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ivxvm

45 karma · joined June 21, 2021

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ivxvm··on 11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker
Hey, but it's genuinely a nice language. Maybe they're not the most brilliant of type theorists, but even without ownership/borrowing, just stuff like traits, structs/enums/unions with pattern matching, etc, is done quite well.
ivxvm··on Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7
> you just need to load the image into RAM

> The startup is of course nowhere near that of a small C or Zig binary, but for larger tools it will be tolerable.

It's worse than Java and Python and JavaScript I think? The languages that were always disliked for CLI/TUI/GUI apps because of unnecessary bloat they bring due to their runtimes. It's not impossible to use this ofc, it's just inferior to alternatives with minimal runtime, so such an app might be considered a temporary solution to use before someone rewrites it in Rust or Zig or C and people have no reason to use slower and more resource hoggy version. Many people even choose to avoid Emacs for slow startup times, now imagine if something like grep was starting a virtual Lisp Machine underneath. This is why I think it's more promising to consider it for apps and niches that people never tried to keep minimal, such as games and webservices, even if it doesn't have native coroutines or whatever. Using non-standard solution is almost a non-issue and invisible to end user while startup times and RAM usage are very visible.

Also, ofc there's definitely unique things that become available with something that's just as programmable in runtime as it is in development stage. So some kind of very polymorphic app that benefits from growing more native code in response to user actions, could benefit from it. I don't have many ideas of what app really needs this though.

In the past, like two decades ago, I've seen a person using SBCL with some kind of unofficial continuations or green threads for backend webdev in commercial setting. I also remember someone using it in context of virtualization systems, but don't remember their exact usecase.

Also quick search shows there are some modern takes on coroutines as well: https://atgreen.github.io/repl-yell/posts/sbcl-fibers/

ivxvm··on Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7
Anywhere is where exactly? I've been thinking of where I could use it for like 10 minutes, and I couldn't come up with anything. Maybe a game engine or web services. It wouldn't make much sense for any kind of desktop software or command line utilities that are supposed to start really fast and have minimal runtime.
ivxvm··on Dopamine Fracking
Yeah, when people say "dopamine hit" nowadays that can mean anything from serotonin to endorphins to even adrenaline. What they usually mean is simply an optimized experience. Optimized, commodified, industrialized, etc, in a way article describes.
ivxvm··on The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide
3-7 and 9-12 is everyday life in Ukraine.
ivxvm··on Science YouTuber physicsgirl (Dianna Cowern) stands for the first time in 2 yrs
I didn't word it right. It should have been something like: "Add it to your list and research it if you're out of options". It helped me with some weird condition years ago which could have been depression but it had zero symptoms other than severe chronic fatigue, so maybe it wasn't.
ivxvm··on Science YouTuber physicsgirl (Dianna Cowern) stands for the first time in 2 yrs
Recommendation to research something still can be useful. I didn't word it right. It should have been something like: "Add it to your list and research it if you're out of options". It helped me with some weird condition years ago which could have been depression but it had zero symptoms other than severe chronic fatigue, so maybe it wasn't.
ivxvm··on CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops
Things like hospitals, airlines, 911, should have multiple systems with different software stacks and independent backends running in-parallel, so that when one infra goes down they can switch to another.
ivxvm··on CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops
I've never seen a program running in kernel mode other than AV software. Pretty sure all stuff you listed doesn't. Asking admin permissions doesn't mean it's kernel mode software.
ivxvm··on The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
Necropolis, Ziggurat... Imo the best games nowadays are often those that no one heard about. Popularity wasn't a good metric for a very long while. And thankfully games like "New World" and "Starfield" are helping a lot for general population to finally figure this out.
ivxvm··on Awesome Engineering Games
Check out Modded Minecraft Expert Modpacks like "Create: Above & Beyond", "Project Ozone", "Nomifactory" and so on.
ivxvm··on Quake Brutalist Jam II
It's okay if it's Quake, just don't suggest it to be used as a Postal level
ivxvm··on Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
It's interesting thing to explore when you already have a nice big picture, but overall it's quite misleading in case of genres (or whole branches) which author is not much into.
ivxvm··on Before he was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski was a mind-control test subject
I think you get the wrong idea. What he basically says is that scientists mostly do science because they enjoy doing it, and everything else he says is a consequence of that. People in general tend to gravitate to activities which they enjoy in terms of process, and science is no exception. Usefulness of their work would be a nice side effect, but people rarely do things purely for result, especially when it's something that requires a lot of time and efforts. Basically we are inherently hedonistic creatures and there's no way changing that.
ivxvm··on Before he was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski was a mind-control test subject
I'll just save some quotes here since I really like them:

> Kaczynski likened science to a “surrogate activity” that is “directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward” or some sense of fulfillment.

