vanderZwan

> One of my friends has a theory that if you didn’t get into Star Trek before you’re 18 years old, you’re never really going to get it.

Nah, I got my partner into TNG during the pandemic and she was in her thirties. It was our comfort show during that time, one episode a day.

Then it's the elders' responsibility to warn the newbies whom they can and can't trust.

IMO that's applied Sayre's Law though. And my explanation for that is that the more niche (and therefore fragile) an academic topic gets, the more defensive people are.

I've heard stories of friends working in (say) such a niche part of fluid dynamics that there's two professors and a few dozen PhDs in the entire world who get it, and the professors refuse to work with anyone who ever cited the other in one of their papers.

On the other hand, I've worked as a programmer for molecular neurobiologists who were working on multi-million dollar research projects mapping out all cell types of the brain using single-cell RNA sequencing, and collaboration seemed much more common there.

The stakes don't get much higher than running the country you're from.

EDIT: Also, the city of Groningen elected a city council of young students and put a 24 year old in charge of the city’s traffic and urban development policy. We still brag about being one of he most bike-friendly cities in the country that was the result.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...

Nice example of Poe's Law. I genuinely can't tell if this is a sincere comment written by someone who spent too much time in the start-up bubble, or a satirical comment on that type of person said by someone who very much aware that start-ups are just one of many ways humans can organize themselves and who knows that parliamentary politics is nothing like that for very good reasons.

But I do find it hilarious that apparently everyone assumes it to be the former, and that is quite telling about how most of this site's visitors think the other visitors of this site look at the world.

Since you're working on your own thing that may or may not be like a traditional Forth at all, and also mention Uxn, you might find some ideas in Ben Bridle's Bedrock worth stealing:

https://benbridle.com/projects/bedrock

In particular the reasoning for what he changed compared to Uxn might be insightful:

https://benbridle.com/articles/bedrock-differences-from-uxn

See his answer to the seventeenth question in this interview:

https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2213858&WT....

> Don Knuth: As you say, I've come to believe that P = N P, namely that there does exist an integer M and an algorithm that will solve every n-bit problem belonging to the class N P in n**M elementary steps.

I think we should blame the elders for teaching people new to the trade wrong.

Because "heavyweight SPA for a static blog" isn't exactly a rare problem.

There was some discussion about this in the Goose discord a few days ago.

One idea that came up was this: you could define a particuda function name as the "landing pad" for handling particular error kinds. Then you "wrap" calls to the library in a function with this name. Here's a part from a larger worked example:

    fn catch_io<F: fn()>() -> IoError {
      F();
      return IoError{ message: "", ok: true }
    }

    let err = catch_io() { c(); };

https://gist.github.com/bkietz/9bf510299ab62bb4c7f7d2db6eff0...

Mind you, this was just discussion, no experience with how well this would work in practice.

That removes the allocation but keeps the overhead of a pointer, a capacity and a fixed buffer.

And these strings in Goose are 6 bytes, while the ones in C++ are apparently 16 to 24 bytes each.

Apologies, I wasn't trying to be dismissive, it was meant to be a joke that the sentence read like an (earned) humblebrag.

For context: I'm very active on the Goose discord (and have been following WvO's languages since Lobster was announced on Google Groups eons ago). I goof around there too, and forgot for a moment that outside of that chat it wouldn't be obvious that I'm being tongue-in-cheek.

Well, my dayjob is writing JavaScript and I've having a blast writing Goose code by hand in my spare time in the last weeks, so it can't be that bad.

Hmm, well the benchmarks always use an explicit "faster than idiomatic C/C++ and safe Rust". Similarly it also notes that in theory you could write equally fast C/C++ (since Goose compiles to C), but it would be an unreadable, unsafe mess.

Note also the fact that e.g. array indexing has bounds checks without escape hatches for the programmer, but the compiler can elide quite a few of them, and the language has tools to help the programmer write code that is guaranteed to be check-free.

I think that suggests the ambition is to compete with Rust in the domain of combining safety with not compromising on performance.

> From what I can see, the #1 way an AI produces "good code" is to simply work in the context of existing good code.

"Just Git Gud First" - Wouter van Oortmerssen

I think what you might be missing is that you can also do a sort of livenes analysis to determine how many dynamically-sized variables are "awake" at the same time at most. Then you only need to create as many stacks as that number, because you can reuse the stacks of "sleeping" variables (since the "awake" variables are guaranteed to be freed once their block goes out of scope, and threads don't share any memory so no data race worries regarding those stacks).

