Wonderful. And these people call themselves utilitarians too. God / Buddha / Allah / Batman, save me from their kindness!
3,866 karma · joined March 10, 2017
I am not calling you out personally here, but this comment bears many hallmarks of the "accelerationist disease": thinking in abstract models rather than in concrete terms; optimising for the fangs of capital rather than human beings, imaginary infinite bets that lead participants to nonsensical conclusions
You can't capture the full range of behaviours and edge cases unless you are willing to ingest billions of events without lossiness
Metrics have limitations of cardinality. Logs need to be reduced or else you are in archive rehydration hell
There will be code paths that have never been triggered that you still need to reason about as part of analysing a system, eg in threat modelling
> I get why you think I might not have worked on large systems
I didn't, necessarily. But it looked like an excessively strong claim, combined with a challenge to the author's competence. I wanted to call that out.
> This is complete lack of experience on the authors part
Actually I'm going to turn the accusation back on yourself: if you think reasoning about a system's entire graph of behaviours from runtime traces is trivial, I don't believe you've worked on a truly complex system
The range of what a program can do is much larger than what a program does do in your two week Datadog aggregation window
- Type system is too concrete, can't express sets or unions.
- Not much support for functional programming except passing closures
- Can't express immutability. Well, there's const, but it's crippled
These things mean Go falls short of what GP wants.
But Go has very distinct and (honestly kinda weird) design goals, it isn't really supposed to be "the simple applications language". It's supposed to be "C with NewSqueak", very much a systems programming language. You see that in its aggressively concrete type system
Codeberg wants to protect their hosting from the large volume of AI projects.
What do you think the right solution is here?
> I think you're being dishonest in your framing
Asking without malice: why are you telling me this?
This is an open internet forum. You can suspect my sincerity but also, I can suspect yours.
Neither of us can ever prove we mean what we say. We just have to muddle on and ignore anything we think is trolling
Why do the very vocal "AI people" online have this thing where they are simultaneously:
- proclaiming their thing to be inevitable and massive and a bulldozer of productivity;
- responding to any negative reaction like they are almost like a persecuted group
It seems paradoxical to me. If your LLM-written project is so amazing, who cares about the critics?
Let them have their corner of the internet. There are plenty of other sites that will host your project.
Perhaps if you are a heavy codeberg user it is annoying to move onto Forgejo. I get that. But ultimately Codeberg has the right to decide these things
The issue being, gratification is rarely a good guideline. It just means collapsing the gap between doing the thing and the idea of having done the thing. But that gap is where you actually learn things
It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores.
There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.
In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users
Take a look at p40 / figure 12 of "WRITING CODE VS. SHIPPING CODE: PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS ACROSS GENERATIONS OF AI CODING TOOLS" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...)
Their analysis is on pg42-43
> they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far
I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite.
Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?
When clients come to you, is that because they always intended to get help taking their system to production? Or is it a last resort after all the AI approaches fail?
Is there a general way that these projects break down? Or are the failures usually subtle?
His work is very flimsy, and I have been a hater for close to 10 years [1].
I think Bregman skirts close to the "Effective Altruism" movement and his work has similar problems of choosing flashy, exciting, elitist projects over boring, uncomfortable, policy changes.
His enamourment with "AI!!!" (exclamations mandatory) is par for the course. Basically a fantasy that if AI leads to enough layoffs, the rest of society will accept a transition to UBI (against their own interests)
Bregman has been going on about UBI for decades and I've never seen him do the actual maths. In Utopia for Realists he argued the budget deficit can be completely made up by the cost savings of having fewer benefit systems. It's fantasy
[1] https://www.breck-mckye.com/review-utopia-for-realists-rutge...
The faulty malloc. A bunch of random qsort implementations. Reiji Asakura wrote an account of how the BIOS and kernel were developed, and it sounds so amateurish
Then there's the way the JP console checks for faulty ECCs on sectors 0..15, not as a clever anti piracy check, but because the CDU-920 broke CD-XA authoring...
There is a faulty array iterator in the BIOS code that can copy arbitrary data to locations higher up in the memory map than the base pointer. Normally that wouldn't let you overwrite any executable code because the base pointer is very high up (might be a stack pointer?). But because of the memory aliasing, if you set the right value the write "wraps around" and lets you clobber the BIOS.
This means you can boot a custom BIOS, effectively, by just going into the memory card screen. From there you can execute a PSX.EXE without going through the mechacon checks, bypassing copy protection
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I wouldn't mind learning more about the MGS port. Do you remember much about it?
It uses TCL for most of the scripting, IIRC. In fact I think MGS 1-4 use the same lineage of scripting languages.
MGS2 source code was leaked recently, but my guess would be that was a complete rewrite and shared very little from the PSX codebase.
I mean sure. Every company wants an infinite addressable market. But that doesn't mean it exists.
It might not be possible to sell 10x the software we sell today. It might not even be possible to sell 2x
I am willing to bet a Twix we'll look back on that stuff in 2 years with a lot of embarrassment
"Well. It's got a nine in it"
"What percentage??"
"Nine"
I think there is truth in this. A lot of the assistive technology (AT) vendors, also sell consultancy.
Go to the Vispero career pages (who develop JAWS for Windows) and a big chunk of the jobs are remote consultancy roles advising clients on accessibility errors and selling for billable hours.
What makes a web page accessible? Why, it has to work with JAWS, of course!
Vispero makes a lot of money from this; the consultants are all in India, the clients are all in the West, so they can hoover up the difference. I get the impression most AT vendors are extremely cheap, which may explain why it takes decades for them to improve things
I came across this problem pretty directly a couple of weeks ago - I wanted to see if I could port a small C program to Go, where one of the needs is to create gzip archives. But the Go stdlib insists on extraneous padding that breaks the backwards compatibility requirements of my program.
The padding isn't needed, it isn't useful, and you can't opt out of it. So the whole program went in the bin and I have resumed maintaining it in C
This is one of dozens of situations I've experienced where Go's allegedly pristine stdlib design has kicked me in the nuts
The author is someone in the demoscene who has been accused of "vibe coding" large pieces of work.
His counter is that if such things are possible, where is the vibe coded Photoshop?
He then goes on a tangent that "vibe coding" is a kind of easy accusation mostly levelled at "neurodiverse" developers
Which is why he ends the post:
So.
Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?
WHERE IS THE THREAT YOU MADE UP TO ATTACK ME?
I'm waiting.
– gizmo1. Argues that Tailwind requires div-itis
2. And that divs affect the accessibility tree
As mentioned below:
A <div> itself is treated as a generic, transparent box. It doesn't get keyboard focus, and it isn't added to the screen reader's elements list (like headings, links, or landmarks).