omega_rythm

Which is a deficiency of compilers and languages they support: there should be a notion of "verbatim" code, where the compiler doesn't try to apply any code transformation changing the "literal" semantics (as opposed to "intended" semantics).

Of course this would only be possible for languages like C which don't make any advanced abstractions on the hardware arch.

Did you give a shot at other languages in the same category as F#, like Haskell, Ocaml, Clojure or Elixir?

It may have to do that often actions on set top boxes are related to accessing content, for which the software has to check permissions; these are usually embedded in the stream (think mumultiplexed), and the decoder needs to receive the frames before being able to extract the content and display it. Cable network has very high latency (compared to fiber or adsl).

If some of the credential checks are stored in a separate device (dongle, smartcard ), then it could take even longer.

In one of William Gibson's books (the first trilogy I believe), there was this idea of companies running algorithms on new product names to check if translated in other languages, the name would mean something NSFW. Just imagine how limiting that would be for marketing people, with so many existing human languages.

I didn't talk about liking or disliking ads. I don't like medicaments but I find them very valuable.

Well, I don't know.

I think that people from the west tend to see the negative aspect of advertising: people over here think "annoyance" (all the answers to my provocative post were like that — yeah, small sample, not significative), whereas in Asia it seems to me (but I may be wrong) that people see the positive side: the image I have is of people thinking "opportunity of bargain". Maybe I don't understand it. Websites filled with tiny ads, streets covered with neons and shop signs, they might very well pretend. And indeed, they don't have a choice, Like LA people stuck in traffic because there are no other ways, websites are just like that and consumers have to do with it.

> No user would opt-in to commercials, ever. I don't believe for a second this system was designed with opt-in in mind.

The occidental mindset is heavily geared against advertising. If you got free rebate coupons, gifts, etc. as rewards for opting in, would you still refuse it?

I'm trying to say that we don't necessarily see the whole picture, and the article doesn't give hints about the purpose of that "feature".

I guess the text tries to cover both opt-in and opt-out dialog boxes, which perhaps indicates that somewhere in the admin level configuration is an option to choose which mode the service should work in.

Or Samsung and Yahoo just did not understand each other and this dialog is a collateral damage.

> The only experience that's worse is those set-top boxes the cable companies provide you with.

I don't know about the American market. Over here (France), set-top boxen aren't so bad. And there are regular software upgrade; some of them even include games and apps.

It's probably the only one that works, and it's just a hint (the conversion function is weird btw, it accepts hexadecimal symbols ranging from '0' to 'z'; it actually "decodes" any base from binary to triacontahexadecimal (36)).

I wouldn't worry much about people whom I granted access to my computer, (though it could be worrisome if someone else got their hands on their credentials), I would worry about people who got access fraudulently. But that requires tighter security policies.

Regarding Windows, it's all explained on MS website (just a Google search away), and it seems quite potent, but a default consumer OS doesn't push for stringent requirements for each and every application being installed. It's up to the user to setup the adhoc policy, and hook up VNC to it, I guess. The good thing with application markets and distro supported package repositories is that in theory all this could be included in the package and verified for conformance by the repository maintainers.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make: are you saying that no matter the OS, some hardware platforms will be flaky and others well supported?

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I must admit that my knowledge of llvm is very limited. I did make the (perhaps wrong) assumption that it would be easier to understand on that basis alone (well, and the fact that the people writing it know how to code C++ properly, I guess for major projects like Gcc and llvm you may expect well engineered code). I felt that the whole macro business isn't as solid nowadays as what templates could allow in terms of type checking (and perhaps some macros involved for syntactic sugar alone; caveat with the cryptic error messages for errors in templates), hence my previously stated opinion.

Note that I am not complaining about the DSL, just how things are quite difficult to figure out (and untyped macros, as stated above).