For example, suppose we have a function with a growable array that calls another function (without passing said array) that also uses a growable array as some temporary scratch space. Then the first function's array isn't being used when the second is sleeping, so the inner function's array could safely share the stack because it will all be freed with a single pointer restore once the second function exits.

Now, I actually don't know how the compiler works but as I understand it does things similar to my example to optimize the number of stacks needed (but let's wait for WvO to confirm or deny whether my understanding matches reality).

Well, "safety" is a lot of things so you have to be a bit more specific than that about your use-cases. And I can't really answer it either way - I think WvO has to chime in about that himself - but I can point to some things that might give you some idea of what to expect. Here's what WvO wrote a few weeks ago when he shared Goose on twitter:

> Goose: my latest programming language. Safer, faster and less memory than Rust/C++ for algorithms where tightly packed, flat data structures matter.

> It can represent more kinds of data structures as flat, pointer-free bytes than any language I know.

https://xitter.cf/wvo/status/2107979660558766351

So one way to answer might be: how often do you reach for unsafe when using Rust? If you don't I guess Rust is safer. If you do… it gets trickier.

As for UB, I guess you could try looking through the spec and/or the reference? Like, the code is mostly generated by Claude after WvO wrote a specification. If it were anyone else I'd be worried, but given WvO's cv I actually suspect that means the spec leaves basically no ambiguity.

However, Goose compiles to C. Does that by definition mean UB sneaks in, or is there a "UB free" C subset? I don't write C, so I don't really know.

*one of, you mean:

https://strlen.com/programming-languages/

If you had no other obligations and todos getting in the way, what's the first thing you'd rewrite in Goose yourself?

(And why isn't it Amiga E?)

There's a VR version of Civilization though

I don't know, have you done anything to impress them?

Reminds me of the classic "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom!" lecture (although it's obviously not yet at that level of micro-manipulation)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_Plenty_of_Room_at_th...

> “Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?”

I think the author of the article missed that this punchline talks about the giant floating seed of a coastal species of plant, that spreads itself by drifting out into the open sea, following the sea currents and eventually finding new islands to colonize. In other words: that coconuts do, in fact, migrate.

The fact that a lot of the old fonts also used an ſ with a partial crossbar on the left side probably makes it a lot worse, no?

> The Dutch health care system is under pressure and GPs (and their parent organizations, and the government) are reaching towards IT automation and self-help / pre-screening / etc to reduce the load

I'm aware, both of my parents are retired GPs.

Back when they retired, about a decade ago, they already had spent a decade complaining that the a constant increase in excessive administrative work got in the way of the actual work of being a doctor that helps their patients. So much that they had joined the strike (remember when that was a big deal because it happened for the first time in Dutch history?)

Anyway, the situation got more complex since then but a lot of pressure is also still administration. Yes, now we have assistants taking on more complex tasks leaving the "important" things to the real doctors, but I think that the need for that is also is in large part due to doctors not getting enough time to be doctors.

And I feel like automation will help fight back at that about as much as IBM's 1967 prediction came true that their office machines would fight back at the "paperwork explosion". Which is to say: Jevons paradox said no.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Consider that I am not talking about people who use LLMs to learn about keywords to search for in other websites, but only regurgitate what the chat told them uncritically.

Corsicans, channeling their inner Gollum: "give it to me raw and wriggling!

Maybe it's a dog treat over there as well?

Would be nice if people just did that instead.

It's kind of infuriating to hear Dutch people cite these chatbots without bothering to check https://www.thuisarts.nl/.

Yes, your intuition was right about that! But even back then they were aware that the mineral ones lasted longer. I imagine a high-quality book about color like this would go for the "big budget" paints that lasted.

The fact that only one copy was made suggests it wasn't really intended as a mass-produced book, but as an individual item, perhaps to show to visitors or clients.

Well, old paintings from that period are usually fine too, right? Pigments were usually made from mineral sources that last very well. It's usually the varnish on top that changes color over time.

A book's illustrations don't have that problem, and the pages aren't exposed to the air or sun as much either, if kept on a shelf in a dry place most of the time.

Does make me wonder how expensive the blue pages were to make though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine

Tangent: always fun to read these old books that still have a long s and having to remind myself not to misread it as an f all the time. It gets so silly, like the authors have a bad lisp (or "bad lifp", I gueff).

(also funny that our forward slash is a descendant of it, meaning it's a "cousin" to the integral symbol)