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sriku

2,326 karma · joined May 17, 2014

Interests - Music, Mathematics, Physics, Scheme

email - srikumarks @t gmail d.t com blog - http://sriku.org

Work area (former) - Automatic video editing tools (algorithms, fx, rendering)

Ph.D. - Understanding Indian classical music through computer synthesis.

Banner - helping create, communicate, learn and understand Indian classical music through technology.

(formerly aufreak3)

submissionscomments
sriku··on Previewing the Model Hardware Standard
Open Sound Control reinvented?

https://joearms.github.io/published/2016-01-28-A-Badass-Way-...

sriku··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
Same here. For tough compute, I spin up a machine in some cloud service, do what I need, and shut it down. Of course, its a different issue if you need power on the desktop right there, like for A/V/Graphics work.
sriku··on Turns are Better than Radians (2022)
You'll have to bring in the 2π factor somewhere. Cant escape it. If sint is the sin function but with angle give in turns, then d/dx sint(x) = 2π cost(x). sin(x) ~ x for small x but sint(x) ~ 2πx for small x.
sriku··on Why care about programming languages
Lean seems to fit your ask fairly well.
sriku··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
I recently lent a book with some scribbled notes of mine to a friend and they were all like "oh we love scribbles in books". Another way to connect.
sriku··on A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury
Those inseparably mix up programming language, compiler, programmer(s) and application domain as factors.
sriku··on A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury
I wish people'd report metrics like "40 type classes, 5000 functions, 300 instances, 20 monads, 14 functors, ..." And such instead of "lines of haskell".
sriku··on Claude Code to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan?
This test would be a good way to lose existing subscribers perhaps.
sriku··on Claude Code to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan?
https://claude.com/product/claude-code seems to say it is included in Pro plan.
sriku··on OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS
"Fast" is not always a virtue and "efficiency" is not always the only consideration.
sriku··on XML Is a Cheap DSL
While this can give a notation for the domain, you'd still need an engine to process it. Prolong+CLPFD perhaps meets it well (not too familiar with the tax domain) and one could perhaps paraphrase Greenspun's tenth rule to this combo too.
sriku··on The Om Programming Language
Another concatenative-ish one embedded in js .. just for fun - https://github.com/srikumarks/pjs

You may find the "genailang" module fun to play with.

sriku··on I Don't Like Magic
This - I even ran Claude to produce a security eval of openclaw for fun and it was mostly spot on - https://sriku.org/files/openclaw-secreport-claude-13feb2026....
sriku··on Cord: Coordinating Trees of AI Agents
We built something like this by hand without much difficulty for a product concept. We'd initially used LangGraph but we ditched it and built our own out of revenge for LangGraph wasting our time with what could've simply been an ordinary python function.

Never again committing to any "framework", especially when something like Claude Code can write one for you from scratch exactly for what you want.

We have code on demand. Shallow libraries and frameworks are dead.

sriku··on Use protocols, not services
The "impossibility" of enforcing legislated constraints on thousands of providers point is hand waving. We're all legislated to not harm each other. Throwing the small fraction who do in jail, is sufficient to keep the vast majority away from harming others, and there is also moral alignment.

If 10% of hosts (maybe even less) are penalized, the rest will likely start complying. much like self managed compliance of thousands of companies. A protocol is only as good as the entities that participate in the community using it.

sriku··on The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling
"what specific laws ...?"

If a company chooses a design and it can be proved through a subpoena of their communications that the design was intended and chosen for its addictive traits, even if there has been no evidence collected for the addictiveness, then the company (or person) can be deemed to have created a design in bad faith to society and penalized for it.

(Well that's my attempt. I tried to apply "innocent until proven guilty" here.)

sriku··on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?
Great point and many of the responses are very interesting too.

