tombert

For stuff I wrote that I run on my server, I have been converting from Clojure to Rust. Sometimes mechanically, often by hand.

I actually like Clojure more but even with GraalVM AOT it still tends to take significantly more memory than even naive Rust code (e.g. using Clone everywhere). If you’re looking willing to spend time abusing the borrow checker you can often get memory usage down to like 5% of what you’d get out of Java stuff.

You know, I've been looking for an excuse to play with an Ubuntu phone. Maybe I can justify buying one purely for travel so that nothing terribly interesting is on there.

Granted, even if they seized my phone now I don't think they'd find much terribly interesting stuff on there outside of a concern at how many lolcow "Documentaries" I watch.

If we can’t be 100% sure then I think maybe we shouldn’t have potential state-sponsored murder of innocent people.

People who are a risk to normal society do need to be separated, and for that I am willing to not be 100% sure (though with plenty of chances for appeals). If we lock up someone for a crime they didn’t commit, we at least have the option to release them and potentially pay out some kind of financial settlement as a means of punishing the state for their mistakes. If you kill someone, there’s not really much of an opportunity to even try and make it right.

It is decidedly not self evident given that it is directly contradicted by statistical evidence. Again, violent crime in most European countries is significantly lower than the United States. I would agree that there are lots of reasons for it but it certainly doesn’t appear that the lack of capital punishment is causing massive spikes in crime.

We can certainly agree that if an innocent person is executed that is just state-sponsored murder, right?

The jury system of the US is a good system but it’s certainly not immune to mob mentality. It’s certainly not immune to appeals to emotion. It’s certainly not immune to any number of the things that make humans human. This is partly why we have an appeals process. If we are going to put someone to death, I think it’s better for them to be given every single avenue possible to prove their innocence so that we aren’t murdering someone innocent.

Sorry, is there any evidence for point 2 or is this just vibes? Violent crime is significantly lower in these countries than the US.

There are a billion potential reasons for this, but it doesn’t appear to be that people have started dawning costumes and LARPing as the Punisher in large numbers.

Most other “respectable” countries have actually gotten rid of capital punishment entirely.

I think we are at a fundamental disagreement though; I think it should be expensive and difficult to execute someone. I think the slow appeals process is a good thing. It should hard for the government to kill people who aren’t a direct threat.

I don’t know your politics but it doesn’t matter the specifics. Imagine whichever politician that you think is most stupid and tyrannical. Do you really want to give them the ability to rapidly kill people they don’t like without at least some bureaucratic checks in place?

I think I am in broad agreement. If someone isn’t an immediate threat (and in the case of capital punishment they’re by definition confined and separated from society) then there’s no justification for killing them.

I’m not a complete bleeding heart here; I am not going to pretend that the world is a worse place because we killed Ted Bundy. He was an awful human who you could make a pretty good argument for deserving to die. I just find the idea that the state is killing people pretty bad.

It’s not cheaper, and it really can’t or shouldn’t be.

In the US you have a right to appeal your sentence, which is a good thing. If the government is going to be killing people, we want to (at the very least) make sure they have dotted every “i” and crossed every “t”. You have to pay someone to read these appeals, typically an attorney or multiple attorneys and/or a judge. There can be a backlog so it can take awhile to get through all of them.

This is inherent to how capital punishment works in the US, and anything less would be borderline tyranny, so I reject your framing of it as “aberration or some dumb policy”.

Sure. I am just saying that until the 70s eighteen year olds weren’t even considered “full” adults with all the privileges thereof. They still aren’t given that they’re still not allowed to drink (in the US).

I think the latest studies suggest adolescence can keep going until your late 20s. I agree you can’t set a firm line on that because of course these aren’t discrete things and everyone is a bit different, but maybe set an admittedly-still-arbitrary age of ~26.

Or I would just do what the UK did and stop capital punishment since I think it’s wrong.

I don’t love the way American prisons work either, but I guess we have to agree to disagree on that particular point.

I would rather we don’t have the death penalty at all, but if that’s off the table then I would probably do the cutoff at wherever the medical community says adolescence is done.

I extrapolated from the fact that 18 year olds couldn’t vote prior to 1971. I will admit that “agreed” might have been a bit too strong of a word, but it seems like the United States didn’t think that 18 year olds were “full” adults yet.

The voting age being 18 was changed in the 70s, primarily so they could more easily justify sending 18 year olds to fight in Vietnam. Prior to 1971 it was kind of agreed that 18 year olds were still basically children.

Even now, though, in every state in the US, you're not a full adult when you're eighteen. You're not allowed to buy alcohol until you're 21. In a lot of states you're not allowed to buy cigarettes. We've decided that, despite being "grown ups", they're still not grown up enough to be trusted with these things.