That doesn't mean no decision has been made: in a typed language with subtyping, this amounts to choose the "top" type of the type hierarchy, and without subtyping, you're choosing not to enforce structural constraints. In untyped languages with structured values (like any usable language), you make those decisions in the way your code checks for this or that value attribute or runtime structure. I guess unspecified and specified as "any" is often the same, but for me the former is a design mistake.

Yes, it's correct, at least my dictionary says so.

Gcc code is arcane: it relies heavily on macros to define some kind of DSL for the compiler backends (check out the .def files), but if you want to contribute seriously you need to learn that DSL and how it works behind the scene somewhat, whereas llvm is C++. That being said, it's an interesting experience to dive into that code.

Was there a followup to that story? It seems like the author made a lot of assumptions (I read PG article about Corp devs).

It makes sense, thanks for the explanation.

Great work! The image quality is astounding, really.

So, I just tested your renderer with the material test scene, and while it ran pretty fast, it seems it only used 3 cores out of 4 on my system. Is there a way to configure/force the renderer to run a number of threads?

Of course, but even with lisp you can't (programmatically) work on the code without having that code representation. If it's trivial, then there's no harm in opening it, but RMS thinks otherwise, so there must be something else.

Hmmm, Charybde and Scylla. There's no solution I suppose, or maybe just go by what RMS wants: produce a data structure for the necessary data for the simplest possible improvement, then define a more involved data structure for a more ambitious feature, and reiterate again and again, until the data structure becomes isomorphic to what Gcc deals with. No need to actually code all these steps, just specifying them should help RMS understand that it's inevitable at some point.

You really should have a look at the rust code this guy wrote. I would not call that last optimization type safe.

It doesn't have to be like that. I suggested elsewhere in that thread that emacs maintainers should use llvm for what they need, since it can already provide that service. This would require further down the road to have Gcc match llvm feature-wise (except maybe that feature), so that compilation of code accepted by llvm would be possible with Gcc.

Why not reverse the argument? If llvm can already be used for that sort of task, why not simply use it in place of Gcc for that very precise task? I'm pretty sure RMS would not mind it as much as opening gcc's AST, and he would certainly embrace the idea of making Gcc able to match llvm feature wise to make sure that whatever becomes possible in emacs is handled at compilation by Gcc.

I don't think the issue is just allowing proprietary IDEs to interface with Gcc; I think there are deeper issues at play.

Also, I wouldn't say that he's forcing anyone to chop things, he's more likely saying "let's make dishes from recipes which don't require chopping things", but his cooks are still used to chopping. Is there really an alternative to strong "intellisense" and refactoring abilities in IDEs for efficient development ? I don't know. I personally feels that this is a necessary step. Maybe RMS, with his experience of AI research (iirc), has a different view.

For RMS, allowing non free code to be derived from free code is unethical, it goes against all the ideal of his movement. Indeed, from your standpoint, the thing he is fighting against seems trivial, but there are deeper consequences.

There's ethic, and there is practicalities. RMS stands by the former, while many engineers think mostly about the later. I wouldn't say that thinking ethically is a bad thing, but it may hamper things, because it usually deals very poorly with a situation already unethical in nature.

There are more than 7 billions people on Earth, but barely enough resources to content everyone. Pushing resource extractions will damage the ecosystem, but not doing so will provoke millions of deaths. Preserving nature is a laudable goal IMHO, wouldn't you agree?

This may sound like a reductio at absurdum, but if that innovation threaten your ability to survive, you will be very reluctant to research it, won't you? Gcc has been the very foundation of gnu, it's the cornerstone of the whole ecosystem: you cannot run Linux (or hurd) without compiling it first. Imagine you'd be commissioned to the fabrication of a virus immune to all known forms of treatments for the purpose of using it to hotpatch cancerous cells. Obviously this tech could have much more dangerous applications, and without a way to disable it, noone would stand a chance. In that scenario, wouldn't you try to reduce this virus' immunity to the minimum needed for its planned usage?