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smasher164

1,521 karma · joined August 13, 2015

akhil.cc
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smasher164··on Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone
why do we see pdf viewer exploits on ios when we have sandboxing mechanisms nowadays like wasm? Or is this exploit accounting for the sandbox breakage?
smasher164··on Getting Started with AT Protocol
> you wouldn't normally use a database replication protocol to actually transmit live video

Right, I'm more concerned about the areas where there's overlap between atproto and matrix, like with identity and authentication, for example.

smasher164··on Getting Started with AT Protocol
One thing I'm wondering is how ATproto can be integrated with voice/video chat. Would you combine it with Matrix, XMPP, or some custom protocol?
smasher164··on How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language
Yeah I think if Julia had a plain interpreted mode or a base template JIT that could tier up to LLVM's, they could drive that execution latency down a lot.
smasher164··on Introduction to Formal Verification with Lean Part 1
a) Thanks for putting this together!

b) Please don't hijack my scrolling.

c) I really wish Lean were more mature as an application programming language. Its standard library is really lacking.

smasher164··on Ask HN: Did Fable disappear from your Claude usage and requires credits now?
They might use this bug as a reason to be able to extend it for another week or something.
smasher164··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
It's still shocking to me that the approach taken wasn't to have Claude write a tool that translates Zig to Rust. I imagine it would've been cheaper, deterministic, and each iteration would produce a better tool.
smasher164··on Running Windows Games on a Hobby OS with Wine
If you have a goal of making your OS usable, you have to design it with this in mind. Build your kernel and driver subsystem in a way that legacy OS interfaces can be implemented on top of them. Find ways to repurpose existing infrastructure so you don't have to do all the work yourself.
smasher164··on Show HN: Microcrad – Micrograd Reimplemented in C
I guess I interpreted this part of their README as implying that the author found RC too fragile

> Reference counting buys correctness and composability, but at a cost.

> Disadvantage #1: you must balance every reference. Each value_create, value_retain, and each operation's implicit retain of its operands has to be matched by a value_release. Forget one and you leak; do one too many and you free memory that is still in use. The training examples in examples/ are verbose precisely because they are scrupulous about this in their error paths; that verbosity is the price of leak-free C.

smasher164··on Show HN: Microcrad – Micrograd Reimplemented in C
Is there a reason you didn't go with something like Boehm for a library gc, instead of writing your reference counting implementation?
smasher164··on LLMs Are Complicated Now
lol yeah I guess the best move right now is to fetch their /feed and iterate through <post>s
smasher164··on Cargo-Geiger
I think what would matter from this kind of measure is whether a project's use of unsafe actually has undefined behavior. Like the number of unsafe blocks is not really my concern as much as what the unsafe blocks are doing. If you build a single faulty abstraction via unsafe, anything that uses it is broken.

In my projects, it usually comes down to a scenario like needing to write inline assembly or invoke a foreign function, where there are close to zero guarantees the language can give me.

smasher164··on Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers
Honestly, given how trivial it is for mythos-class models to identify an exploit, I’m going to assume any sufficiently large project written in C, C++, or Zig is riddled with latent vulnerabilities and compromised.
smasher164··on Formal methods and the future of programming
I think it's a good time to learn Lean. It positions itself as a proof assistant that's also good at practical programming. I'm not sure how mature the ecosystem is for the latter.
smasher164··on Restartable Sequences
I was having a conversation with someone recently if RSEQ would be a good primitive to build a load-link/store-conditional implementation in user-space. It gives you a critical window, though you still have to deal with spurious restarts, and provide a way for one core to abort another.
smasher164··on Perry Compiles TypeScript directly to executables using SWC and LLVM
On other sites, like github and reddit. This exchange was funny though. He eventually gets called out by the other commenter to stop responding with an LLM: https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/issues/139#issuecomment-429...
smasher164··on Perry Compiles TypeScript directly to executables using SWC and LLVM
I'm not against AI usage but the website, documentation, and even the comments the creator (proggeramlug) makes in response to questions are all very clearly AI-generated. Also, as someone else noticed, the pacing of the commits is eerily fast. That combined with the level of functionality makes me dubious how much accountability the creators have over the implementation.

