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I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

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Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#431

Post by mschuster91 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #429
mschuster91 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s ok to appreciate a work even if you disagree with its creator’s morals or ethics. In the case of Harry Potter... the perception of the work tends to follow the perception of the author. There's a bunch of issues with the original books that's widely seen as problematic today - character names seen as racist [1], enough problematic gender stereotypes to warrant half a dozen of academic papers of various quality…

I'm not gonna lie: it has always struck me as extremely racist to claim that goblins are caricatures of Jews. No normal, reasonable person reads Harry Potter and thinks "Jew" instead of "wacky fantasy creatures".

> No normal, reasonable person reads Harry Potter and thinks "Jew" instead of "wacky fantasy creatures".

It was a pretty obvious thing for us Germans when the movie came out. Caricatures of Jews that were used in the time leading up to 1933 are taught and analyzed at schools here. Crooked noses, deal with money, hoard money... it's not that far away. There's a pretty good blog post with actual imagery, if you want to read further [1] - although I admit that JKR just used existing folklore as a foundation, just as with other elements of worldbuilding.

That shofar however, now that's intentional. HL came out many, many years after I read about the issue the first time. And 4chan, inevitably, immediately identified the goblins as jews.

[1] https://jewitches.com/blogs/blog/goblins-jews-and-antisemiti...

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#432

Post by fc417fc802 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #419
mschuster91 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I strongly suspect that a lot of folks, these days, only do the middle one. Ain't no one willing to pay for all of that. The clear separation is something you only see remaining in academia and industries where code quality issues have legal consequences (i.e. aerospace, marine, automotive and medical), and even there, pressure is high to relax rules viewed as "arcane". Writing good specifications, documentations,…

I’m not so sure. I see a lot of “Ready, Fire, Aim” behavior, hereabouts, and can’t help but imagine that it extends into our basic workflows. It’s entirely possible to create a huge ball o’ mud, that works, but is unmaintainable, and damn near impossible to adapt to changing circumstances. I just went through that, with my LLM. Really easy to simply say “Screw it. Let’s ship.”

It doesn't seem like you're disagreeing with him?

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#433

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #432
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so sure. I see a lot of “Ready, Fire, Aim” behavior, hereabouts, and can’t help but imagine that it extends into our basic workflows. It’s entirely possible to create a huge ball o’ mud, that works, but is unmaintainable, and damn near impossible to adapt to changing circumstances. I just went through that, with my LLM. Really easy to simply say “Screw it. Let’s ship.”

It doesn't seem like you're disagreeing with him?

> Ain't no one willing to pay for all of that.

That made me think that he didn't think it was possible.

I guess I'm a cynic, but I think that many companies, these days, are willing to pay -and pay a great deal-, for exactly that.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#434

Post by MomsAVoxell »

gaigalas wrote: post #384
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a few thousand years back I beg to differ, but okay. I don’t disagree to your allusions that there is a banality to mob idolatry, but that’s a discussion for other forums, ironically.

Idolatry is not the same as mythologizing. And I never said there is a banality to it, just that there could be . We don't have enough to know.

In any case, you do seem to have overlooked that there are successful mythologies in the contemporary era - that indeed Fabrice and co., are worth understanding better not just for the nature of their work, but also the means by which their reputation preceded them - and lets not forget that the markets in which they operate are worth multi-millions of dollars worth of economy and they are clearly successful at scale.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#435

Post by MomsAVoxell »

gaigalas wrote: post #404
zerohp wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Buddha lived before writing in India. We have plenty of other stories that were passed by oral tradition before they were written down.

The oral tradition you're probably trying to refer to is the Rigveda, which is amazing. It's like a human recorder that kept a series of vocalizations intact for thousands of years through chanting, with error correction mechanisms and all sorts of tricks to reduce drift over time. That's our oldest attested oral tradition, 2000 years or so. Stretching to a maximum of 6000 years if we're generous. Buddhism is like, a…

The stories of Narwala Gabarnmang say hi.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#436

Post by hnlmorg »

agentultra wrote: post #357
stouset wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the gallons of ink spilled on the subject I have not worked at a single place in my 30-year career where developers sat around perfecting masterpieces. I have worked at a never-ending list of places where people shipped the first thing that worked, built spaghetti around it, something else got built on top, and the original thing is now critical infrastructure that takes 10x longer to fix bugs or add needed f…

I feel like the navel-gazing-ivory-tower programmer is almost a straw man used by commenters and bloggers to make themselves sound pragmatic. Summoned only be be torn down. Never to be found on an existing software team. I have come across the architecture astronaut before. But I feel like they’re the result of the culture of the ecosystem the language. The Java and C# programmers whose language requires you to juggl…

That maybe true, but the reason we are having this conversation was because people made those kind of comments. Which lead me to defend Bellard’s POCs.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#438

Post by mschuster91 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #433
fc417fc802 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem like you're disagreeing with him?

> Ain't no one willing to pay for all of that. That made me think that he didn't think it was possible. I guess I'm a cynic, but I think that many companies, these days, are willing to pay -and pay a great deal-, for exactly that.

> I guess I'm a cynic, but I think that many companies, these days, are willing to pay -and pay a great deal-, for exactly that.

lol, where? Outside of the industries I mentioned (and banking/insurance, which falls under the "legal consequences" catch-all)... good luck.

Government procurement only cares about price, and you see that confirmed whenever some government "digitalization" project balloons or the balloon inevitably explodes. Large companies live and breathe on Excel and shadow IT. Small companies want something that reasonably works and can be somewhat afforded.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#439

Post by JKCalhoun »

bflesch wrote: post #414
dmitrygr wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is heavy in such types, yes

If they are so clever it's weird how they end up with butterfly keyboard, walled garden software, glassy iOS themes, and fight against EU initiatives such as replacable batteries. Apple is a super late stage company, why would a clever person join them just to work under some middle manager.

There are plenty of hard problems that need solving.

One co-worker, for example, has headed up the team that convert the proprietary RAW format from various camera vendors to a standard RGB format that can then be edited/adjusted in Photos, etc. The cameras (vendors) never rest and as such he's kept quite busy.

Another coworker was the guy you turned to who could walk a stack, read registers, and then tell you that you were trying to dispose of an object on a different thread than you created it on (and the framework that handled the object had stashed important data in the creation thread that it needed for disposal—bad framework).

I turned to another coworker when a stack of transforms had my brain in a knot (early bring up of Preview to allow scaling (zoom), translation (scrolling) and rotation while trying to select text (hit-test in the transformed PDF). "The matrix you want to invert should have been created in the reverse order of the transforms that you had applied when displaying the PDF." Oh.)

And then there were the GIT experts that could somehow fix the completely fucked up state I had got the project in…

And the Smart Guy™ who, glancing at the debugger, might announce that I had exceeded the number of threads allowed per process. (I had no idea there was a limit.)

Come to think of it, maybe I'm just an idiot. :-)

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#440

Post by bombcar »

Georgelemental wrote: post #342
andrehacker wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that how it is supposed to work ? Stroke of genius (over and over again) to get something working given constraints of the day followed by hundreds of engineers who will improve on the foundations, basically like Wozniak ?

Yes, also to be clear, I am not diminishing Bellard's achievement

Honestly, the ability to pass off a project to long-term maintainers that don't immediately get overwhelmed, collapse, or explode is perhaps his greatest skill.
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