DowsingSpoon

> Those 20% would just figure that there's no need to have children when you can just focus on yourself and go largely extinct within a generation, replaced with some people from the higher tiers, but not nearly enough to make up for those who weren't born.

A person being _unemployed_ is not a hereditary trait. Also, while it's already pretty wild to effectively claim that about 20% of humanity carries some kind _doomed to be made unemployable by AI_ gene, it's another giant leap beyond that to declaring this cohort will uniformly choose not to reproduce and therefore become extinct.

Write once run anywhere? But C already is a "write once run anywhere" language! Though, you usually have to recompile first :)

The criticisms related to UB are not about understanding the target platform and the target compiler's behavior. Undefined Behavior is not the same thing as Implementation-defined Behavior, and lots of folks (including me) would be satisfied with reclassifying chunks of UB as the latter.

The behavior of the target platform isn't really the issue. C23 mandates two's complement for signed integers. Most hardware wraps on overflow, but that literally doesn't matter. The standard says a program exhibiting signed overflow is undefined, period.

In practice, UB rules mean the compiler is free to remove checks for signed overflow/underflow, checks for null pointers, etc. This can and does happen. Man, just a few weeks ago, I just had to deal with a crash in a C program that turned out to be due to the compiler removing a null check. That was a painful one.

No, not really. I bought an $800 pair of designer sunglasses a couple of times, but usually, good frames are only a few hundred bucks.

I’ve thought about this myself. Couple of points:

1) It’s not my job to fix all the problems of Capitalism. It’s painful to try to fight the system without collective action. My family and I have to eat too.

2) We have had a solution all along for the particular problem of AI putting devs out of work. It’s called professional licensure, and you can see it in action in engineering and medical fields. Professional Software Engineers would assume a certain amount of liability and responsibility for the software they develop. That’s regardless of whether they develop it with LLM tools or something else.

For example, you let your tools write slop that you ship without even looking? And it goes on to wreak havoc? That’s professional malpractice. Bad engineer.

If we do this then Software Engineers become the responsible humans in the loop of so-called “AI” systems.

The Department of Defense was established by the National Security Act of 1947. If the Congress wanted to change the name then they would pass another law to do so.

An executive order is not law.

What are you trying to communicate in this comment? That you have spite for your users? Why? That you consider not bothering with Firefox support to be a good way to, what, express your spite? Do I have that right?

And you thought it good to post this?

You’re not wrong. You’re not the only one saying this either. Though, I’m currently of the mind that the concern is overblown. I’m finding Opus 4.6 is only really capable of solving a problem when the prompt explains the fix in such concrete detail that coding is incredibly straightforward. For example, if the prompt has enough detail that any decent human programmer would read it and end up writing basically the same code then Claude can probably manage it too.

While I haven’t used other models like Codex and Gemini all that much recently, Anthropic’s is one of the top-tier models, and so I believe the others are probably the same in this way.

A junior’s mind will not rot because the prompt basically has to contain detailed pseudocode in order to get anywhere.

This article does not make it clear what a metaproject actually is. That said, I _believe_ the author is describing a concept similar to something I do. Choose a very small number of open-ended, broad projects. Each project should basically be an endless well of work. Moving the metaproject forward involves finishing several sub-projects, each of which is a respectable weekend or holiday project all on its own. A good choice for metaproject allows for a choice between a wide variety of new and interesting things to work on.

Get bored or stuck? Do something else. There’s so many things to do. You’re still working on the same metaproject.

Find something cool online that you want to experiment with? Find a way to frame it as an experiment or project under the umbrella of the metaproject.

For example, my overarching project is to develop my own computer system, from the custom CPU, up to the operating system and applications, as completely from scratch as possible. This has led me to learn more about Verilog, electronics, soldering, computer architecture, RISC-V, emulators, you name it.

At one point, I decided I needed to design my own high-level language for this thing. The compiler has itself become a metaproject where there’s always something to work on: parsing, lexing, optimization passes, experiments in syntax, garbage collectors, writing a debugger, etc.

Someday soon, I hope to be able to start a project to build video hardware with a sprite engine, like in those old 8-bit and 16-bit game systems. I’ll mentally bill this under the umbrella of “working on my computer project.”

I’ve been thinking of “that computer project” as a kind of life project that I’ll plug away on here and there until the day I die.

I wonder if this is how those old men who build boats feel about their boat. Hey, there’s my own catchy phrase right there: “Build your boat”

This is why, of course, nearly all open source projects are written in Java.

The Instruments suite, plus sanitizers like ASan, is basically the valgrind equivalent on macOS. It’s not exactly the same, but it comes close.

Memory management in Swift is almost broken? How so? This is a fascinating assertion, and I’d love to learn more.

There more to stability than continuity of government. Though, that definitely is important.

It’s bad enough that America’s foreign policy lately swings wildly every four years. More recently, it’s been acting aggressive toward allies, and making very strange and unpredictable moves.

The USA’s tariff policies are, frankly, utterly insane. Yes, I do mean the tariffs are irrational and incoherent. The approach to the tariffs has been overly aggressive. They’ve been changing almost daily, at times. Now, tariffs are specifically a thing that must be stable and predictable on a multi-year horizon. This must be, at least, off-putting to other governments, and to any companies wishing to do business in or adjacent to the USA.

Monkeying with the Fed is dangerous and basically unprecedented. This is going to make people nervous because it marks the end of an era of stability in monetary policy. We may be at the start of a new era where interest rates, much like the tariffs, change frequently for bad reasons or for no reason at all. Who can say?

And THAT is the problem.

I think black hole accretion disks and jets are something like several orders of magnitude less dense than would be required for that.

Yes. As far as kernels go, NT was pretty damn good.

So is Mach, by the way, if you can afford the microkernel performance overhead.