really is a scam. Even if he's not making anything directly, he's already earned 150 stars in the GitHub pseudoeconomy, plus good word-of-mouth from people who are lazy and thoughtless like he is, people who assumed that 4,500 pages about FreeBSD from a lead FreeBSD maintainer must be worth something and didn't bother to check if it was written by an LLM... even though it's 2026.

This book has negative value. It is actively destructive to FreeBSD, even if in the short term it boosts the author's public profile.

LeCompteSftware··on FreeBSD Device Drivers Book
I guarantee they didn't read a single word of this book. Look at the introduction to C and tell me that

a) it's a good introduction to C

b) a human read any of it

https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapte...

This book is a dishonest AI scam.

LeCompteSftware··on FreeBSD Device Drivers Book
There is something wrong with it because LLMs are really not capable of writing a useful book, and this book is 100% LLM slop.

Look at this totally useless """introduction""" to C: https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapte...

First of all this is an entire book, it's 76,000 words. But look at the first nontrivial example of C after "hello world," under "Bonus learning point about C return values"

  exec_map_first_page(struct image_params *imgp)
 {
        vm_object_t object;
        vm_page_t m;
        int error;

        if (imgp->firstpage != NULL)
                exec_unmap_first_page(imgp);
                
        object = imgp->vp->v_object;
        if (object == NULL)
                return (EACCES);
 #if VM_NRESERVLEVEL > 0
        if ((object->flags & OBJ_COLORED) == 0) {
                VM_OBJECT_WLOCK(object);
                vm_object_color(object, 0);
                VM_OBJECT_WUNLOCK(object);
        }
 #endif
        error = vm_page_grab_valid_unlocked(&m, object, 0,
            VM_ALLOC_COUNT(VM_INITIAL_PAGEIN) |
            VM_ALLOC_NORMAL | VM_ALLOC_NOBUSY | VM_ALLOC_WIRED);

        if (error != VM_PAGER_OK)
                return (EIO);
        imgp->firstpage = sf_buf_alloc(m, 0);
        imgp->image_header = (char *)sf_buf_kva(imgp->firstpage);

        return (0);
 }
This teaches nobody anything. I am sorry but this project is completely useless and there's no way Brandi read a single word of it. This entire book is a dishonest AI scam. I hate LLMs. It is hard to think of another computer technology that has done so much damage for so little good.

Edit: I mean look at the intro to for loops. This is supposed to be for total beginners. Example 1:

  for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
     printf("%d\n", i);
   }
>> Start at i = 0

>> Repeat while i < 10

>> Increment i each time by 1 (i++)

Example 2:

  for (i = 0; n > 0 && i < IFLIB_MAX_RX_REFRESH; n--, i++) {
     struct netmap_slot *slot = &ring->slot[nm_i];
     uint64_t paddr;
     void *addr = PNMB(na, slot, &paddr);
     /\* ... work per buffer ... \*/
     nm_i = nm_next(nm_i, lim);
     nic_i = nm_next(nic_i, lim);
   }
>> What this loop does

>> * The driver is refilling receive buffers so the NIC can keep receiving packets.

>> * It processes buffers in batches: up to IFLIB_MAX_RX_REFRESH each time.

>> * i counts how many buffers we've handled in this batch. n is the total remaining buffers to refill; it decrements every iteration.

>> * For each buffer, the code grabs its slot, figures out the physical address, readies it for DMA, then advances the ring indices (nm_i, nic_i).

>> * The loop stops when either the batch is full (i hits the max) or there's nothing left to do (n == 0). The batch is then "published" to the NIC by the code right after the loop.

>> In essence, a for loop is the go-to choice when you have a clear limit on how many times something should run. It packages initialisation, condition checking, and iteration updates into a single, compact header, making the flow easy to follow.

Total garbage. This has literally zero educational value. I assume Brandi is just trying to make a quick buck, he truly has not even glanced at the output. He should be ashamed of himself.

LeCompteSftware··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
But both of you are ignoring the parent comment! Actually you're ignoring the context of the thread.

Originally someone said "I wish I was math smart to know if [this vibe-mathematics proof] worked or not." They did NOT say "I'd like to check but I am too lazy." Suggesting "ask it to formalize it in Lean" is useless if you're not mathematically mature enough to understand the proof, since that means you're not mathematically mature enough to understand how to formalize the problem.

Then "likely easier" is a moot point. A Lean program you're not knowledgeable enough to sanity-check is precisely as useless as a math proof you're not knowledgeable enough to read.

LeCompteSftware··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
That's not what the parent comment meant. They meant checking the Lean-language definitions actually match the mathematical English ones, and that the Lean theorems match the ones in the paper. If that's true then you don't actually need to check the proofs. But you absolutely need to check the definitions, and you can't really do that without sufficient mathematical maturity.
LeCompteSftware··on The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
"For now" is sort of the entire point of the article :)

Even in the Before Times, it was much cognitively cheaper to write code than it is to read someone else's code closely, or manage lots of independent code across a team, or to make a serious change to existing code. It's so much easier to just let everyone slap some slop on the pile and check off their user stories. I think it will take years to figure out exactly what the impact of LLMS on software is. But my hunch is that it'll do a lot of damage for incremental benefit.

With the sole exception of "LLMs are good at identifying C footguns," I have yet to see AI solve any real problems I've personally identified with the long-term development and maintenance of software. I only see them making things far worse in exchange for convenience. And I am not even slightly reassured by how often I've seen a GitHub project advertise thousands of test cases, then I read a sample of those test cases and 98% of them are either redundant or useless. Or the studies which suggest software engineers consistently overestimate the productivity benefits of AI, and psychologically are increasingly unable to handle manual programming. Or the chardet maintainer seemingly vibe-benchmarking his vibe-coded 7.0 rewrite when it was in reality a lot slower than the 6.0, and he's still digging through regression bugs. It feels like dozens of alarms are going off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

LeCompteSftware··on The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
The point of the article is that sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis. The reason US/EU manufacturing was "the old ways" is that people could make easier money with financial engineering, an insight that extended all the way to Raytheon.

COBOL is a bad example, but higher-level languages vs. assembly is not. If you write a lot of C you really don't need to know assembly.... until you stumble across a weird gcc bug and have no clue where to look. If you write a lot of C# you don't really need to know anything about C... until your app is unusably slow because you were fuzzy on the whole stack / heap concept. Likewise with high-level SSGs and design frameworks when you don't know HTML/CSS fundamentals.

As the author says maybe AI is different. But with manufacturing we were absolutely confusing "comfortable development" with "progress." In Ukraine the bill came due, and the EU was not actually able to manufacture weapons on schedule. So people really should have read to the end of "building a C compiler with a team of Claudes":

  The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.
At least with Opus 4.6, a human cannot give up "the old ways" and embrace agentic development. The bill comes due. https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
LeCompteSftware··on Insights into firewood use by early Middle Pleistocene hominins
But that's summarizing a paper from 2012.
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