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I hate compilers

xeiaso.net

81–90 of 182 posts

Re: I hate compilers

#81
post #77

Could have sworn the author was a nix(os) user already. I know it’s a meme but what all the problems they’re describing literally is solved by nix. The nix sandbox even catches calls for time for example to replace it with 0 for determinism.

They stopped using Nix due to disagreements with how the project was run.

https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/much-ado-about-nothing/

Re: I hate compilers

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don’t think so. LLMs are good at a lot of simple tasks, but bad at certain simple tasks. Moravec’s paradox in a new iteration. It applies to humans too. Calculus is “simple” but it takes something like sixteen years to train a human to do it, if all goes well. Meanwhile, most humans think that inverse kinematics is, like, the easiest thing in the world (it’s a super complicated task).

Calculus is definitely the harder task, considering it took a species developing the cognitive capacity for symbolic reasoning for it to show up, whereas any animal can figure out how to position its limbs. Yeah, we figured out how to make CAS programs before inverse kinematics software, but that's because computers were made to solve numerical problems, not to replace the cerebella of chordates.

> Calculus is definitely the harder task,

You’re only evaluating “harder” or “easier” based on the perspective of somebody who has a mammalian brain with millions of years of selective pressure to make it suitable for solving inverse kinematics problems.

The point here is that when we start constructing agents or tools with different architectures to ourselves, it makes sense to reevaluate notions of whether something is ‘hard’ or ‘easy’. LLMs are bad at counting not because counting is hard, but because their architecture makes it hard.

Re: I hate compilers

#83
post #73
post #16

Reading this, I think low level engineering is actually more dependent on specific environments. Hardware also has its own points of change. Usually, when you think at a high level, environmental changes are less significant than you might expect. But low level thinking tends to be tied to specific environments, which is what makes it difficult. The reason low level is hard is that even if the code itself is short, t…

Looks like the formatting ate your asterisks at *(int*)buffer. Use \* to get an asterisk.

Since edits aren't allowed after a certain amount of time, I'll keep that in mind next time. Thanks!

Re: I hate compilers

#84
post #76

So to avoid those energy-hungry LLM companies from scraping your website, you force each browser to compute a lot of hashes in a necessarily energy-hungry loop, creating, at the same time, all the kind of accessibility problems?

I don’t get how people believe there’s a PoW function that both:

1. Allows access in reasonable time/battery use to me on my phone

2. Poses any meaningful challenge to the most compute-resourced organizations on the planet

I wonder how many cumulative hours of human life have been wasted waiting on Anubis.

Re: I hate compilers

#85
post #54

These seem very reasonable, the workarounds used are natural, and overall the article is not at all congruous with the conclusion in the (clickbait?) title? Compilers literally made your project possible!

> Clang relies on address layout for ordering things I would consider that a bug tbh

What is kind of annoying is that the author jumps to "I hate compilers" instead of "I will report/help fix this bug upstream."

Re: I hate compilers

#86
I’m still surprised by Anubis’ decision not to make the PoW have a useful output, for example a crypto, protein-folding like, or something else.

And I speak as being generally very critical of cryptos, but here rewarding the website owner with some cents to have access seems fair, and resolves the traditional issues about micro-payments.

Re: I hate compilers

#87
post #76

So to avoid those energy-hungry LLM companies from scraping your website, you force each browser to compute a lot of hashes in a necessarily energy-hungry loop, creating, at the same time, all the kind of accessibility problems?

I don’t get how people believe there’s a PoW function that both: 1. Allows access in reasonable time/battery use to me on my phone 2. Poses any meaningful challenge to the most compute-resourced organizations on the planet I wonder how many cumulative hours of human life have been wasted waiting on Anubis.

[deleted]

Re: I hate compilers

#88
post #76

So to avoid those energy-hungry LLM companies from scraping your website, you force each browser to compute a lot of hashes in a necessarily energy-hungry loop, creating, at the same time, all the kind of accessibility problems?

I don’t get how people believe there’s a PoW function that both: 1. Allows access in reasonable time/battery use to me on my phone 2. Poses any meaningful challenge to the most compute-resourced organizations on the planet I wonder how many cumulative hours of human life have been wasted waiting on Anubis.

The vast majority of that compute is locked in AI accelerators that do the inference. Those hardwares are bad at doing anything other than that---in fact crawlers would need more residential proxies than more computes in that regard.

Re: I hate compilers

#89
> What do you do when the client has WebAssembly disabled?

Do people really do that? -- disable, not just using old browsers with no wasm.

Disabling wasm while keeping js enabled is a configuration i can't understand

Re: I hate compilers

#90
post #89

> What do you do when the client has WebAssembly disabled? Do people really do that? -- disable, not just using old browsers with no wasm. Disabling wasm while keeping js enabled is a configuration i can't understand

It’s easy to imagine an organization with a paranoid security posture ending up with that configuration because they decided to only enable a minimum necessary feature set where they determined that JS was necessary while WASM was not.
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