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titzer

20,388 karma · joined August 24, 2013

WebAssembly co-founder, former V8 compiler techlead and engineer.

My programming language: http://github.com/titzer/virgil My newest Wasm engine: http://github.com/titzer/wizard-engine

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titzer··on Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
Yeah but they keep moving the buttons for no reason and somehow 34GB OS updates only result in rounded corners and less functionality.
titzer··on Python's experimental JIT to be removed
> Once your Python warms up

How long does that take?

titzer··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
I'm going to be the cynical one and offer this translation: "Our results are too important to wait for the pesky peer review, so we are dumping a whole ton of money in a fund and giving some elites a breathless first look so our buzz keeps getting jacked up."

The reality that Science is a grind and there are thousands of new results every year discovered by regular humans who use a regular human process to cross-check and review.

Treating every result from the AI like a gift from god is getting tiring.

titzer··on Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers
Yeah I forgot how we collectively decided that those people with money automatically get more money because they have money.
titzer··on Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers
> to those who want to buy the world

Oh, they don't need to buy it, they already inherited from their rich parents. The world is just a set of trading cards to them at this point.

Elon Musk's fake money could buy a new $10 million mansion every single day--every single day--for THREE CENTURIES, and he wants more!

Society is delusional. We can't even collectively agree to tax psychotic money-grubbers who cannot even enjoy the fake wealth they have their names on.

titzer··on Meta's GB{2,3}00 Cluster
When you're a celebrity, they let you do it.
titzer··on Ousted Savannah police officer gave ICE agent husband access to Flock system
s/think they//g
titzer··on Artificial intelligence is capitalism's final destination
> would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them

Hello, black and white thinking.

Personally I just find it soul-crushingly dystopian that a few people have hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of wealth and we laud their mental illnesses while at the very same time, people die because of lack of health care.

I find it morally reprehensible as a society that we constantly cater to the needs of nepo babies instead of taking away just a fraction of their ungodly wealth to actually help people.

titzer··on Artificial intelligence is capitalism's final destination
So much of the dialog around "capitalism" paints everything that is not Soviet or Mao-style communism as "capitalism", when in reality all economies are mixed. Democratic governments and regulatory bodies shape the economic landscape. The diversity and makeup of the marketplace makes a big difference.

A huge portion of the success of "capitalism" is due to well-funded open science.

When monopolies, crony capitalism, and growthism, these are active detriments to all but those in power. Things become top-heavy, inequality leads to increasing social disconnection, discontent, and, throughout history, violence including revolution.

But now they have the dark crystal hypnotizing us all, who knows what will happen.

titzer··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
If by this you mean that engineering is about meeting specifications. If by this you mean half assing some janky shit that barely clanks over, then no.
titzer··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
> a competitor to Google search

Fielding a web index takes a massive amount of compute and storage of a very different kind than what Anthropic is using. AI is extremely heavy on GPU, maybe somewhat on storage but (comparatively) light on CPU. They need CPU to train coding agents, obviously, but scaling to a billion user web search is a whole different thing.

titzer··on Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe
> The entire supply chain coordinates using these embedded sensors and control systems to make sure you always have safe food available at the lowest possible cost.

I think the entire supply chain is making sure it has maximum profits extractable by law and any other emergent phenomena you observe is serendipitous and probably temporary, damaged or dropped as soon as the regulatory environment or marketplace changes to allow another dime of profit.

titzer··on Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe
This future is just so damn depressing and I think a lot of people are in active denial.
titzer··on "Just Ask Claude" Is a Rare and Valuable Skill
Adblocker. Don't pay extortion fees.
titzer··on An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust
A distributed word processor that is not tied to the behemoth's cloud infrastructure and authentication walled garden would be very nice.
titzer··on An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust
Why make a clone when you can redo the whole dang UI? Sure we'd like WYSIWYG, but I am absolutely convinced now in my 34th year of computer use that I don't want a GUI with a bunch of toolbars and dropdown menus that is laid out by decades of cruft accumulation.
titzer··on Google told to halt work on datacentres in Finland over environmental concerns
Fines are just there as a threat to make sure they're not behind on their (checks notes...what are they calling it these days again...oh that's right) PAC contributions.
titzer··on Google is illegaly cutting forest to build data centers
> are able to punish them

They will not.

titzer··on I'm sorry, but you still have to think
The quality of anything is proportional to the time people spend paying attention to quality measures they care about. If you care about the quality of the code (and I am extremely bimodal about when I do and do not), then spending time looking at the code, whether said code is written by a clanker or a coworker, will lead to tinkering with and improving it. If you care about UI functionality, and you spend time tweaking the UI functionality, then it will get better. If you care about performance, and you spend time measuring, displaying, improving, it will get better.

