positron26

> Can't differentiate the function? Fuck gradients. Here's the entire fucking posterior.

- Monte Carlo

It is a great pleasure to return to instinct, leaning back on pre-internet years, on early internet years. I cannot wait to return to a lifestyle where I tend to encounter my peers in great numbers, to only incidentally hear the things we say about "the internet." A greater pleasure still would be to recreate the wonder in a form that is more durable, one where these people who I would identify closely with may not be drowned out, as if the universe became transparent again.

The gradient into formalisms is steep and the bottom is deep. These are the worst results anyone will ever see again. The bottom of the internet is also deep, but won't be around much longer.

Before the like button, it was more individualistic. Before web 2.0, before global market penetration had hit 10%, it was mainly early adopters.

Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.

The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.

I suppose we will tell them to vote for better laws?

That last few years of being under 18 can feel completely immoral. "Study hard. Learn skills you will need in life." Meanwhile GPA inflation from unconcerned minders of public institutions will put food on their own table, so accessing anything that will actually move your life ahead will generally require money or ingenuity.

Piracy isn't my religion, but I find it a critical relief valve protecting individual self-determination, especially for young people. Over-centralization of capability into hosted services creates a wall for a problem that needed more relief valves.

No, even the humans are dead.

Both the "user configuration" and the library are configuration masquerading as code. One is dynamically evaluated, the other compiled.

I just figure users of Zed know this... so what are we pretending to talk about?

Internet is dead.

Don't want to derail. Of course lighter RA is very welcome!

But I can't wait for the moral panic driving us to all pussy-foot around LLMs to die with prejudice.

Virgins often at some point in their lives assume that not having sex means they have achieved some higher level of self-control, a privileged position upon a high precipice from which they can judge others. They gather, stew, and throw stones at individuals who are going to and fro, living their lives.

Any and every gathering can mob individuals. It is not inherently moral to find yourself in a troupe. You have not reached "consensus" except within a single Discord room, a subreddit, some cesspool of comments on HN. No amount of back-slapping idiocy and corrupt self-evaluation will make any mob any more than just that.

I often say that the difference between an engineer and a mechanic is that the engineer can make a rocket fly the first time (given enough time). Still, good engineers know that time is a trade-off, that exposing errors and motivating problems sooner is very, very worth it. They contain failures. They pull errors forward in time.

But along come those most enabled by LLMs, the idiotic brigades of co-enablers who know only the high quality software made by others. They are experts in what they must be provided in order to open their wallets, and they bring this expertise into the arena of those sharing ideas. Ideas are rough, and idiots are not fond of them.

Lo the brigades demand the engineer never to show them anything that is not perfect. The brigades complain endlessly of laziness while giving no effort themselves. The brigades expect engineers with twenty years of experience make the inefficient time tradeoff of coding everything by hand even before having any idea if what they're building will be wanted by the world.

The brigades want the perfect software, but not the ugly, filthy process from which it is forged. They want it to impress them the first time they see it. They want it to be easy, low-price, available at the push of a button. They want it yesterday and without bugs. Add "Don't use LLMs!" to the list of unreasonable and ignorant demands.

The brigades hate a world where you can't trust a project from its heft and good looking README alone. They hate that what they have never had any interest in reading at all can now no longer be blindly trusted. They hate these LLMs. They hate them, HATE THEM!!! They hate the laziness, the long-winded replies, the hallucinations...

At the culmination of their frustrations, the brigades turn to the engineer with precise instruction: "Give me only the answer. Make no mistakes." We owe these lazy shits nothing.

The point of language servers is to support all editors that speak LSP.

Lol. In 2015 boring technology is at the hands of your PM spinning up some agent spam. Bury this pile of outdated thinking. Go hard at the most difficult programming you can find or go home.

Is that the earthquake in question? No. So your hair-splitting is motivated by what again? Rationalizing HN overreacting so that people can be entertained? Everyone here is "winning" an online argument with zero regard for the false alarm all the karma farming causes.

Okay. Let's make every such instance news?

HN is exaggerating to feel close to the action. It's childish.

There is a trench off of Tokyo that is likely to rupture in our lifetimes, and people who have other people to check on don't care about HN's disaster fantasies.

