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dnmc

66 karma · joined January 20, 2026

I write code at Google. Opinions are my own. https://github.com/dmcardle
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dnmc··on AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
This has been on my mind lately! Especially in light of the many incomprehensible but machine-checkable proofs we've been hearing about.

Occam's Razor is a useful heuristic, but it biases us towards simpler explanations.

dnmc··on A Written Language for the Cherokee So Efficient It Was Thought to Be Magic
They're targeting something like a 5th grade reading level — I'm not convinced it's slop.
dnmc··on My two-part desk setup (2025)
When you have two monitors, is your head always turned to one side? That always hurts my neck, so I wind up with the second monitor relegated to the side, where I never actually look at it.
dnmc··on -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code
There are languages like Dafny that permit you to declare pre- and post-conditions for functions. Dafny in particular tries to automatically verify or disprove these claims with an SMT solver. It would be neat if LLMs could read a human-written contract and iterate on the implementation until it's provably correct. I imagine you'd have much higher confidence in the results using this technique, but I doubt that available models are trained appropriately for this use case.
dnmc··on Unsigned Sizes: A Five Year Mistake
Maybe this isn't what you're suggesting, but it's already possible to make an interface that prevents callers from doing math on indices in Rust — just return a struct that has a private member for the index. The caller can pass the value back at which point you can unwrap it and do index arithmetic.
dnmc··on jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
And If `jj absorb` gets it wrong, you can run `jj undo`.

This is such a killer feature to me. I'm not scared to start potentially gnarly rebases anymore because I can painlessly undo.

dnmc··on Filing the Corners Off MacBooks
In response, I expect the open-source community to make an optimal square packing window manager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_packing
dnmc··on A new C++ back end for ocamlc
Is this the Stephen Dolan of "mov is Turing Complete" fame?
dnmc··on C++26: The Oxford Variadic Comma
Are you suggesting we move to C++++?
dnmc··on 4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)
I've never verified this, but it feels like scp starts a new TCP connection per file. If that's the case, then scp-ing a tarred directory would be faster because you only hit the slow start once. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5681#section-3.1
dnmc··on The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)
I don't think the OP ever returned with a conclusive answer, but I'm somewhat convinced by the commenters that it was either a low-frequency engine sound rattling the neighbor's windows or something to do with the car's rear-cross sensor.
dnmc··on The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)
Here's another for your collection.

- Putting the car in reverse sets off the neighbor's home security system. https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/7k12fs/neighbors_hous...

dnmc··on Banned C++ features in Chromium
There are yet more interesting docs in the parent directory :)

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/styleg...

dnmc··on Show HN: Artificial Ivy in the Browser
Oh no! I can run it on my phone, which is a few years old, so I figured it wouldn't lock anybody's computers up.

It's pretty CPU-heavy because it's constantly creating and updating SVG elements. I may attempt to rewrite sometime with WebGL and shaders :)

dnmc··on Show HN: Artificial Ivy in the Browser
Hah, believe me, the flamethrower feature is first in line for the v2 milestone!
dnmc··on Show HN: Artificial Ivy in the Browser
Oh, those are great ideas. On that note, I was also considering simulating nutrients and rewarding the roots that find them.