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zffr

1,028 karma · joined January 20, 2020

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zffr··on Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'
It really depends on how you are using AI. If you simply use it to get the answers to homework you won't really learn. If you use it to figure out the topics you need to learn, and to identify/close gaps in your understanding then it is a very useful tool for learning.
zffr··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
IMO the fear is that software engineering becomes a _high_-skill profession.

If the models get good enough to solve all of the low-skill problems, then we only need to keep around the people who are highly skilled. That means a fewer number of software engineers, and a difficult path to becoming someone who is highly skilled.

zffr··on Boot a Virtual iPhone via Apple's Virtualization.framework
Here are some reasons to use this instead of the simulator: security research, testing, automation
zffr··on The Valley of Webhooks
With webhooks, consumers get to asynchronously respond to updates from a provider. If no data has changed, a provider will not send any updates.

With SCROLL, consumers are responsible for choosing when to ask a provider for updates. Without a mechanism for knowing when data has changed, consumers will be forced to be pessimistic and poll providers for new data on some cadence.

I see two issues with the proposal: (1) SCROLL will lead to an increase in unnecessary network traffic for both the consumer and provider, and (2) because a consumer cannot know when data has changed, the lag between a consumer's local model and the provider's data model will be larger when with Webhooks.

zffr··on The Last Technical Interview
As yegge mentioned, there might be more appetite for trying out this idea now because there are many engineers who are currently unemployed. Offering them short co-op could be beneficial to both the engineer and prospective employer
zffr··on Full-Text Search with DuckDB
What’s your use case for this?
zffr··on Self-updating screenshots
As a next step, it could be cool to write unit tests against these screenshots that look for words like you mentioned. That way if a screenshot is updated and a test breaks you will know what documentation to update
zffr··on Laws of Software Engineering
One example where I think the law does make sense is for website URL paths.

Over time the paths may change, and this can break existing links. IMO websites should continue to accept old paths and redirect to the new equivalents. Eventually the redirects can be removed when their usage drops low enough.

zffr··on The Gemini app is now on Mac
It would be much snappier, and would trivially support common native features like being able to open messages in new windows.
zffr··on What game engines know about data that databases forgot
Why would column-oriented databases be mentioned? My understanding is that these are typically used for OLAP, but the article seems to talk only about OLTP.
zffr··on LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs
The performance of both the website and the iOS app is also not great. On the iOS app, I frequently see frames dropped and scrolling is sometimes blocked for up to a second or more at a time.

LinkedIn's feed is certainly not simple, but modern iPhones should be more than capable of rendering it at 60fps.

zffr··on Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]
Well the executable binaries inside IPAs are encrypted, but the IPA bundles themselves are typically unencrypted. You should be able to see unencrypted assets inside of them
zffr··on Swift 6.3
Fair point, I had not considered needing to read and understand code you didn't write yourself.

Especially in a corporate setting, not understanding a keyword you see in a PR could lead to bad code being checked in.

zffr··on Swift 6.3
> 3. get rid of roughly 150 of the 200 keywords there are

I don't understand this point. Could you explain?

The new keywords enable new language features (ex: async/await, any, actor), and these features are opt-in. If you don't want to use them, you don't have to.

What are they keywords you think should be removed?

zffr··on Testing the Swift C compatibility with Raylib (+WASM)
What are the languages with similar or better ergonomics?
zffr··on Nominal Types in WebAssembly
> It's not fast.

Not disagreeing with you, but here’s an article from Akamai about how using WASM can minimize cold startup time for serverless functions.

https://www.akamai.com/blog/developers/build-serverless-func...

zffr··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
Yes. This page has several ways to get older macOS versions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662, but the earliest macOS version you can use on Apple Silicon is macOS 11.

If you move your home directory to a different disk partition, you can even share it between two different macOS versions!

zffr··on Why Objective-C
Holy shit, it’s still being actively developed and maintained https://github.com/cappuccino/cappuccino
zffr··on Defer available in gcc and clang
My suggestion is no - first have them do it the hard way. This will help them build the skills to do manual memory management where defer is not available.

Once they do learn about defer they will come to appreciate it much more.

zffr··on Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
Prefer structs over classes != only use structs.

There are plenty of valid reasons to use classes in Swift. For example if you want to have shared state you will need to use a class so that each client has the same reference instead of a copy.

zffr··on Show HN: Stripe-no-webhooks – Sync your Stripe data to your Postgres DB
With the library you’re able to use stripe without thinking about web hooks. The library is named based on what it enables a user to do, not how it works internally.
zffr··on Competition is not market validation
Yeah customers are market validation, not merely the existence of competition.

If your competitors have customers, I think that is a sign of market validation. If they do not, then you might not either.

zffr··on Many Small Queries Are Efficient in SQLite
IMO the page is concise and well written. I wouldn’t call it very elaborate.

Maybe the page could have been shorter, but not my much.

zffr··on Many Small Queries Are Efficient in SQLite
I think the most common set up is to have your application server and DB on different hosts. That way you can scale each independently.
zffr··on Improving the usability of C libraries in Swift
You listed 8 types, and this is because there are 3 axes that each have 2 values

- Mutable or not

- Typed or Raw

- Single object, or Buffer

Given one kind of pointer, you can convert to any other kind of pointer, but you are responsible for knowing if it’s safe to do.

The API is not super intuitive, but I can see how it makes it more clear what you are doing in your code.

zffr··on Apple Creator Studio
Pages and other iWork apps will remain free. The premium features are for curated images and templates, and AI assisted document creation. If you don't care for those features, you will not be affected by the change.
zffr··on Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
It’s probably frameworks + localized assets.

With dynamically linked frameworks you bear the cost of the entire framework (and its dependencies) even if you just use a few functions.

iOS apps also need to include all localized assets in each app bundle.

zffr··on CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)
If you do software as a profession, is the book really THAT expensive at £45? Having a deep understanding of CSS could make you significantly more than that.
zffr··on The compiler is your best friend
At least on iOS, asserts become no-ops on release builds
zffr··on We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
I would have expected SVGs to be like PDFs and render the same across devices. Is the issue that some renderers don’t implement the full spec, or that some implement parts incorrectly?
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