8 is serious. 9 is Pacific subduction rupture.

7 is not really top news of the day.

People with friends and family exposed don't really appreciate being false-alarmed with 7s and 6s.

Bill Gureley's talk on regulation comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM&t=1447s

The reason barking at open source will only get the dog thrown into the river is because there is a whole lot more cumulative power distributed among companies and consumers who don't want two incumbents to dictate which kinds of alternatives can exist.

Note that those rushing to the "all corpos evil" talking points will turn around and advocate delegating these decisions to "the government." This is the same government that they also claim is bought by the corporations. It's also the same government that will enforce the regulatory capture on behalf of the yucky corporation against the broad, diverse interests.

Thinking big vs small while embracing the biggest of the big is some kind of inconsistency that people need to deal with by looking in the mirror and finding some awareness. Nuance. If your problem model is wrong, so is every solution you propose except if your wrong model may get lucky from time to time. Not every broken model is a broken clock. Some broken models cannot admit the right answer ever.

The real dynamic on display here is broad, correlated mass of overlapping interests, big and small. The big pile of people and entities that don't want to be governed by OpenAI and Anthropic can push harder and win the tug of war. You don't have to like your temporary allies all the time, but at least know who they are and when you are aligned.

It can't be one language, and that's the big problem. It's inescapably a bunch of tiny DSLs. Once you see both the inconsistency and the necessity for inconsistency, it becomes much easier to just roll with it.

Would like to hear the rest of this story. Don't have an X account atm.

Just like how the web was won?

I think Mozilla is chasing a past formula, but the projection isn't linear enough to remain consistent, and the critical parts of the outcome, utter centralization of the market dominance of the three C's, are left out of the equation.

We might get the consolation prize, a few nerds having competitive alternatives to applaud, but we will be left with the hidden costs: stagnation by bloated market leaders, consumers and businesses pouring trillions of dollars into the commercial offerings while open development wonders where money comes from, and the leakage of these imbalances into political and social spheres.

If we follow a Mozilla template and get to the peak of Mozilla's success at the web, look at what that really is. Facebook, Amazon, Google etc are orthogonal to that equation.

The algorithm advances are going to crash this so hard.

> their own arbitrary reasons

Outside pressure behind much of it.

In any case, there's a fundamental mismatch between pressure groups and the leverage they can exert through single-consensus. I don't know how to describe the other consensus that is on my brain, but it is distinct.

Making a note of this as an obvious technical alliance that should have existed for decades.

> we need someone

> Then GPL fans can

Checks out

The OS running the program isn't even perfect.

I tire so much of complainers who want someone else to make all their tools infallible yet want to do nothing. Let's just full-stop there. They not only want to avoid working on the tools. They prefer if the tool does everything for them, and they prefer having things done for them without bound.

Complainers want easy APIs. When the API isn't easy enough, they want easy Kubernetes containers "programmed" by YAML. When that isn't easy enough, it's all point-and-click hosted services on GCP and Amazon. You people don't want to program. You want apps. Infallable apps. You want to be consumers, fed from the sky like little birds who endeavor only never to fledge, never to fly. And you want to pay nothing for it.

The secret you people need to figure out is that the lifestyle you think is sustainable is actually a commensal relationship with people building things for you. There is no vast alliance to wrest power from corporations, to dissolve capitalism, no grass roots movement to "shake things up." There is food falling from higher in the water column from an ecosystem filled with people who do things. Those above do not have time to look down, but if they did, all they would feel is overwhelming contempt, so they only look across at the horizon.

But why do people seek to confirm comments like this? Because Rust scary. Churn on, little ant mill. Let be free any who understand the pointlessness of this performance.

Presuming there is an infinite pool of programmers who tirelessly work for a low price?

Was the human labor?

Present-to-present time, especially while we wait for VK_EXT_present_timing to become adopted, can only be indirectly measured. This makes just-in-time rendering unnecessarily hard. High-accuracy event timings can only be made for rendering, not presentation. The missed latches can be seen by phase doubling. Waiting on the last frame to finish displaying requires use of a fence on a separate timing thread. The timings provided by this and by VK_KHR_present_wait are muddied with OS scheduler latency. Spin-locking the waits with zero timeouts should be a thing, but does not seem to be guaranteed. The compositor also seems to inject scheduler jitter.