Like you really built a backend that lowers to LLVM, integrated it with a generational gc, wrote a cross-platform reactive runtime, and built support for eleven different targets within like a year? Are you just prompting the model to tack on the next coolest thing or do you understand how these features work?

I worry how many of these kinds of projects will show up now. How do you guarantee stability? If there's a memory corruption error in the GC implementation, who's going to debug it?

smasher164··on Performance of Rust Language [pdf]
You end up needing something like refinement types to control the way you statically enforce bounds. That being said, there's stuff like https://flux-rs.github.io/flux/ which uses macros to layer a refinement type system on top of rust's. You can use it to statically eliminate bounds checks.
smasher164··on Making deep learning go brrrr from first principles (2022)
> This is a category error.

Okay, but surely you know what they actually mean right, or are you being willfully obtuse? They are comparing CPython (the main python implementation)'s implementation that runs on the CPU with a kernel running on the GPU.

smasher164··on Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust"
What I don't understand is if they were going to translate Zig to unsafe Rust, why not just build a translation tool for it? You could do a one-to-one mapping of language constructs, hardcoding patterns in your codebase, and as one friend put it "Tbh they could've just hooked up zig translate-c to c2rust". They would get deterministic translation, would probably have not been a heavy investment to build, and the output would have the same assurances as the input.

In this case, I would trust the output even less than the input. The input was memory-unsafe but hand-written. The output is memory-unsafe but also vibe-coded and has had no eyeballs on it. What is the point of abusing agentic AI for this use-case?

smasher164··on Hammerspoon
One of the reasons I left macos was that automation via Automator and Applescript was inconsistent and unsupported in many contexts. Well that and the locking down of app distribution and sandboxing. However, the positive reception to Hammerspoon is making me consider trying it again.
smasher164··on Ad: An Adaptable Text Editor
This is very exciting! I've been longing for an acme-like editor that adapts better to mainstream OSes. Being vim-like is a major plus. I'm gonna try this out!
smasher164··on Tvix – A New Implementation of Nix
Does tvix support targeting windows? And I do not mean WSL. iirc, the nix attempted a windows port but there were some hardcoded assumptions made about unix in the implementation that made it intractable, for example the location of the store. Do these issues also hold for tvix?
smasher164··on Rust data structures with circular references (2021)
Another approach is to use a Gc<T> smart pointer: https://docs.rs/gc/latest/gc/

I've used this in an interpreter and it's quite convenient.

smasher164··on vmcache: Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management [pdf]
> these groups don't seem to be interested in fixing kernel problems

I mean, they built a whole kernel module that addresses page allocation/deallocation scalability issues. Whether that gets brought upstream, I'm not sure.

smasher164··on NixOS has one fatal flaw
Yeah in many ways, Nix is a research project that escaped the lab. It’s the first tool of its kind that also happened to become successful. You have to write in this dynamically typed Haskell with poor affordances for being a build system and fragmented ways of addressing pinning.
smasher164··on Darling: Run macOS Software on Linux
I have an iphone, so I hope the serial number won’t be an issue.
smasher164··on Darling: Run macOS Software on Linux
Yeah, I also tend to bring up iCloud Notes in a browser tab. It’s still far from perfect, since Notes is usually an offline-first app, which you miss out on here.

I’ve been looking for a replacement, but nothing really gives you

- Offline-first usage

- Sync changes via CRDT

- Fast startup time

- Rich text support

- iOS and desktop linux support

smasher164··on Darling: Run macOS Software on Linux
I know this only works for cli tools right now, but I’d love to be able to run iMessage and Notes on linux.
smasher164··on Frink is a programming language designed to make physical calculations simple
Frink is great. If you’re looking for a more general purpose language with a units system, consider F#: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref...
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