qalmakka

I'm puzzled about why people were so vehement at roasting Joe Biden for his clear advanced age, while Trump is blatantly suffering from dementia or some similar mental impairment. His speech is way more rambling and incoherent that anything Joe Biden ever went through, and it doesn't get better when he's in a more familiar setting - quite the opposite, he gets more and more nonsensical whenever is giving an interview to anybody

Unfortunately C++ is full of very dubious features that I argue may not make much sense or may make sense in a different form that's not how C++ implements them.

IMHO the current contracts are a half-baked feature that I suspect will immediately end up in most coding styles as "do not use contracts".

I understand the concept but having a feature that's not consistent among compilers, targets, ... all while doing absolutely nothing to solve the _real_ problems with C++. Like that the build model is still the obsolete TU model of C, while adding multiple compile-time features that inevitably end up causing build times to skyrocket considerably. Or that modules are still DOA after 6 years. Or that the syntax is full of bullshit anti-features that could be at least fixed by having a proper build model (like Rust) and editions (like Rust).

Having yet another feature that only works sometimes with quirky semantics is dumb and I understand why many people feel like it should be shelved to prioritise the features people _really_ care about, like meta

That's a feeling I've been also feeling for the last year or so. Turns out the means was what I cared about, and I didn't care about the ends that much. LLMs robbed me of that in a way I couldn't see coming.

I think that we as a society fail to see that the speed we built things was rarely the problem. The real shortage was in the ideas - having them, finding the motivation to act on them, sharing them, and the biggest driver was the desire of showing off, being told you are great and your idea was great.

I am afraid that by removing the ick to fix things, to challenge everything and being rewarded for that, we will end up with less innovation, not more. Why bother? Why do anything if everything is cheap, why start a new project only to be shrugged away as being yet another thing any machine could have done? Why show off when the merits are the machine's?

HN went from being a constant stream of Show HN to AI news after AI news. The most interesting projects AI have enabled are to run old stuff onto other things.

Rehashes of old ideas keep sprouting out of everywhere, keeping new ones at bay. I think we are probably entering a long winter and all that will be left is permutations of what we did before '23

Jesus H Christ these guys had literally the number 4 as their secret and they call telling them they're incompetent an "out of proportion" reaction?

yeah anyone wise migrated away from PHP ages ago. The fact it got lipstick on back with PHP7 doesn't make it a well designed programming language. At least in my experience the vast majority of PHP websites nowadays are old abandoned PHP5 projects, which aren't much worse than just slopping a rewrite in something else

> Run Android apps natively on Apple Silicon Macs. No emulator, no virtual machine, no Linux underneath.

God damnit Dario fix Claude already so that it stops using this sentence structure once and for all. Opus is so annoyingly recognisable that it has started to irk me badly lately

Vkd3d is a PE executable, if wine works and Vulkan works then it works too, as long as the required extensions are present

> CEF

Ah that's the reason why they came up with an instant speedup. Optimising CEF is basically like docking a zero from your speedup loop [1]

[^1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

> Git assumes that clients work offline and need a complete copy of the repository. Since nearly all of our clients are agents and jobs, we designed Scion’s client and protocols around a server that is always reachable, and have clients fetch data when they need it.

That sounds like Subversion with extra steps

> In git, you commit locally and then push to share your work. In Scion, every commit, rebase, or merge happens on the server, so there’s nothing to push,

Yep not beating the allegations with this one

To be fair 90% of the companies I've ever worked for always used git in a way that turned it into Subversion, but with 10x the storage usage (note: I hate Subversion with a passion, I'd rather send patches via email than that)

I don't really agree with this. Having strong types and guardrails like in Haskell, Rust or OCaml helps _massively_ with LLMs because they get very clear messages back, and can express their logic using semantic types they can easily follow. Conversely, I've noticed that AIs (just like humans) tend to kind of lose the thread with very dynamic code

> What if I told you that Docker Desktop has always used microVMs?

