5C5C5C @ 5C5C5C @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

I would personally love to see AOC as president. Unfortunately I don't constitute a majority of the electoral college, and right now that's the only backstop we have against the descent into a fascist dictatorship.

AI person reporting in. Without saying whether or not I personally believe that the current tools will lead to the end of humanity, I'll point out a few possibilities that I find concerning about what's going on:

• The hype around AI is being used to justify mass layoffs, where humans are being replaced by tools that do a questionable job and can't really understand the things those humans could understand. Whether or not the AI can do as good of a job according to some statical measurement is less relevant than the fact that a human is less likely to make an extremely grave mistake and more likely to be able to recognize when that does happen. I'm concerned this will lead to cross-industry enshitification on an unprecedented scale.
• The foundation models consume a huge amount of energy. The more impressive you want it to be, the more energy it needs. As long as the data centers which run them are dependent on fossil fuels, they'll be pumping a huge amount of carbon in the air just to do replace jobs that we didn't need to have replaced.
• As these tools are used more and more, they're going to end up "learning" from content created by themselves instead of something that's closer to a ground truth. It's hard to predict what kind of degradation of service will come from this, but the more we create systems that rely on these tools, the more harm it will do to us.
• Given the cost and nature of these tools, they're likely to yield the most benefit to moneyed interests that want to automate the systems that maintain their power and wealth. E.g. generating large amounts of convincing disinformation to manipulate the public into supporting politicians or policies that benefit a small number of wealthy people in the short term while locking humanity into a path towards destruction.

And none of this accounts for possible future iterations of AI tools that may be far more capable than what exists today. That future technology will most likely be controlled by powerful people who are primarily interested in using it to bolster the systems that keep them in power, to the detriment of humanity as a whole.

Personally I'm far less concerned about a malicious AI intentionally doing harm to humanity than AI being used as a weapon by unscrupulous people.

I agree with you, but at the same time I can't think of any other candidate that would both (1) have enough name recognition to motivate semi-apathetic democrats to vote, and (2) not rile up the semi-apathetic bigots into counter-voting.

According to the gossip, Biden has said that if he does choose to step down, he'll promote Harris. I don't think Democrats will have much of a problem supporting Harris, but I'm concerned being a woman of color will motivate a lot of bigots into a counter-vote when they might have otherwise stayed home. The next best pick might be Buttigieg, but then you get the homophobic bigots coming out for the counter-vote. Newsom might be the next best after that, but then you have the anti-California lunatics coming out to counter-vote him.

As much as I don't want to cater to bigots, I think the stakes are just too high here. If it were a campaign against Mitt Romney then I wouldn't think twice about running any of these people, but when we're on a razor's edge against America spiraling into a fascist dictatorship, every risk needs to be accounted for.

Obviously Biden should've declared back in August that he wouldn't run for reelection so the Democrats could run a primary and build up someone to have name recognition and a positive image, but now it's too late for that 🤷‍♂️

Unironically I absolutely believe that pacing yourself properly is the only way to actually "give it your all". Unless you want him to load up on stimulants of questionable legality, but those might actually kill him before election night.

Yeah the only way it would be that high is if it lumps C and C++ together. But at that point it may be an underestimate.

A better language wouldn't have any need to use POSIX signals in this way.

I agree 2/10. The 2 points are because it was an interesting experience to be resurrected from the brink of death by the IV drip in the hospital. Also seeing my eyeballs full of blood was pretty metal.

If we are now considering philosophical intellectual exercises to be memes then this description is accurate.

I do think that specific point is catering too much to sloppy get-it-done-fast-and-don't-think developers. It's true that they are Rust's most untapped demographic, and the language won't reach the pinnacle of mainstream usage without getting buy-in from that group, but I really think they'll be won over eventually by everything else the language and ecosystem offers, and .unwrap() won't be such an unreasonable price for them to pay in the long run.

The ideas in the article are great, I'm just a little confused by some aspects of the author's tone where it sounds like there's an assumption that the Rust community isn't interested in expanding the scope of the language to every conceivable use case domain and height.

For the 4 years that I've been paying attention the Rust language is advancing faster than I ever thought a language is able to, but more importantly that advancement has been sound and sensible. So far I haven't seen a language feature make it into Rust stable and thought "Oh no that was a mistake", even as features roll in at an incredible rate.

