It makes no sense to compare.
I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
451–460 of 488 posts
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is true, but I have to be honest and say that I didn’t make the connection until I saw Bellard’s project for the first time, and I said: “ah! That actually makes A LOT of sense”
My biggest gripe about AI is that very few people actually understand that, and many think that LLMs are "thinking" and capable with "coming up with a novel solution". They are not. The only reason one might think the solution is novel is because they never saw it before, but what they are actually receiving is an excerpt from someone elses blog post or stack overflow answer. [1] A bit terrifying thought experiment i…
My biggest gripe with the discourse around AI, especially by programmers with hubris about Machine Learning, is the idea that LLMs can’t come up with “novel solutions”. They can, and they have. CoT[0] is how LLMs can output tokens in “reasoning space” to guide their “thinking” to produce absolutely novel solutions. You can imagine reasoning being multi-layered, where the top layer is an abstract heuristic (examples of which can be “try special cases”, “try solving a part of the problem with relaxed constraints”). The lower layers become more and more concrete with the details of the problem, and the result is a solution of the problem.
You don’t even have to understand how modern reasoning LLMs work to be able to tell that your perception is warped and doesn’t reflect reality - there’s plenty of news to the contrary - OpenAI resolving a major Erdos problem[1], the First Proof endeavour[2], amongst others [3].
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 [1]: https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c... [2]: https://1stproof.org/assets/docs/report.pdf [3]: https://archive.ph/2w4fi
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tweet also reads a bit off to me too. Carmack positions himself as if he is a some sort of a litmus test for being a great and successful programmer, which I don't doubt that he is but it's a bit strange. Egotripping.
If most people would agree with that, is it really egotripping?
It is because oneself does not speak about himself or herself in superlatives. Others should do it.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is exactly the opposite for MPEG, which only specifies the decoder (i.e. how frames should be decoded).
The concept is similar, in that with MPEG it is the encoder that is the harder of the two, since it has to deal with the noise and real-world effects in the source image. What I should have written is that the "hard" part, which is generally left unspecified, is the part that removes redundancy. An MPEG encoder removes redundancy whilst its decoder adds redundancy. An FEC/communications encoder adds redundancy whilst…
It's not really about difficulty (although encoding is definitely far more difficult), it's about there being multiple valid encodings.
If you have two red boxes on a black background in one frame, and a single red box in the middle on the next, UIUI there are at least two ways to encode this: "left box moved right a bit; right box disappears" and "right box mounts left a bit; let box disappears".
In a complex scene, there is a huge space of possible ways to encode a frame that give identical outputs, and even more that are lossy. Choosing one that compresses well but is visually similar (and not too slow to find) is a quality issue for the codec. It wouldn't make sense to specify the algorithm for that in the spec.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This sub-thread was in reply to someone who stated that "'code is the product' is what IMO caused the downfall of this entire profession".
…and my comment was in reply to someone who stated they’d never met a programmer who values attractive code over shipping a product. ;)
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for saying this! I completely agree with everything you said! There’s far, far too many people who confuse code quality for speed of development and start treating code quality as the product for customer base in the hundreds and active customers in the dozens and for most features to be basically unused. The reality is that tech debt as a concept these days is hardly real: to be in debt means previous decisio…
Im talking about the speed of mental model building, understanding concepts, relations and organizational concepts. Good codebases sort of read themselves. You can guess where things are, how they are sorted and how they work, by understanding and relying on the authors ideas.
“Good” code makes trade offs. While readability is an important constraint, it’s far from being the only constraint. And there are plenty of occasions where objectively better code is subjectively harder to read because other constraints trump human parserability, such as using CPU-friendly memory layouts, SIMD-instructions in tight mathematical loops, and so on and so forth.
Not to mention that readability is entirely dependent on the readers familiarity with particular coding styles. Eg someone unfamiliar with SQL would find ORMs easier to read, whereas I find SQL easier than ORMs. Same is true for any other paradigm, eg for functional vs imperative.
And this is why I hate when people generalise about human readability being the definition of “good code”. For one thing, there will never be a consensus on what is more readable. And external constraints might require subjectively less readable code.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 y…
Obviously it's advanced work, but the problems might be harder due to the Apple-specific circumstances and tech debt; and not because they are globally hard for humanity.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#458Bellard is a genius. Carmack's modesty about his own genius is impressive too.
I admire Tiger Woods. He is almost certainly a better overall golfer than I am.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
The psyop about "only shipping clean code" has been a big drag on projects On the real world, if it runs and solves their problem nobody gives a fucc. Period Props on him.
Watch how developers breathlessly defend code quality and stand tall ready to die on the hill against "AI slop". Craftsmanship, quality control, oh, it's all so, so important. No, it's absolutely vital to civilization. Then witness the amazing reversal when some member of The Tribe pushes unbelievably unreadable slop that works. Then we see his Ring getting kissed by all the betas: "if it work, it works". Pick a side…
I think "quality" (quoted to keep the term vague) is important for long-term maintainability of software at scale (>1 developer). However, working / shipped / earning code is always better than quality code that isn't used in production.
ffmpeg, facebook, claude, twitter etc might not have existed if the authors focused on quality over shipping.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess would be the hueristic is "I want to do simple thing, why is it so hard?" (Modern computing has an overabundance of "DX tarpits".) Which is funny because, everyone has that experience, right? But then approximately nobody proceeds to do something about it. (Including most people who have the skills to make a difference!) Like, that's surprisingly mundane, and surprisingly actionable. --- If we distil it into…
As an extension to your last point, here in the US people love complaining about politics (on both sides) but very few people (including me!) take the time to come up with solutions and go to town halls, or write to senators apart from the automated message that makes you feel like you did a thing, or even run for office. Of course, all of those are hard! And I think that speaks to the modern tarpits. No one set out…
I see this as a balance between effort and impact. I don't know anything about politics - maybe this is how it should work - but I do know corporate IT bureaucracy. In many cases, the activation energy required to move the needle on rather trivial things just isn't worth the effor; so you look for workarounds, forgotten corners of the infra, or other rogue ways to actually do stuff. When an IT department says to me - great idea, formalize these 20 pages of requirements, death by powerpoint style, and put it in our suggestion box - I just pass on that. I suspect politics is even worse than the run of the mill corporate IT, and many people feel the same in regards to politics.