doyougnu

Please write this up! I’ve had similar ideas but haven’t tried going back to ctags yet. I’d love to read about your experience.

Looking forward to 15 years of embedded.

IIRC that talk of about using indices (u32) to represent data in an array. That is orthogonal to representing that information in the type system since you can just type the index

Some shameless self-promotion

I think this is exactly right. I've been thinking of "this time" as similar to the advent of digital spreadsheets. Spreadsheets existed for thousands of years but spreadsheet programs transformed spreadsheet work that took hours or weeks into seconds. You still had to know what you were doing, and if you knew what you were doing you were easily 10x faster than those that didn't.

I think we are in a similar situation with code generation now, then only difference in my mind is that LLMs come with a massive platform risk. Who's to say that one day anthropic decides my company is too much of a competitor to use their tool (like they've already done with openai) or what if they decide that instead of pulling their product from my use they just make it generate worse code, or even insert malicious payloads. A dependence on these tools is wildly more risky than dependency on a word processor or a spreadsheet program. It reminds me of the arguments around net neutrality and I cannot fathom how people building on top of, and with, these tools do not see the mountain of risks around them.

I'm honestly shocked by this having been an Ars reader for over ten years. I miss the days when they would publish super in-depth articles on computing. Since the Conde Nast acquisition I basically only go to ars for Beth Mole's coverage which is still top notch. Other than that I've found that the Verge fulfills the need that I used to get from Ars. I also support the Verge as a paid subscriber and cannot recommend them enough.

My recommendation: find and cultivate vision, then view the $JOB not as separate from _your_ work towards _your_ vision, but part of it. Its the part that funds you enough to continue to progress on your own plan.

Here's how I think of it: If I were a painter, I would paint, explore and experiment in my free time because its what I want to do. Maybe, as a painter, my vision is to improve the state of the art of some kind of dye or brush or canvas and that is my vision. But! That does not mean that I cannot be commissioned to work on a mural or put on a retainer for a museum or something else. The only difference is that in the latter you are being explicitly payed by a patron to produce something they want. And furthermore I need that work, I work for myself but still need projects to bring in money to do the work I care about.

I view my software dev as the same thing. I have a vision of where I want to be, what I want to do, and how I want to contribute to advance the state of the art of the things I care about. I do not care, and am unconcerned about the corporate needs of the thing I care about, its for me and for people like me. My $JOB is just one part of that larger goal and the path I walk towards that goal. Its an important part, sure, and I show up and give a good faith effort and my expert opinion, but its not the part that enriches me as much as my personal stuff. The distinction is that the $JOB is not separate, its a necessary and important part of my plan to execute on my vision.

Once you have vision I think you'll find its much easier to find similar people who want to work on the same things you want to work on. And I think you'll find it much easier to tolerate capitalist minutiae because you will reduce the things you need from $JOB.

I've interfaced with some AI generated code and after several examples of finding subtle and yet very wrong bugs I now find that I digest code that I suspect coming from AI (or an AI loving coworker) with much much more scrutiny than I used to. I've frankly lost trust in any kind of care for quality or due diligence from some coworkers.

I see how the use of AI is useful, but I feel that the practitioners of AI-as-coding-agent are running away from the real work. How can you tell me about the system you say you have created if you don't have the patience to make it or think about it deeply in the first place?

Couldn't have said it better myself. But IIUC Andrew stated that its not a monad because it does not build up a computation and then run. Rather, its as if every function runs a `runIO#` or `runReader` every time the io parameter is used.

Agreed. the Haskeller in me screams "You've just implemented the IO monad without language support".

Not a game dev. Besides profiling, I would create game scenarios that exercise certain parts of the game engine.

For example, I would create a game fight scenario where the player has infinite health and the enemy just attacks super fast at some settable rate. That way you could monitor whats happening in extreme abnormal conditions with the hypothesis that if the game works in extreme conditions then it will work in normal conditions.

Another example. If you have random encounters like in old school JRPGs then I would create a scenario where a fight happens per step of the player, the fight loads, then the enemy immediately dies, rinse wash and repeat. That should allow you to asses how the game performs after 100s of fights quickly.

The idea here is to create tests that improve your signal to noise ratio. So you create a scenario that will create a large signal so that then you can more easily diagnose the performance issues.