Compare that to the C++ ecosystem where I feel like almost every new language feature is arriving very slowly while also being poorly executed (not that I think the ISO committee is doing their job badly; I just think it's effectively impossible to make new language features in C++ without gross problems so long as you demand backwards compatibility).

I fully expect everything in this very sensible list to make it into the language at a reasonable pace. I don't object to the "bikeshedding" as much as the author here seems to because I'd appreciate if Rust can avoid painting itself into a corner with bad language design choices the way C++ has. If we're talking about language ergonomics, I'd rather suffer some tedium now while waiting for a feature to be polished than be stuck in a corner forever in the future because a bad decision was made.

One example I can think of is I'm not convinced that his proposal around kwargs for function arguments is a good thing, at least not without some serious thinking. For example should it support the ability to reduce foo(a, b, x: x) to just foo(a, b, x) like what's done for struct construction? If so then the optional arguments start to look too much like positional arguments and the syntax starts to get questionable to me. On the other hand if that simplification isn't supported then that becomes inconsistent with other parts of the language. So this is something that I believe requires a lot of serious thought, and maybe the better answer is to have built-in macros for generating builder structs

That being said, the edition system of Rust could afford us some leeway on not being forever trapped with a bad language design choice, but I don't think we want to rely too much on that.

You can't prove that Godzilla's bones aren't hollow ballast tanks that can be emptied and filled as needed.

Ordinary biomatter is very close to the density of water to begin with. That's why having a little air in your lungs is enough to be the difference between sinking and floating.

If Godzilla's biomatter under 1atm of pressure has a density close to water then being able to compress or expand an empty chamber inside his body by even just a tiny percentage of his ordinary overall volume could be the difference between floating at sea level or sinking to extreme depths.

Or if you prefer we can imagine that Godzilla gives himself a big ole booty when he needs to come up to the surface and make a mess of things.

"Lungs aren't really inside" is not an argument that I thought I'd be confronted with.

If you find that your lungs are not inside your body then I urge you to seek immediate medical attention.

Considering most JIT compilers for JavaScript are written in C++, I can't conceive of a reason you couldn't implement one in Rust.

Is part of your requirement that unsafe doesn't get used anywhere in the dependency tree? If so you'd have to take away most of the Rust std library since many implementations in there have small strategic uses of unsafe under the hood.

In my entire software engineering career, which spans embedded systems to CAD applications, I've never encountered a case where GOTO is actually needed (but maybe some places where it can be used as a dirty shortcut to save you some lines of code).

As for arbitrary function pointers, if those function pointers are written in Rust then they'll come with all the safety assurances afforded to Rust code. I suppose if you're worried about the danger of running ussr-code with unsafe in it, you could probably have your JIT refuse to compile the unsafe keyword specifically.

You'd be right if the cavity is only compressing other organs inside the body without changing the overall volume, but I don't know why you seem to insist on making that assumption.

I thought it would be clear from my original description, via the analogy with lungs, that the cavity would not squish the internal organs but rather expand the overall volume of the body.

My head canon for sea-based Kaiju is they have a sack of muscles somewhere inside their body that can expand a cavity, kind of like the diaphragm expands the lungs, except instead of taking in air or water it just creates a volume of vacuum inside of them. This makes them extremely bouyant relative to the surrounding sea pressure, so they rapidly ascend and can casually float like a boat near the surface.

But if they ever want to dive again, they just let that cavity collapse and all their bouyancy goes away.

I really don't think that there is any perfect programming language.

You'd be wrong 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

I think a long time ago a vicious cycle began in the advertising space where predatory ads had more incentive to pay for ad space, so sensible people start to perceive ads in general as predatory. Now no sensible advertiser that's trying to promote a legitimate product for legitimate reasons will do so by buying ad space, thus reinforcing the increasingly accurate perception that all ads are predatory.

Disclaimer that I have no experience with writing compilers myself, but conceptually I don't see any obvious reason that someone couldn't create a JIT compiler for Rust so that it can be treated like a scripting language and do rapid iteration...

And you think lending validity to Israel's claims that its actions are purely to defend itself from a bigoted terrorist threat is going to help anything?

There's an enormous gulf between asking nicely and spreading imagery that implies you want to literally murderer all Israelis. Have you considered that the most effective action may exist somewhere between those two positions? Also I'm very mad at you right now for making me sound like a centrist. Blech.