MyOutfitIsVague

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Comment · 10 months ago

Green is in the center of the visible spectrum of light (notice the G in the middle of ROYGBIV), so evolution should theoretically optimize for green light absorption. An interesting article on why plants typically reflect that wavelength and absorb the others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Earth_hypothesis

Comment · 10 months ago

You do need to turn off strict aliasing for that, because mruby uses `struct RObject { RB_OBJECT_HEADER; ... }` and `struct RHash { MRB_OBJECT_HEADER; ... }` (where MRB_OBJECT_HEADER begins with `RClass `). You can alias objects of both types as an `RClass `, but you can't alias them as one-another, converting RHash to RObject. According to my reading of the strict aliasing rules[0], the aliasing would be legal if one of the types literally contained the other, or if they were being accessed through a union. The "compatible types"[0] section requires the types to be exactly the same in layout, not just starting as the same. It's not safe to cast incompatible structs to one another just because they have the same initial members, unless you are accessing them through a union (C11 6.5.2.3p6). Optimization can cause UB when working with mruby if strict aliasing is enabled.

[0] https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/object.html#Strict_... [1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/compatible_type.htm...

Comment · 10 months ago

There is plenty of room in science for research that is just to examine and collect data. I don't understand your argument that science should only be to demonstrate claims and "completing" theories. Is science not about experimenting to slowly form a more complete understanding about how our world works? Research that does little more than collect novel data and show probable correlations is still extremely valuable.

Comment · 10 months ago

The MRuby embedding API isn't a whole lot like Lua's. Lua is a fantastic experience to embed. You might have to futz with the registry to store Lua objects in a C struct, but the abstraction allows you to almost never have to actually worry about the VM internals or the GC directly. Mruby is a lot more like MRI Ruby's API. Raw objects are exposed to you, you have to turn off strict aliasing because inheritance is implemented by the old "common meta struct as first member" idiom, you have to manually trigger VM collecting in long-running C code ( https://github.com/mruby/mruby/blob/master/doc/guides/gc-are... ), getting args in a C function involves a variadic scanf-style function. The most striking difference is documentation. The documentation of the mruby C API is actually "read the headers". There are many seemingly redundant functions that look like they do the same thing, completely without explanatory comments, or minimal inscrutable comments:

    /* mrb_gc_protect() leaves the object in the arena */
    MRB_API void mrb_gc_protect(mrb_state *mrb, mrb_value obj);
    /* mrb_gc_register() keeps the object from GC. */
    MRB_API void mrb_gc_register(mrb_state *mrb, mrb_value obj);
    /* mrb_gc_unregister() removes the object from GC root. */
    MRB_API void mrb_gc_unregister(mrb_state *mrb, mrb_value obj);

I'd rather work with Ruby as a language than Lua, but I'd much rather work with Lua than Mruby for the documentation and API alone. If mruby had anything close to the Lua reference documentation, I'd be all over it. As-is, embedding mruby kind of sucks, which is a real shame.

Comment · 10 months ago

I think it's fatigue. His stuff appears on the front page very often, and there's often tons of LLM stuff on the front page, too. Even as an LLM user, it's getting tedious and repetitive.

Comment · 10 months ago

I don't think it's implying that at all. Especially with the accompanying sentence. The implication is that hyper focusing on news is distorting our perception of normal.

Comment · 10 months ago

If your friend then believes that work, sleep, and hygiene are not things you did at all because you don't talk about them, then your analogy would be comparable. People believe homicide and terrorism are significantly more common than they are, and vote accordingly. It's affecting all of our lives. Let me know when your vacation stories change public policy, and then I'll start complaining about those.

Comment · 10 months ago

Many cancer and heart disease deaths are preventable. There's no direct correlation with preventability. The correlation is with fear and spectacle.

Comment · 10 months ago

I didn't imply that all web developers care about it, but that most of the people who care about it are web developers. I won't deny that it's still a minority.

Comment · 10 months ago

It's a common philosophy for developers with standards of robustness and accessibility to not hard depend on js for things that don't need js to function.

> Why the target audience of the ruby, probably primary web developers, whould do that?

In my experience, it's mostly web developers who care about this in the first place.

Comment · 10 months ago

Fair enough, I meant in terms of what rules and restrictions exist around aliasing, which are different between the two, but my wording was indeed off.

Comment · 10 months ago

Octopuses or octopodes. Octopi is incorrect.

Comment · 10 months ago

It's worth noting that "aliasing" in Rust and C typically mean completely unrelated things.

Strict aliasing in C roughly means that if you initialize memory as a particular type, you can only access it as that type or one of a list of aliasable types look like char. Rust has no such restriction, and has no concept of strict aliasing like this. In Rust, "type aliasing" is allowed, so long as you respect size, alignment, and representability rules.

Aliasing safety in Rust roughly means that you can not have an exclusive reference to an object if any other reference is active for that reference (reality is a little bit more involved than that, but not a lot). C has no such rule.

It's very unfortunate that such similar names were given to these different concepts.

Comment · 10 months ago

The accusations aren't "towards anyone who dares question her", they're towards people who assume that she had come in after the fact and unfairly got into somebody else's role, which is ignorant (and easily cleared up by glancing at a Wikipedia article) and also a common refrain aimed at any woman in any position of authority.

I'm not a fan of Baker for many reasons, but "how did she even get that role?" always pings my shithead radar, and isn't a question I hear for incompetent male CEOs, who are assumed to be just incompetent, while the women are assumed to be incompetent infiltrators who were hired on the basis of their sex.