docandrew

We still use leaded gasoline (100LL) in prop airplanes today, for what it’s worth.

So it’s not clearly a net-negative technology.

I use it for many of my side projects. I just like the language, the strong typing fits well with my work.

Hype aside, if you can get an answer to a computing problem with error bars in significantly less time, where precision just isn’t that important (such as LLMs) this could be a game changer.

I had a Palm Pre and really enjoyed this, shame it didn’t make it.

Feels like maybe this is retreading ground covered by Why3ML, but perhaps I’m missing something.

https://www.why3.org/doc/whyml.html

My favorite diagramming tool hands-down! It’s the only one that’s ever “clicked” for me, I use it all the time.

Maybe other folks’ vibe coding experiences are a lot richer than mine have been, but I read the article and reached the opposite conclusion of the author.

I was actually pretty impressed that it did as well as it did in a largely forgotten language and outdated platform. Looks like a vibe coding win to me.

nginx and Roblox and redis and nmap and neovim and cryengine … the list goes on

There are a LOT of tools with embedded Lua scripting capabilities.

Not having to put length-1 everywhere is a good thing, actually.

I think his point is that ORMs (and maybe DBs in general) are used for data persistence by folks who just don’t know any alternative.

Fun side projects mostly, my GH username is the same as here if you’re (morbidly) curious.

It’s a little like go in that it compiles quickly enough to replace scripts while still yielding good enough performance for a lot of systems tasks. It predates go and I wish Google had just supported D, it’s a much nicer language IMO

Ada for bigger projects, D for quick one-offs and more “scripty” work.

Move to EKS and you still need a k8s engineer, but one who also knows AWS, and you also pay the AWS premium for the hosting, egress, etc. It might make sense for your use case but I definitely wouldn’t consider it a cost-saving measure.

“etcd, apiserver, and controllers.”

…and containerd and csi plugins and kubelet and cni plugins and kubectl and kube-proxy and ingresses and load balancers…

It started as a side project.

They may not match the rate of upstream development, but doing their own thing is going to be a faster path to their goal of Rust in the kernel than trying to convince everyone else to do something that they don’t seem to want.

I don’t see why forking is not an option here.

If the upstream maintainers don’t want to adopt it, the Rust folks can gradually rewrite the bits they want to and let the market decide. Use the Ballmer “embrace, extend, extinguish” model.

I’d argue that libraries shouldn’t read environment variables at all. They’re passed on the initial program stack and look just like stack vars, so the issue here is essentially the same as taking the address of a stack variable and misusing it.

Just like a library wouldn’t try to use argv directly, it shouldn’t use envp either (even if done via getenv/setenv)

You can embed and work with UTF-8 strings with no issue (I have source with emoji string literals), but if you need complex manipulation of code points vs glyphs etc. I’m not sure how robust the libraries are for what you are trying to do.

https://ada-lang.io/docs/learn/how-tos/gnat_and_utf_8/

One thing that’s kind of interesting about SPARK in particular - all the contracts get compiled to why3ml as an intermediate step before running through the solvers. If there are any VCs that can’t be discharged using the automatic provers, you can manually prove them using Coq: https://blog.adacore.com/using-coq-to-verify-spark-2014-code

I think the lines between what some consider true DT and what is possible w/ Ada might be more blurred than people expect.

What’s nice is that you can do it in steps - you may have a hard time proving full specification, but you can prove absence of bad behavior like buffer overruns, etc and go from there.

Steve Klabnik (of Rust fame) wrote a (very generous IMO) article about Ada, interesting comparison: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/learning-ada/

FWIW I just tried on KDE (built from source on NixOS) and had some weird cursor dpi issues and GDK errors. Looks like it is tailored more for GTK-based DEs for now.

If family farms are socialism why did the bolsheviks kick family farmers off their land and collectivize the farms?

It’s objectively cheaper to outsource software development to countries with lower costs of living too. How’s that working out?

I’m working through it now, for someone with a computer engineering, EE or math background I think this is a great resource to get started with CS fundamentals.

What the heck did I just watch?

I liked the conclusion: gratitude for a human in the loop who could make human decisions. Like the old IBM presentation said, “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

(Of course greed, stupidity and laziness will cause us to use computers for all sorts of management decisions and we’ll destroy lives as a result.)

I think getting recalled as a retiree is about as likely as a regular civilian being drafted though. Both theoretical risks but about equal, for career planning purposes.

The tax stuff is total bullshit. If it wasn’t the schools in Las Vegas would be the best in the country and the teachers there would be the best paid. They aren’t by a long shot.