Viewing profile — rjpower9000

Part of the land — 120 of the nearly 700 acres — is rented from a family who owns multiple farm properties and wants their fields weed-free with perfectly straight grids of crops, …

Not sure where I stumbled on this, but fascinating historical article on how people were already using spreadsheets for task management and development back in the 80s.

Thanks for sharing. I ended up reading through one of these -- https://atonementlicensing.com/surviving-your-first-oracle-l... -- it's truly amazing/terrifying that it's so bad. It…

I might have phrased this unclearly, I meant specifically for the case of translating one symbol at a time from C to Rust. I certainly won't claim I've figured out any magic that m…

It's in between. It's more C like than the Claude port, but it's more Rust-y than c2rust. How much depends on how fine-grained you want to make your port and how you want to prompt…

It seems feasible, but I haven't thought enough it. One challenge is that as you Rustify the code, it's harder to keep the 1-1 mapping with C interfaces. Sometimes to make it more …

I'm the author. That's a great idea. I didn't explore that for this session but it's worth trying. I didn't measure consistently, but I would guess 60-70% of the symbols ported eas…

That's an interesting idea. I hadn't thought about it, but it would be interesting to consider doing something similar for the porting task. I don't know enough about the space, co…

Thanks for sharing, I did not know about that! Indeed, this is exactly the type of subtle case you'd worry about when porting. Fuzzing would be unlikely to discover a bug that only…

I was pretty hand-wavy when I made the original comment. I was thinking implicitly to things like the Python sub-interpreter proposal, which had strong pushback from the Numpy engi…

Fixed, thanks!

I had a similar experience. I finally got around to reading Ulysses when I had some downtime between jobs and pushed my way through it. I ended up referring to https://www.ulyssesg…

The one in which I spend way too much time building a crappy version of Claude Code, ending up with yet another Rust port of Zopfli, but different from that of Syzygy, and I promis…

> I mean, you can. "Have an initial idea. Define a utility function. Apply gradient descent". > It's just that all three steps are really really hard. Haha, I was hoping for someth…

I won't argue with the idea whether you can test a particular program produces a result (we aren't so interested in programs that run forever in any case). Your observation of the …

I respect he's open about his work and struggles, and it's cool he's programming at 86, but it does seem like his approach makes it harder for him rather than easier. For example w…

> incremental search from a simple start point towards a solutions Good point. More broadly than just TDD, we might characterize an "easy" problem as one where the surface from con…

I was fascinated by the "Sudoku Affair", found myself speculating on the internal mindset of TDD advocates, and ended up with an unsatisfying conclusion that you can't systematize …

It's true you're still working, but it's a different, more distracted effort: you put the LLM on something for a while and then come back. Sometimes it does it right, some times no…

Good insight. That's a better description than what I came up with, "Tiktok for engineers". LLMs probably compound the issue, with that hope of a magic outcome. Though I've had man…

I have to assume there are some other obsessive engineers out there with reflections of their own. I'm curious how people approach the challenge of staying focused while keeping an…