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spense

43 karma · joined December 14, 2023

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spense··on Port of the TypeScript compiler, checker and lsp to Rust, by LLM
> I did over $400,000 in API priced tokens

i'd bet this is a few subscriptions over a few months rather than paying directly for tokens.

spense··on Overlord: AI accountability that watches over you
this looks awesome. a personal ai dom.

but i don’t trust you, so i’ll need your privacy policy before signing up. it 404s right now

https://overlord.app/privacy.html

spense··on The vibe coder's career path is doomed
we're in agreement. context rot is real.

i'm suggesting the solution is abstraction + composition. 1/ use ai to solve a subset of the problem 2/ abstract away its complexity to just its interface 3/ build with known interfaces.

this is how we solve problems. it should work the same for ai.

spense··on The vibe coder's career path is doomed
agree, but no-code is complexity-limited bc they can't:

  1. write custom components on the fly (ai can)
  2. compose arbitrary components (composition isn't solved)
spense··on The vibe coder's career path is doomed
one-shotting entire products is a dead end.

once we figure out the right building blocks of applications, it will simply be inefficient to write code yourself.

perhaps a controversial take, but writing code is going away (99% of it).

spense··on Implementing fast TCP fingerprinting with eBPF
i've been looking at this recently and this isn't just for bots. ebpf fingerprinting is how cloudflare quickly detects ddos attacks.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/defending-the-internet-how-cloud...

spense··on The muscular imagination of Iain M. Banks: a future you might want
how we handle ai will dramatically shape our future.

if you consider many of the great post-ai civilizations in sci-fi (matrix, foundation, dune, culture, blade runner, etc.), they're all shaped by the consequences of ai:

   - matrix: ai won and enslaved humans. 
   - foundation: humans won and a totalitarian empire banned ai, leading to the inevitable fall of trantor bc nobody could understand the whole system. 
   - dune: humans won (butlerian jihad) and ai was banned by the great houses, which led to the rise of mentats. 
   - culture series: benign ai (minds) run the utopian civilization according to western values.
i'm a also fan of the hyperion cantos where ai and humans found a mutually beneficial balance of power.

which future would you prefer?

spense··on Dark Mode Sucks
I'm all in on dark mode. All my devices are dark. I find it far easier on my eyes. And out of frustration that most sites don't have the option, I've enabled Chrome's auto dark mode[0], though this still breaks a few things (worth the cost to me).

[0] chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark

spense··on I sped up serde_json strings by 20%
awesome that serde moves so quickly. i just ran across simdutf8 and realized the pr for simd-enabled uft8 parsing is coming up on 5 years:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/68455

spense··on Multi-cursor code editing: An animated introduction
Yep. Nothing better than wowing other devs.
spense··on Multi-cursor code editing: An animated introduction
Love these!

I'd add filling out boilerplate (e.g., impl trait defintions).

An extension can also increment selected numbers together or turn selected 0s into a sequence.

spense··on US Air Force says AI-controlled F-16 has been dogfighting with humans
There's an inflection point where technology accrues too much power to a ruling class, such that no amount of unrest or revolution is able reset the social order.

I believe China has already passed this point. Their culture and individual behavior is tightly controlled (e.g., you can't use public bathrooms if your social score is too low).

AI may be the catalyst for western countries.

spense··on New theory on Satoshi Nakamoto
honestly, i thought we settled on Adam Back as Satoshi:

  - adam was extremely active during the early cypherpunk days, when
  - he invented Hashcash, which bitcoin cites in its whitepaper and used as its PoW
  - he was the first to take Wei Dai's b-money proposal seriously and discusses combining it with hashcash (the 2 core elements of bitcoin)
  - he disappeared and reappeared professionally during the exact timeframe of bitcoin development
  - his writing closely matches satoshi's (british english + style/punctuation)
  - he had no public involvement with bitcoin until he joined Bitcointalk forums in 2013 and suddenly had intimate details of unknown bugs in bitcoin saying "I thought I'd fixed them".
  - he started Blockstream with the mission to ensure the survival of bitcoin (funded lighting, paid core devs, etc)
  - he recently helped nail the coffin on Craig Wright's case in court proving he was not satoshi, during which
  - he revealed the earliest known email correspondence with satoshi
watch the interview were he uncomfortably describes himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=688J9UZJxKg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g

spense··on New theory on Satoshi Nakamoto
why not adam back? the evidence in favor of adam dwarfs other candidates.
spense··on Ask HN: What do y'all make of Netflix's 3 Body problem?
> Nothing important can happen.

wouldn't it be a wake up call? wouldn't things of real importance start to happen?

we're insanely capable creatures, but most of our energy is wasted on in-fighting and getting in our way.

spense··on The TikTok ban is all about preserving US power
"A republic, if you can keep it" -bf

america gets many things wrong, but to think it deserves to collapse or that it shouldn't take steps to protect itself is ignoring history.

tiktok is controlled by a country we're entering/entered a new cold war with. china is not your friend.

spense··on Ask HN: Are there any good reasons to use C++ over Rust for new projects today?
personal antidote - i've heard this too, but jumping in (after years of python/typescript), i'm blown away by how productive i can be. it's easily my favorite language.

the hiring pool may be smaller, but don't believe the fear.

spense··on What it was like working for Gitlab
are you suggesting a better way?
spense··on Polyinstantiation in DBMS
this seems extremely inefficient.

attaching a role-based policy to data fields (or storing it alongside data) should be enough.

spense··on Apple drops PWA support on iOS for EU users
It's not true. According to a follow-up tweet:

> Sites that had some PWA information provided - such as an iOS icon - would be added as PWAs even though they weren’t. They have tightened up things so that only sites that are explicitly configured as PWAs will be added as such.

https://x.com/JamesRLandrum/status/1755411290107863429?s=20

spense··on Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
> Is resolution going to peak?

not for awhile. apple vision / oculus will stream (4k/8k) 3d movies.

https://developer.apple.com/streaming/examples/

spense··on Benchmarking 20 programming languages on N-queens and matrix multiplication
C, Nim and Zig all benefit from static allocation and it's available in rust, so seems fair?

also, `const N` is used in rust's nqueen test, so figured it would be fine.

someone posted an `.iter().zip()` solution which benchmarks only a little slower (+10ms) than static allocation:

https://github.com/attractivechaos/plb2/pull/4#issuecomment-...

spense··on Benchmarking 20 programming languages on N-queens and matrix multiplication
rust is equivalent to C when using static allocation

i sent a pr to fix it