Viewing profile — tmerr

My read of Turing's paper is that he proposes replacing the question of "Can machines think" with a behavioral test. I doubt he would try to argue that passing the test implies tha…

Where to start. The process I see work well in practice is. 1. Generate an idea. 2. Let critics help identify flaws. 3. If it's unsalvageable give up. Otherwise, modify the idea an…

My personal site is tmerr.com There is one post, and I haven't shared it publicly before so that's something!

This is interesting to hear, but I don't understand how this workflow actually works. I don't need 10 parallel agents making 50-100 PRs a week, I need 1 agent that successfully sol…

Yes the situation sounds similar to regular files to me. Iiuc mmap can implicitly sync to files, but it is only guaranteed after unmapped (akin to closing a file) or an explicit ca…

This has me thinking, it could be a fun project to prototype a convenient file interface based on pointers as a C library. I imagine it's possible to get something close to what yo…

I mean. I've owned several IoT devices that work either locally or over the internet. Some of this you can just blame on local networks being fiddly in ways that are difficult to c…

For another data point: last week I ordered my first PCBs from JLCBCB. 2 fully assembled (parts already soldered) and 3 bare. $40 for the boards themselves, $40 for shipping, and $…

Heh, I'd recommend replacing dead links on the blog with https://web.archive.org/ ones. Based on how broken the site's external links were I incorrectly concluded the whole blog wa…

A more optimistic takeaway is that if you set out to solve a hard problem then you might be surprised about your tech's applications elsewhere. Between 1983 and 1989 they built a c…

The ideal set of building blocks depends on the problem. If the building blocks make it easy to write concurrent code (Go, Erlang), then it becomes easier to write a server. If the…

Maybe the decline of desktop applications (Java, C#) and Android (Java)? And then Go coming out with some killer frameworks? I have to stretch my imagination to imagine anything ca…

I'm 30 and have been using vim since college. Usually I'm not actually using the vim editor, but some IDE that has vim keybindings. Good enough for me since I don't customize it mu…

Social media is played up like reality TV. Perks are good but working at a faang is 90% just work, like anywhere else.

> FWIW, the default concurrency has been changed to "unlimited" since the 0.1.0 release. Nice! Will that end up on Github? > Out of curiousity, what do you want Most often I want t…

Ahh having a generic pool abstraction that collects results is tempting... nice work. I likely won't use this library though, since - I don't want to mess with panics. - The defaul…

My advice: Tell the teammates that you want to see them grow to become code reviewers. At first require PRs to be approved by two people: first someone else reviews it. once they L…

That's a great question. What I've seen is versioning de emphasized. Good unit & integration test coverage to prevent refactor breakage. And when you make a large change that affec…

Better to tune this out even if you're a beginner. You normally don't say "The big O of the algorithm is ..." because it's ambiguous whether you are talking about time complexity o…

> Code becomes tightly intertwined and the dependency graph becomes unwieldy One way to combat this is to use a build system with a notion of visibility, https://bazel.build/concep…

I absolutely believe in this after working both ways. With feature branches I would waste time rebasing, resolving merge conflicts, to then come up with the perfect pile of commit …

I've never worked anywhere that deadlines were set with enough precision that +/- 20% would be distinguishable from noise. I think it would be lost to more significant factors like…

Sure. But without every piece of the pie accounted for we can't tell whether the increase in money to funds is representative of the whole, or caused by shifting preferences

Thanks. It might include more than I expected, but still "exchange-traded and long-only funds" would be missing anything that's not considered a fund, like individual stocks, that …

Probably cherry-picked stats. The article says "Investors have poured almost $900 billion into equity exchange-traded and long-only funds in 2021". So does that sum together to all…