After all that, people can talk about averaging methods, but there's a lot to be done before what this blog is talking about is even available.

The reason solving just-in-time rendering is important is because queue priority is not actually supported by most drivers. Some extensions can give us global priority for the process, not real priority for queues. The right way then to avoid workload A from causing workload B to miss a latch is to put workload A into the idle time that would exist from running B just in time. This is itself a luxury based on the fact that workload B is lightweight enough that its own uncertainty can only rarely exceed the latch deadline.

At least on VRR displays, making B a bit late has much less dire consequences, but driving refresh from the application needs exclusive access to the display, and not all compositors want to provide this.

Please do reach out if it seems like I'm only still catching up. I'm sure someone knows a decent way to get sub-millisecond just-in-time rendering accuracy without watching the phase suddenly double on FRR. Ping https://github.com/positron-solutions/mutate and we can get in touch.

What these hardliners are standing for, I have no idea. If the code passes review, we're just arguing about hues of zeros and ones. "AI" is an attribute that type-erases entirely once an engineer pulls out the useful expressions and whips them into shape.

The worst part about all reactionary scares is that, because the behaviors are driven by emotion and feeling as opposed to any intentional course of action, the outcomes are usually counter productive. The current AI scare is exactly what you would want if you are OpenAI. Convince OSS, not to mention "free" software people, to run around dooming and ant milling each other about "AI bad" and pretty soon OSS is a poisonous minefield for any actual open AI, so OSS as a whole just sabotages itself and is mostly out of the fight.

I'm currently in the middle of trying to blow straight past this gatekeepy outer layer of the online discourse. What is a bit frustrating is knowing that while the seed will find the niches and begin spreading through invisible channels, in the visible channels, there's going to be all kinds of knee-jerk pushback from these anti-AI hardliners who can't distinguish between local AI and paying Anthropic for a license to use a computer. Worse, they don't care. The social psychosis of being empowered against some "others" is more important. Either that or they are bots.

And all of this is on top of what I've been saying for over a year. VRAM efficiency will kill the datacenter overspend. Local, online training will make it so that skilled users get better models over time, on their own data. Consultative AI is the future.

I have to remind myself that this entire misstep is a result of a broken information space, late-stage traditional social, filled with people (and "people") who have been programmed for years on performative clap-backs and middling ideas.

So fortunate to have some life before internet perspective to lean back on. My instinct and old-world common sense can see a way out, but it is nonetheless frustrating to watch the online discourse essentially blinding itself while doubling down on all this hand wringing to no end, accomplishing nothing more than burning a few witches and salting their own lands. You couldn't want it any better if you were busy entrenching.

Doing short form updates on BlueSky, but that is the worst algorithmic feed I have ever experienced in my life. I gave it some data. I indicated I didn't want to see some posts. The self-selection of the overall audience is overwhelmingly strong. No matter what I do to shape my engagement, all I get is Rachel Maddow in my feed.

The reason I'm not on X is because I just won't use a platform owned by someone who thinks Nazi salutes are just free expression (of desire to censor political opposition into utter powerlessness before purging them), so I'm not complaining about the Blue in Bluesky.

Nonetheless what it's abundantly clear that whatever audience I need to connect with, I cannot effectively do it on BlueSky. They need desperate overhaul to fix the self-selection bias that is likely making the platform appealing to only a very certain kind of ant.

> What does that tell you?

That HN was a neat community fifteen years ago, but like all things cool made by early adopters, it will eventually attract a following hoping to be somewhere, to exist among people doing things, but the tragedy of such followings is that they bring with them their toxicity, their immunity to their own poison, and drown out what they depend on until the early adopters early adopt away.

The real slop is all this lazy concern farming from an ant mill that is powerless to do anything except validate its own hand wringing.

> calling it out

Calling what out? Did we suddenly invent a durable Turing test that will last more than six months? (We didn't, but some people "just know")

The only durable metric is if the article is good, if the ideas are good. Everything else is complaining about Bob Dylan's electric guitar.

"very, very obvious" and yet so could be your comment or mine. Can we stop this kind of farming comment already?