I'd say that I don't think it's that relevant? Hopefully everyone was aware that you required a VM to run Linux software on Windows and Mac, and then who would really care about what VM docker used to run development containers? The more expendable the better. Hopefully nobody is using a Windows PC with docker desktop in a production scenario - but given how utterly incompetent some people I met was, I'd not be too surprised from that

Yes, but at least it was a real thing with a serious proposal behind. Even if Carbon ships, what value would it give in 2029 or whenever it is in a world where writing rust or heck even C++ is now way easier and foolproof (as long as you know where to guide an LLM)

In my experience LLMs are way better when they "know" a language "instinctively". It's just that unless your language is very niche, the corpus is usually good enough. I tried using Claude to write my own personal language a while ago (I wrote a toy compiler decades ago) and it struggled a bit, because you could see in it's reasoning it had to "repeat" the syntax equivalence to itself while it read the code. It didn't just "know" it could use a given construct to do something; conversely Astra, when carefully instructed to do so, can plop down esoteric template code that works the first time, because it just "knows" it's the right stuff to write

Carbon was clearly DOA the moment it was announced, IMHO. It looked cool but it served none but Google, and now with LLMs you have a massive incentive not to use a niche or new language due to how better LLMs get the bigger the corpus is

The only somewhat realistic proposal in this space is Herb Sutter's cpp2, which is arguably a massive improvement and I'm puzzled why nobody in the standard thought to give it a spin, there's just to much cruft they'll never be able to get rid of unless they make an alternate yet backward compatible syntax with C++ that changes the defaults from "random 80s nonsense" to something better

yeah it does feel like a Lisp that people happen to write in an imperative fashion most of the time

Tcl is way too smart of a language for its own good. I love how everything is a string or can be hacked on a string, so you can basically do levels of metaprogramming that reach unheard of levels

> secretly in a cash crunch

What's secret in the fact that literally they've never had a single positive quarter yet, and we're a rack of GPUs being repossesses away from going from a bull to a bear market? Their entire business is based on getting financing from VC, and they've been keeping the lights on by pushing any narrative they could to sustain the hype. Regulatory capture isn't really a conspiracy theory, it's the very exact thing multiple companies in their position have done in the past to avoid a market readjustment they knew they'd lose

I think that the economic side of things of how those businesses are run, and the fact AI has potential to be an incredibly powerful tool, are orthogonal concepts. I don't see how the fact an LLM can be used, autonomously or directly, to perform hacking or penetrate computer systems, has to do with the fact that there's clearly an interest from those labs in being strictly regulated while dictating the rules they should respect in the first place. I suspect such regulations will be surprisingly difficult to implement for anyone but the existing US-based labs, and of course it will be super surprising when it turns out that since the federal government stopped everybody from making new frontier models they suddenly got super profitable.

> What would you say when their models cause new incidents like hugging face on

What would you say if Caterpillar builds a bulldozer with a faulty breaking system that kills people? I'd hold them responsible because they failed to oversee the development of their product like every responsible company should do. If they're so much in a hurry to ship that they can't even test what they're building properly, they must be held responsible for that - and I say this as one of their customers and users, not as a random Joe that dislikes LLMs. LLMs are useful but it's undeniable that these labs are clearly desperately trying to keep the lights on no matter the consequences

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are locked into an arms race funded on shaky hype-based debt. They have to constantly push the envelope at the frontier or risk seeing their funding pulled, probably causing a global financial crash in the process which would kill them.

Clearly they've realised that people are increasingly fine with non-frontier models, including Chinese ones. They can't consolidate and just deliver a product to profit because they're constantly being caught up by the Chinese at prices they will never be able to match.

I suspect their main goal for the last year and a half or so was to pull a GM - let the share of the AI economy grow, then have the government bail them out when the debt becomes unsustainable. Clearly Trump would have never let the bubble explode before the midterms, right?

Well it's now clear that the US government has way too much debt right now for 2008-style bailouts, and the market doesnt have the money lying around to buy their overinflated stocks at an IPO. The only avenue realistically left to them is to cry wolf so much to get governments to ban all non-approved models, stop new developments and give them breathing room to consolidate to get their current crop of models profitable at higher prices.

