mbrock

Pangram 4.0 flags it as 97% AI.

There are tells in almost every sentence but some flagrant ones: “where every technique below makes its trade”, “every size you want crisp is another atlas”, “a bitmap has no idea it is being viewed in perspective”, “the fix that carried the industry for a decade”, “it lies about corners”, “built for artwork that moves”, “what separates them is technique, not resolution”, “text is where Slug earned its name”.

These are Claudisms, cloying mannered prose cliches that often anthropomorphize concepts, with an uncanny and annoying smugness.

yes I use that exact feature constantly to use Codex on remote servers and it works great

In the ISO standard, yeah, but that's not how C actually works.

It would work basically the way it works on Linux? What makes you think it's somehow fundamentally Linux-specific?

Not really. I mean if you want to make that claim, use actual quotes.

Fil-C's understanding of memory safety is not "its own" idiosyncratic made up definition. Memory safety in the whole tradition that includes CHERI etc is defined in terms of objects and allocations. In C structs and arrays are not object boundaries. So CHERI will have the same semantics as Fil-C in your struct example, unless you enable a compatibility-breaking mode, which Fil-C could very plausibly acquire too, at the same cost of breaking semantic compatibility with the C/C++ semantics.

> Fil-C is the worst of all worlds here. Like C, it forces you to manually manage your own memory.

Can you expand on this?

There is an unsafe call primitive in stdfil that was used to support constant time crypto functions when Fil-C didn't have support for inline assembly.

Fil-C now has support for inline assembly, so it's not needed anymore, and I believe indeed the intention is to remove it, since Fil-C is not supposed to have any unsafe hatches.

Fil-C is not Linux only by design, that's completely false.

By the way, if you don't want a culture war, you gotta stop warring.

> I do not go around posting "omg Rust is SO MUCH BETTER than zig or fil-c, which are TRASH." I talk about engineering tradeoffs, and what matters to me personally. I do not say "if you use Zig, you are a bad person." I am not saying that any comparison is bad. I am saying that the way that the comparison is presented is bad. That is different.

Oh, who is saying things like that? Do you mean to imply that this kind of vitriol is characteristic of the Fil-C project?

The same basically holds for proofs in the absence of coherent global correctness criteria like, say, confluence and normalization for a lambda calculus, or soundness and completeness for a logic.

Fable's napkin estimate of the effort required to produce a passable reference semantics for Postgres, which would involve novel discoveries in denotational semantics of concurrent transactions and so on, might be in the ballpark of 30–60 years of PhD level work.

So realistically I think the only way to validate a Postgres implementation involves differential testing, fuzzing, acceptance test suites, etc. And still you'll have bugs that need to be hammered out the good old fashioned way.

Faster in what browser, by what measure, for what modules? "X is faster than Y" without any concretization is usually meaningless.

You can do something like

       (y > 0 && x > INT_MAX - y) 
    || (y < 0 && x < INT_MIN - y)

and hope the optimizer turns it back into just checking the result. Or you use -fwrapv to concretize the ISO ambiguity and specify the natural two's complement semantics, checking overflow with the classic Hacker's Delight formula;

    ((x ^ s) & (y ^ s)) < 0

But the best way is to use the intrinsic __builtin_add_overflow or, depending on compiler support, its C23 standardization via <stdckdint.h> and ckd_add etc.

okey dokey

Well yeah that just means some aspects of the imaginary compiler were in some configurations approximated by some historical compiler versions and were in some cases rejected by the community (which cares about sane semantics even for behavior left undefined by ANSI/ISO) and in some cases left in as defaults but made trivially configurable for anyone who wants to define the undefined behavior.

you mean removing the JIT?

ok what's the alternative?

yeah then I have to learn how it works and what it assumes and how I can control it and maybe switch to a more well behaved compiler if it's truly insane

Right, good example, and both GCC and Clang offer well understood parameters for deciding, per compilation unit, what behavior you want for signed overflow (-fwrapv, -fno-strict-overflow, etc), so in reality it's quite far from spooky arbitrary nasal demons.

Yet the standard does not tell you what the compilers do.

Linux works on a wide variety of platforms. It also relies on those platforms behaving predictably with respect to what the standard leaves undefined.

This description of ISO UB as a totally insane wonderland of random, malevolent semantics just doesn't describe reality.

This is a description of an imaginary compiler, evoked by the ANSI/ISO standards documents, which has never existed and will never exist. To understand what the program will do, you just have to understand the compiler behavior on your target platforms. A helpful intuition pump is: imagine the ANSI/ISO specifications simply do not exist; now what? Well, you just continue your engineering practice, the way you would for any of the myriad languages that never even had a post hoc standards document.

undefined behavior is the behavior of code patterns "for which this International Standard imposes no requirements" and the behavior is in fact almost always predictable and agreed upon by compiler vendors and the users of the language, which is why you are able to use programs that rely on undefined behavior probably every single second you are using the computer

edit: for example I'm typing this into Safari which means probably every key press and event is going through JSC JIT compiled functions—which have, structurally and necessarily and intentionally, COMPLETELY undefined behavior according to the spec—and yet it miraculously works, perfectly, because the spec doesn't really matter

most languages don't even HAVE a specification so in most languages literally EVERYTHING everything is undefined behavior

If you stop trying to find something like truly ontologically novel about it, you might be able to understand what it actually is. Okay it's not impressive. It's not incredible. It's not groundbreaking new technology. It is what it is.

That kind of blanket demand doesn't persuade anyone and doesn't solve any problem.

Even if you get people to sit and press a button every time the agent wants to do anything, you're not getting the actual alertness and rigor that would prevent disasters. You're getting a bored, inattentive person who could be doing something more valuable than micromanaging Claude.

Managing capabilities for agents is an interesting problem. Working on that seems more fun and valuable than sitting around pressing "OK" whenever the clanker wants to take actions that are harmless in a vast majority of cases.

Flexner's "Understanding Wood Finishing" has a section about "the myth of food safety" that pretty directly states that food safety isn't a serious concern for fully cured finishes.

The solvents evaporate when the lacquer cures, right? A lacquered spatula or spoon could leach some plasticizers when heated up. But who on earth would go to the trouble of spray lacquering a spatula? It doesn't seem like a real concern. Wooden spoons from IKEA aren't gonna poison you!

The author seems to have forgotten to mention WHY he wants scrapers to use APIs instead of HTML.

I think all wood finishes are "food safe" once they're cured.

Great! Feel free to ask questions or report problems on GitHub or the Fil-C Discord. If some package doesn't compile I can probably look into it!

FYI nginx and Apache and Postgres using shared memory across processes make them hard to use with Fil-C. Lighttpd works well though!