Clanker code is no exception. Slop is slop because it's low effort.

There are projects I've put most of my career into (necessarily pre-AI), and those I definitely care about the code quality. I look at every line and I don't take clanker code without going around the mill a few times with it. There are lots of things in the code I like and things I don't like and want to refactor. I care about the code quality. But there are projects I've put only weeks or month into, and some only minutes. For most of my vibe-coded projects, I've only cursorily glanced at the code. For these projects I don't care about code quality as much as the architecture and interaction. The ones where I consistently tweak it to work how I want are...just better.

titzer··on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
Requires: Java 22 [link]
titzer··on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
Long live dd! Except every time I use it I am terrified I'll blow out the brains of the wrong device :/

Another example clown app: the MacOS downloads of TuxGuitar, a Java app, used to just ship as a zip with a big jar in it. Now it ships an entire Java Runtime environment specific to your processor architecture. It's 480MB. Derp.

titzer··on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
Yeah, and then 100 different apps can repackage the browser engine as an Electron app, each weigh 300+mb.

I saw this recently with Balena etcher. It's a firmware flashing app with about 10 buttons total. It's over 400mb because it's written in node and has an electron GUI.

Good jerb.

titzer··on Screens Aren't Destroying Young Minds. I Should Know
Depends on the programming language. :-)
titzer··on Screens Aren't Destroying Young Minds. I Should Know
At least one controlled study supports this: (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-50354-3)

They had participants spend either 45 mins doing normal smartphone use or 45 minutes watching a documentary, and the results were that both increased mental fatigue but the documentary group did not have reduced cognitive function, whereas regular smartphone use did.

"Results suggested that both watching a documentary and using a smartphone for 45 min increased subjective mental fatigue and drowsiness. Watching the documentary did not impair cognitive performance. Reaction times on the PVT and number of errors on NoGo trials in the Go/NoGo task were higher among the participants in the smartphone condition. These results indicate reduced vigilance and impaired inhibition capacities only after smartphone use. "

titzer··on Screens Aren't Destroying Young Minds. I Should Know
The entire article is "trust me bro, I used to be addicted, but now I have a PhD."

I mean, come on.

First claim in the article:

> But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis.

Linked paper doesn't support this. Only one study found evidence of overdiagnosis, and the data was both noisy and only focused on ADHD. It literally said "Most reviewed studies suggest that misdiagnosis does occur; however, only one study was able to examine overdiagnosis in child and adolescent mental disorders from a methodological point-of-view. This study found significant evidence of overdiagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder."

Another claim from the article:

> Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.

This kind of muddled thinking is prevalent in the article. The vague term "rewiring" is being argued against, and the author expects that only one specific outcome should be consistent with it, and doesn't admit the obvious other explanation is that social media and internet addiction is replacing the other addictions.

I read the whole article and could deconstruct it more, but I won't--it's tinged with the author's own anecdotal conclusion that they turned out fine, so everyone else will.

titzer··on Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
A typical house uses 100,000 gallons a year. So that's 5000 homes.
titzer··on Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel
A good start would be turning on bounds checks and stop allocating buffers on the stack.
titzer··on Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use
FTA:

> According to the latest figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), data centers used 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the Netherlands in 2024. That is 4.6 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption, a near doubling in five years. Grid operator TenneT projects that data centers will consume 10 to 15 percent of the Netherlands’ electricity by 2030.

Yeah, so 2030 sounds like a long way off. It's 3 years away. We are not going to be meeting any climate targets.

titzer··on AI companies leak data to advertisers [pdf]
Not surprised. Just wait until they bake the goddamn advertising right into the model.
titzer··on The Test
You're talking millionaire problems and I'm talking billionaire problems. You're not getting to the billionaire class through any self-started farming business.

Billionaires are sitting in board rooms paying millionaires to deal with all that bullshit why they are just trading stocks left and right and play shell games with businesses. They're at a completely different level of capital class and wouldn't touch a blade of grass.

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