Viewing profile — thefaux

On scala, I think there were several factors that led to it stalling out in the mid to late aughts. I am not convinced the community was the root cause. I think more significant wa…

There is something that I don't fully understand about this design: why are they insisting on building a giant binary for debug builds that contains all of the code? From my perspe…

Syntax and semantics are never orthogonal and you always need syntax so it must be considered from the start. Any reasonable syntax will quickly become much more pleasant to genera…

Cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis is an abdication of moral reasoning and responsibility. There is no such thing as an abstract life, only concrete realizations. What if the victi…

I have written a compiler for a language at more or less this abstraction level. It provides access to 16 general purpose registers and a set of virtual instructions that operate o…

> Why would anyone create a new language now? The existing ones are "good enough", and without a body of examples for LLMs to train on, a new language has little chance getting tra…

It is interesting though that he evidently didn't notice this 2.5X productivity increase until you pointed it out to him.

Just because it is small doesn't mean that it isn't important.

The lead maintainer of sbt does it as a labor of love. I am very curious if he actually will be receiving any money.

The examples that you and others provide are always fundamentally uninteresting to me. Many, if not most, are some variant of a CRUD application. I have yet seen a single ai genera…

This feels like it conflates problem solving with the production of artifacts. It seems highly possible to me that the explosion of ai generated code is ultimately creating more pr…

I do see this as a bad thing and an abdication of taking responsibility for one's own life. As was recently put to me after the sudden death of a friend's father (who lived an unus…

At the end of life, Maslow became convinced that self-transcendence was the pinnacle of the hierarchy. Strong identification with work will not get one to that final step. I am not…

I truly believe that the cult of c performance optimization has done more harm than good. It is truly evil to try and infer, or even worse, silently override programmer intent. Man…

Honestly, I found this piece depressing. Life is too short and precious to waste on crappy software. So often the question ai related pieces ask is "can ai do X?" when by far the m…

Sure, but I prefer to work on projects that are fundamentally sound and high impact. Indeed, I have certainly noticed a pattern that very often ai enthusiasts exalt its capabilitie…

> Try a GraalVM native image. Milliseconds. Gone. Try building a GraalVM native image. Minutes gone.

This logic is both too broad and rigid to be of much practical use[1]. It needs to be tightened to compare languages that are identical except for static type checks, otherwise the…

Sometimes someone genuinely has a clear vision that is superior to the status quo and is capable of executing it, improving quality, performance and maintainability. The challenge …

I had a roommate who failed out of college because he was addicted to Everquest (yes, Everquest, and yes I am middle-aged). Your last paragraph is barely even hyperbolic. Do you th…

1 Judge not, that ye be not judged. 2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. 3 And why beholdest tho…

The canonical western text is Richard Wilhelm's german interpretation, translated to english by Cary Baynes. This site has the hexagram descriptions from that translation: https://…

In the medium to long term, if LLMs are unable to easily learn new languages and remap the knowledge they gained from training on different languages, then they will have failed in…

The intelligence and benevolence of many marine mammals is vastly under appreciated.

As impressive as this analysis is by the compiler, I shudder to think how much time the compiler spends doing these kinds of optimizations. In my opinion, a better architecture wou…