> “Scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the work itself,” he wrote. “… Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.”

ivxvm··on Free-types: Higher kinded types in TypeScript
Oh, so it's just a type alias for readability. Then it makes sense.
ivxvm··on DeviceScript – TypeScript for Tiny IoT Devices
Idk, I think it's extremely statistically rare coincidence for nominative typing to be a better default than structural. In other words, it's much more useful (by default) to have some function work on more types than be a little bit more type-safe for the exactly the type author had in mind when writing it. In my opinion, type-safety has diminishing returns and the most of its usefulness lies in trivial things, like passing a string instead of some object or array just as a typo, or writing a wrong field name when mapping one object to another, but nominative typing lies way beyond my imaginary line marking the zone when types become more of annoyance than help.
ivxvm··on Free-types: Higher kinded types in TypeScript
Not really possible, because Record and Map aren't compatible at all. At best they both have something like `toString`. You'll need to define at least something like RecordFunctor<T> and MapFunctor<T> to make this useful.
ivxvm··on Macro-ts: TypeScript compiler with typesafe syntactic macros (2022)
> Javascript is dynamic enough there is absolutely no need for Macros.

TypeScript macroses would be very useful for the same things codegenerators are useful: for example generating api client from swagger schema. Ofc you can do some trickery with metaprogramming, for example build and eval strings on fly and the result could be a dynamically generated function, but the point is: we want the process and the result to be typesafe and efficient, which is what is missing with hacky dynamic metaprogramming approaches.

ivxvm··on Where have all the hackers gone?
> But presumably there is also more competition for jobs using popular technologies?

Maybe, but personally I don't feel it has such a significant contribution as number of positions you can apply to. In these languages you basically can find a dozen of positions worldwide open at any given moment of time and apply to them, in JS you can find hundreds upon hundreds of positions every day and just filter and keep applying, and it still can take weeks or months to get an offer, a lot of your applications aren't even processed at that moment, which could be the case with less popular tech positions as well.

ivxvm··on Where have all the hackers gone?
Another reason is that being a fan of less popular tech is heavily punishing to career and job hunting. Hell, it's quite a challenge to find a job even in React/JavaScript (took me a good month or even a bit more last time, and I'm a senior dev), and it would be a nightmare for languages/ecosystems like Haskell or Rust. I wouldn't even want to find another JS job because I don't want to go through a month of such struggle again, and if I were a Haskell dev I would be afraid to lose that job like I will die if I do. Nowadays, I don't even want to touch stuff like that simply because it would be unhealthy for me to become interested in tech that makes my life so much harder and stressful. I would probably think about it only if companies started sending me positions with better-than-senior-React rates themselves proposing to pay me for learning their required stack on the go.
ivxvm··on A moment’s silence, please, for the death of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse
Are their metaverse developments open-sourced? Wouldn't it be meaningful to just give it to people, probably with a license like GPL? That would be such an extraordinary waste if all that massive amount of work they did so far will go into the trash can.
ivxvm··on And yet It Understands
I think the whole concept of "consciousness" might get old in nearby future. ANNs and brains will get better understood and people start questioning not what consciousness and reasoning are, but rather why they feel their "now" as they do, whether they are full of energy and in sharp mental state or they drunk to half death and can't really reason and form sentences normally yet still perceiving their "now" in the same way and feeling like they are still them. I don't know if there is a better word for this concept, but it definitely feels like the word "consciousness" shifts away from this meaning each day.
ivxvm··on And yet It Understands
Is it really surprising that text model can't solve graphical quizzles?
ivxvm··on And yet It Understands
> has made all of its progress by throwing chairs (data) at the problem.

To me it seems like the most tricky thing about the whole field is that quantitative adjustments make qualitative breakthroughs. Simply increasing parameters / layers / data make sudden rapid jumps in generalization / abstraction / etc. It's somewhat unintuitive because many things in world don't work like this, and the metaphor you're discussing is more about "normal" things, it doesn't really apply to ANNs well, those are more of anomaly, like quantum mechanics (yeah, it's probably a bad analogy too).

ivxvm··on And yet It Understands
Maybe it simply doesn't understand Venn diagrams well - after all, it's a visual concept.
ivxvm··on GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
So it still can't write new code according to project's patterns / conventions and "core" library?
ivxvm··on Reassessing relative temporal lobe size in anthropoids and modern humans
Idk. I think the real tipping point is being able to succesfully use external memory so that you don't have to keep everything in your working memory when doing reasoning or solving problems.
ivxvm··on Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
Product owner is the one who analyses requirements, decides what should be implemented, and creates user stories for programmers. Currently programmers can use AI to help implement user stories but in future probably AI will be good enough take and implement user stories on its own. In more distant future it could replace product owner too. So that CEO can just talk AI directly into making a great product without much details, but at that point businesses like this will be less valuable because many can do that and there's no need for devteam and less need for investments.
ivxvm··on Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
I wouldn't be surprised if John Carmack combines activities of product owner, game designer, and programmer. In most industry cases, programming jobs are not like this. There are dedicated positions for people who focus on delivered value and it's not programmers. So in scrum terms, he might actually be saying that programmers will be indeed obsolete, but product owners, game designers and other kinds of business analysts not.
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