Unfortunately for them I suspect Mr President has way too much dementia and way to little business acumen left to realise the sham going on, so I think they'll keep doing charades for a while until they'll suddenly stop

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are locked into an arms race funded on shaky hype-based debt. They have to constantly push the envelope at the frontier or risk seeing their funding pulled, probably causing a global financial crash in the process which would kill them.

Clearly they've realised that people are increasingly fine with non-frontier models, including Chinese ones. They can't consolidate and just deliver a product to profit because they're constantly being caught up by the Chinese at prices they will never be able to match.

I suspect their main goal for the last year and a half or so was to pull a GM - let the share of the AI economy grow, then have the government bail them out when the debt becomes unsustainable. Clearly Trump would have never let the bubble explode before the midterms, right?

Well it's now clear that the US government has way too much debt right now for 2008-style bailouts, and the market doesnt have the money lying around to buy their overinflated stocks at an IPO. The only avenue realistically left to them is to cry wolf so much to get governments to ban all non-approved models, stop new developments and give them breathing room to consolidate to get their current crop of models profitable at higher prices.

Unfortunately for them I suspect Mr President has way too much dementia and way to little business acumen left to realise the sham going on, so I think they'll keep doing charades for a while until they'll suddenly stop

The major advantage of CLI is IMHO that you can use a CLI yourself too. It's a universal tool.

One thing I hate is when people write an MCP server for something useful and just that. Like, why don't you tell the same Claude or Codex instance you wrote to also expose the same functionalities as a CLI? The problem is that it's full of technical people with zero CLI knowledge nowadays (or, rather, for the last 20 years or so), and it kinda sucks in general, because lots of stuff only comes in GUIs that are not composable, not scriptable and sure as heck full of stupid bugs and limitations due to how harder it is to get GUIs right compared to popping out a "dowhateverctl" kind of tool

I am no fan of Iran but the white people in question literally went there to wage war with the so called has-been-empire and got their butts spanked, despite EVERYBODY warning them for years this would have been an unwinnable war

This is basically self inflicted, as usual messing up in the Middle East always ends up with consumer paying the price for their ruler's stupidity

"Oh no, my drinking water tastes like crap after I pooped in the well"

> CUDA for AMD on Windows

This gives me strong "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows" kind of vibes

Codegen was still done via LLVM. LLVM supports the MSVC _runtime_, here they're talking about using their (arguably worse) backend directly to generate code and do optimisations

... but why? The MSVC backend has been falling far behind LLVM with every release. I understand they want uniformity but IMHO either they catch up or they switch fully to LLVM, if they can

For me it definitely was

libuv does all sorts of shenanigans, like using the undocumented fields in STARTUPINFOW the CRT uses to pass file descriptors to processes inheriting handles so that you can open whatever file descriptor you need in your children processes like in POSIX

But Microsoft kind of expects this crap and will support it until the end of time; Apple can't give a crap until and will readily break programs even when they use legal APIs

I don't know. I know that the old interface was less pleasant than it could be, but breaking every single program ever written in Zig to change it for a super unwieldy API felt to me more like the authors being unnecessarily fastidious than striving for "no hidden control flow". Every single language has a shitty API or two - it's impossible to have none, and to be fair the new one is way too clunky anyway.

Like, what does "avoiding hidden control flow" even mean? What value there is in having no convenient facility to do buffered I/O? Hidden buffered output wasn't really a problem even 40 years ago, it's one of those things everybody needs and those who don't are well aware of how to use the primitives and do it properly.

But let's be clear, I have nothing against Zig, I quite like it from a language nerd standpoint and I think it's very neat - I just don't understand what is the intended target to be honest. If I'm not looking for a safe language, C is fine, and for all its warts and bullshit C++ works with basically everything under the sun. If I want safety, there is Rust which basically already enforces the same patterns you need to follow to get safe C/C++ programs anyway - in my experience, 99% of the time someone whines that the borrow checker is stopping them from doing something, it's because they are making a massive logic mistake and they didn't notice there's some hidden unsoundness (like pointers with unclear lifetimes, etc).