gdwatson

I am bad at recognizing LLM writing off the bat, though I am getting better. It's pretty common that the writing is good enough to get me reading on a topic I am interested in; then, once I am invested in the piece, it turns out to be shallow, wildly incomplete, or simply wrong.

It's common enough that it's training me to recognize and recoil from AI tics through sheer classical conditioning.

Deliberately so, and for an Internet standard correctly so. I know there is a long tail of environments, so I am curious. What's your environment like that you need traffic inspection but don't have full control of the clients?

There are two angles on this. There is the rejection of the humanities in favor of science and wealth, which are good things in themselves but are not everything. But, on the other hand, what many modern humanities faculties offer is a very time-bound activism that rejects books from 500 years ago and is not interested in the permanent things.

That post salvaged the subreddit; before, it had lost its focus. When I came back to give it another try, that post had become a meme and a rallying cry, and the sub had a lot of legitimately interesting thoughts and discussion.

Fair. If only they'd retired those APIs, too.

I remember when Windows gained experimental support for a UTF-8 locale usable with its 8-bit APIs. I used to run it at work; it had some issues at first, but most got shaken out pretty quickly. I don't know its current state, but that's probably the best route to UTF-8 on Windows if MS would lean into it.

Windows bought into Unicode hard before Unicode expanded beyond 16 bits. The consequence is that its native strings are theoretically UTF-16, but often behave like UCS-2, allowing random halves of surrogate pairs. Windows APIs reflect that, Windows filenames reflect that, and translation into UTF-8 has to reflect that -- somehow. It's not great.

Personally I'd like a world where Unicode gave up all the compromises that come with supporting UTF-16. But presumably burning all your early adopters is not a winning strategy.

I am not so paranoid, and I haven’t been working with AI, so my AI-dar is bad. But I keep reading technical writeups like this, then getting frustrated at the writing style or incomplete explanation – this one was more complete than most, though it was repetitive. Then I come read the HN comments, and I see that it was LLM-generated.

(To be fair, this one says so up top. Even so my eyes skipped over it.)

So I find the reaction helpful. I want to read posts in the best human style, but if the angry mob can’t motivate those, at least I can notice the pitchforks and torches, slap my forehead, and say, “Oh, that explains it.”

I stumbled over that too, but it makes sense when you finish the article. The ancient Romans didn’t build a lot of keyboards.

I think a lot of people just want to be able to discuss different areas of the automatic memory management design space separately, and maintaining the distinction between reference counting and garbage collection (meaning tracing GCs) lets them do that.

As for me personally, I consider refcounting and GC overlapping categories. I am perfectly willing to call CPython’s reference counting plus cycle collector a form of garbage collection, because it is transparent to the programmer. Every memory management technique has tradeoffs and pathological edge cases, but since you don’t have to consider them in the ordinary course of programming I’d say it counts. If you had to break cycles manually, or to annotate which references should be counted, I’d call that refcounting but not GC – as in the C++ stdlib.

This reminds me a bit of the way academics in programming language theory internalized the type-theoretic definition of the word “type” over and against the traditional programming definition. You sometimes see people who try to correct the term “dynamically typed language,” which makes perfect sense when types are data types, to “untyped” or “unityped,” which makes sense when types are mathematical constructs equivalent to proofs.

The colloquial term is clear in context, and it draws its boundaries in useful places. If academia prefers other boundaries to simplify its formal definitions, that’s understandable. But the rest of us shouldn’t restrict our language in that way.

It was a clever hack for porting existing code. But it doesn’t scale at all – you’ve just described adding four registers to a register-starved architecture in order to solve the issue for one CPU generation or so.

"He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position."

At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.

I actually think I like the baseline-aligned one best. It's spaced reasonably well while reflecting the character of each font better, IMHO. Or maybe it's just because a consistent baseline rhythm feels so typographically right.