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No. Plausible code is syntactically-correct BS disguised as a solution, hiding a countless amount of weird semantic behaviours, invariants and edge cases. It doesn't reflect a natu…

We went from expressing computation via formal, mostly non-ambiguous languages with strict grammar and semantics, to a fuzzy and flaky probabilistic system that tries to mimic code…

You are correct. The final output was polished by ChatGPT, but I originally presented the basic ideas in a few paragraphs. The LLM added a sense of flow and persuasiveness which ar…

It starts from the identifier. At every stage, it outputs a sub-expression which is the “mirrored use” and corresponds to the boxed representation below it. When it reaches the top…

A small tool that parses C declarations and outputs a simple visual representation at each stage, as it encounters arrays, pointers or functions. The program uses a table-driven le…

And consequently, "you need 32GB of RAM just to be future-proof for the next 3 years".

Because in C, every allocation incurs a responsibility to track its lifetime and to know who will eventually free it. Copying and moving buffers is also prone to overflows, off-by-…

Yes, you can do it with minimal allocations - provided that the source buffer is read-only or is mutable but is unused later directly by the caller. If the buffer is mutable, any u…

Good C code will try to avoid allocations as much as possible in the first place. You absolutely don’t need to copy strings around when handling a request. You can read data from t…

> These lies don’t just affect them but also the people reading it as they might never see what actually happens This is what sustains this whole economic bubble built on debt and …

They were popular because there was no Unix culture in Eastern Europe at the time. Pretty much any computer geek was a DOS user. To me personally, it always seemed kind of lame bec…

Their English is sufficiently good. It's a cultural aspect regarding writing style. When Russians and most Eastern Europeans write about technical subjects, they tend to be concise…

> Pattern matching should make the language less verbose, not more. In the most basic cases, yes. It can be used as a more polished switch statement. It's the whole paradigm of "de…

Rust encourages a rather different "high-level" programming style that doesn't suit the domains where C excels. Pattern matching, traits, annotations, generics and functional idiom…

The W210s did indeed rust badly and the interiors weren't on par with previous generations, but in purely mechanical terms, they were still solid cars. The diesels (particularly E2…

What a mess of an article. A pretentious mishmash of scattered references with some vague abstract claims that could be summarised in one paragraph.

Big Tech drove us towards techno-feudalism. It's a wider social phenomenon and their hiring patterns for programmers are only one aspect of the problem. Small businesses are forced…

With a lot of fancy wording, the article basically proposes that slow-moving, bureaucratic educational institutions should catch up with TikTok’s latest algorithm, helping raise th…

Yes, that was my point. Regardless of the programming language, LLMs are glorified pattern matchers. A React/Node/MongoDB address book application exposes many such patterns and th…

It’s good at matching patterns. If you can frame your problem so that it fits an existing pattern, good for you. It can show you good idiomatic code in small snippets. The more unu…