To be clear, I'm perfectly fine throwing her in prison for the rest of her life without parole, like she would be had she committed the crime in a state without capital punishment like NY. I'm just particularly turned off by the death penalty. I can sit here and wax philosophical as to why but I'm sure you've heard the arguments and it would be a tangent.

> Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?

I didn't say there shouldn't be consequences. I just think that executing someone who committed a crime when they were effectively a child is kind of upsetting. I do not see how you extrapolated that I think it's "normal childhood indiscretion" out of what I said.

Oh yeah, I read about this.

I'm pretty against capital punishment in general, so take that for what it is, but executing someone for something they did when they were eighteen really bothers me.

I've never been a violent person but I do know that I was even more of an idiot then than I am now.

I feel like PlusCal and TLA+ operate at a different level. I use PlusCal primarily when what I'm modeling has a lot of sequential "A then B then C..." steps. With PlusCal a program counter is implied and it maps more directly to sequential algorithms.

When I write regular TLA+, it's usually for things that aren't nearly as "order-dependent".

I'm glad that LinkedIn's bullshit "inspiration porn" has finally gotten the hatred I always felt it deserved [1].

It's been an issue since well before LLMs were common, but LLMs have brought it up to 11; now all I get is bullshit hustle-culture diatribes or weird political opinions that really have no business being part of a site that is ostensibly your resume. Like most Microsoft products, its snuck in as a "necessary" part of our life before anyone truly realized how awful it is.

I have debated just deleting my LinkedIn because I hate the platform so much, but annoyingly a lot of job applications actually require you paste in your LinkedIn. I don't know if putting something like `linkedin.com/donthaveone` would put me on an automatic rejection pile, but I've been too much of a coward to try it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37905664

This was a long time ago so I can't remember the details, and I was decidedly not a senior engineer at the time. That said, if I remember correctly there was something a bit finnicky with how `cfquery` in ColdFusion handled the automatic caching stuff.

Tangential, but very early in my career, back when I was still using SVN at work, I used to write all my commits in either limerick or haiku, usually smuggling in some curse word(s) with some cheeky message in there. I was convinced that no one actually read them and I could get a laugh out of it.

I did this for months without anyone noticing, and eventually my manager schedules a very awkward meeting asking me why I wrote saying “cfquery fucking blows sometimes”. I had to sheepishly explain that I thought it was funny and then I stopped doing that and my commits became much more utilitarian and much less fun.

Yeah, I was curious if it was going to try and bombard me with a bunch of bullshit about how wonderful our glorious Trump godking is, but honestly the information it gave was reasonable enough.

Flash Player in the browser doesn't exist anymore. There's still the standalone Flash Player that game with Adobe Flash/Animate, and it works fine. It doesn't depend on browser compatibility, since it runs on its own.

A Flash game I made a million years ago actually works in Ruffle now. It's really quite bad so I don't really want to prominently display it on my blog, but I might hide it somewhere as easter egg.

Ruffle is getting good enough where I think we might be properly archive all the Flash stuff.

You know, I've always liked Futurama but I always kind of thought it was silly that literally everything has an AI and a personality.

But, you know, I actually think that there might be a logic to it. Economies of scale might mean that almost-literally every computer you buy in the year 3000 has some kind of AI-assistance chip in there, and sure maybe it will have full AI with a personality spitting out one-liners.

I do not understand billionaires. I don't know why Alex Karp is buying large chunks of forests, the vast majority of which he will never see. I don't know why Larry Ellison is buying entire Hawaiian islands he'll never be able to fully use. I don't know understand the appeal of any of this shit.

Is it just that when you're worth billions, hoardings thousands of Steam games you'll never play isn't enough?

I like that "alignment on safety" appears to mean, at least for anything I've been doing, that they won't violate Microsoft's terms of service. I even had it pushing back on me activating an LTSC key on Windows because LTSC keys are "often purchased on a gray market and violate Microsoft's TOS".

It doesn't even need a couple days. I got Opus 5.5 to do it in like three or four hours, just out of curiosity.

I didn't read the book but they explicitly mention this in the movie.

There was a post a few days ago about why control-flow-macros aren't that bad, and their thesis was basically "because AI can understand code well now", though I feel like that sort of missed a bigger point of "if AI can understand the code easily, what's the point of macros at all?"

Even hygenic macros still end up being there primarily to increase legibility and ergonomics. Good ones, like core.async, make it easy to understand how threads and the like are glued together, but ultimately it's just syntax-sugar on steroids.

If the goal is not for humans to read the code at all, I'm not entirely sure of the point of syntax macros; the LLM could just generate the expanded code.