Viewing profile — diekhans

Would one retype assembly language for C generate code? Having LLMs write out their design and reviewing it seems more efficient. Have LLMs, maybe with a different model, check tha…

It seems like a bug report on what is not clear in the documentation would be highly useful.

No API to hook into one's favorite tools, such as emacs.

https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

This is likely true for many companies. However, it is also a metric for what type of working environment it will be. I value being able to learn quickly and creativity over pre-tr…

The article doesn't understand programmers. People will stay because they are passionate about OCaml and there are not a lot of OCaml jobs. When hiring for a permanent position, I …

Plus the 64-bit integer problem, really 52-bit integers, due to JS not having integers.

Nicely written (and executed). Worse that my worst memory corruption.

Hard rules are the problem. There is a lot of "it depends." After over 40 years of programming, I continue to reduce the size of functions and find it easier to write and understan…

I have had good luck with duplicacy for cloud backup: https://duplicacy.com/

Circos is useful when the data is sparse and quickly becomes extremely time-consuming to near-impossible to interpret. The most you can say is "wow, there is a lot going on". I kno…

This is awesome!!

Thanks for the reply. I try to use exception chaining to create a message that is useful for the user to actually debug the problem (solution-directed error message). The classic t…

The point of chaining exceptions is to add information to an error result. It prevents one from having to pass down information to produce an error message that makes sense to the …

No data checksumming is one of the main reasons not to trust APFS for valuable data. Maybe it is fine on Apple SSDs, but what about terabytes of data on external disks? Why checksu…

It's an interesting package, and I have some of the use cases it appears to address. However, the documentation is inadequate to quickly understand how to robustly build some of th…

I have been having great luck with incremental backups with the very similar named Duplicacy https://duplicacy.com/

My view is that automated testing is not a substitute for QA, but an additional tool. It lets QA focus on harder to automated tasks. For unit tests, a developer is going to try som…

Darktable is an interesting project and an impressive effort. However, serious photographers tend to use Lightroom. It is just eons beyond Darktable. Sometimes even those of us who…

Setting backup-directory-alist to ((".*" . ".emacs.bak")) keeps the files local to the actually files, without the cognitive overload of being adjacent to the edited files.

We really should say "a human genome". Reference genomes serve as a Rosetta Stone of genomics. So we can take DNA/RNA sequences from other individuals and align (pattern match) the…

After years of BSD and Linux on my desktop, I finally figured out that the desktop is about applications. Many of us need to actually accomplish things in addition to develop Open …

It is amazing how much time projects seem to spend on rewriting history for the goal of displaying in in a pretty way. Leaving history intact and having better ways to display it s…

Lot of good info and saved away! However, it drinks the code coverage cool-aid that started like 30 years ago when code coverage tools emerged. Management types said "high test cod…

Not used ECC is not a good tradeoff in my experience. The only ZFS corruption I have experienced was direct attached ZFS on a Mac with memory errors undetected by Apple's diagnosti…