I wonder whether part of this is a habitualization of intolerance for just being with oneself - to be ok with feeling bored, for instance. Most suggestions are about "doing". Just being with oneself without a doing is painful for many from what I've seen.

sriku··on “Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)
This looks to me like partly a false dichotomy. We can design languages and write libraries. Some would even argue that some kinds of "libraries" could be viewed as languages themselves, as much as some languages might as well have been written as libraries in another language.

Also often, the language doesn't live isolated from its implementation (compiler or interpreter). While theory looks at languages via its semantics, in practice as the OP notes it is about the quality of the implementation and what can be reasonably done with the language.

A recent [1] case is Julia. I think it has hit a kind of sweet spot for language design where new performant code tends to get written in Julia rather than in some other language and bound to it. At its core, it is a simple "call functions, passing data in and getting results out" kind of language, but what the functions ("methods") mean and how the compiler does just-ahead-of-time compilation with deep type specialized code means you can write high level code that optimizes very well. Those mechanics operate under the hood though, which makes for a pleasant programming experience ... and there are loads of cutting edge packages being written in Julia. It is less interesting to look at Julia as "just the language".

[1] recent in programming languages is perhaps anything <= 15 years? .. because it takes time to discover a language's potential.

sriku··on The most famous transcendental numbers
i^i isn't unique right? The "let x = π/2" could very well have been "let x = π(4k+1)/2" for any integer k.
sriku··on The rise of industrial software
The frame set by the OP completely out me off and dissuaded me from reading the rest of the article beyond the first paragraph. Didn't feel like much throught was given to what was being said.
sriku··on The rise of industrial software
I find it hard to think of code as being the output of programming. I keep re-reading Naur's "Programming as theory building" paper and it still feels relevant and closer to how the activity feels to me, AI or no AI.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

sriku··on Don't Become the Machine
A quote shared by a close friend and mentor -

Apparently an elderly Irish musician said this as he was tuni g his instrument - "I've learnt that the secret to being happy is to not get personally involved in your own life."

sriku··on Dafny: Verification-Aware Programming Language
Am working on rewriting an imperative programming course to use Dafny to present verified algorithms and data structures.
sriku··on Dafny: Verification-Aware Programming Language
I quite like Dafny, despite my first run up with it (verification aspect) being frustrating. The language is well designed for this. Also, it looks like it is a great candidate as a code generation target for LLMs because you can generate the proof of correctness and run a feedback loop with Dafny's checker.

Try writing a^b in integers and proving its correctness. The simple version works (based on a x a^(b-1)). But if you write an "optimised one" using (with handwaved details) (a^(b/2))^2 .... pulled some serious hair trying to prove this function works.

sriku··on Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith
In a discussion I was in recently, a participant mentioned "culture eats strategy for breakfast" .. which perhaps makes sense in this context. Be bold enough to do what makes the team and the product thrive.
sriku··on An Economy of AI Agents
Wouldn't "The Age of Em" be relevant to this paper? Was surprised to not find a reference to it in the preprint.
sriku··on A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
Impressive performance, yes but is the article giving more credit than due?
sriku··on A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
Rgd the "14 lb 5 oz" point in the article, the simpler explanation than the hypothesis there that it back calculated the weight is that there seems to be a space between 14 and 5 - i.e. It reads more like "14 5" than "145"?
sriku··on How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in
The article says it was created to write audio software but I'm unable to find any first sources for that. Pointers?
sriku··on Forth: The programming language that writes itself
I've had a soft spot for Forth and am toying with a silly Forth-like interpreter for web programming ... if not for actual use, at least for some fun time. One concept it adds is the notion of a "current selection" which can define the available vocabulary to use and is used to select and work with DOM elements. Just experimenting.

https://github.com/srikumarks/pjs

Edit: As a kid, I disliked BASIC as a language though it let me do fun stuff. So I made an interpreter in BASIC for a language I'd like and it turned out Forth-like (and I didn't know about Forth at that time). I guess I'm still that kid some 35 years later.

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