qalmakka

I'm puzzled about why people were so vehement at roasting Joe Biden for his clear advanced age, while Trump is blatantly suffering from dementia or some similar mental impairment. His speech is way more rambling and incoherent that anything Joe Biden ever went through, and it doesn't get better when he's in a more familiar setting - quite the opposite, he gets more and more nonsensical whenever is giving an interview to anybody

Unfortunately C++ is full of very dubious features that I argue may not make much sense or may make sense in a different form that's not how C++ implements them.

IMHO the current contracts are a half-baked feature that I suspect will immediately end up in most coding styles as "do not use contracts".

I understand the concept but having a feature that's not consistent among compilers, targets, ... all while doing absolutely nothing to solve the _real_ problems with C++. Like that the build model is still the obsolete TU model of C, while adding multiple compile-time features that inevitably end up causing build times to skyrocket considerably. Or that modules are still DOA after 6 years. Or that the syntax is full of bullshit anti-features that could be at least fixed by having a proper build model (like Rust) and editions (like Rust).

Having yet another feature that only works sometimes with quirky semantics is dumb and I understand why many people feel like it should be shelved to prioritise the features people _really_ care about, like meta

That's a feeling I've been also feeling for the last year or so. Turns out the means was what I cared about, and I didn't care about the ends that much. LLMs robbed me of that in a way I couldn't see coming.

I think that we as a society fail to see that the speed we built things was rarely the problem. The real shortage was in the ideas - having them, finding the motivation to act on them, sharing them, and the biggest driver was the desire of showing off, being told you are great and your idea was great.

I am afraid that by removing the ick to fix things, to challenge everything and being rewarded for that, we will end up with less innovation, not more. Why bother? Why do anything if everything is cheap, why start a new project only to be shrugged away as being yet another thing any machine could have done? Why show off when the merits are the machine's?

HN went from being a constant stream of Show HN to AI news after AI news. The most interesting projects AI have enabled are to run old stuff onto other things.

Rehashes of old ideas keep sprouting out of everywhere, keeping new ones at bay. I think we are probably entering a long winter and all that will be left is permutations of what we did before '23

Jesus H Christ these guys had literally the number 4 as their secret and they call telling them they're incompetent an "out of proportion" reaction?

yeah anyone wise migrated away from PHP ages ago. The fact it got lipstick on back with PHP7 doesn't make it a well designed programming language. At least in my experience the vast majority of PHP websites nowadays are old abandoned PHP5 projects, which aren't much worse than just slopping a rewrite in something else

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Vkd3d is a PE executable, if wine works and Vulkan works then it works too, as long as the required extensions are present

> Git assumes that clients work offline and need a complete copy of the repository. Since nearly all of our clients are agents and jobs, we designed Scion’s client and protocols around a server that is always reachable, and have clients fetch data when they need it.

That sounds like Subversion with extra steps

> In git, you commit locally and then push to share your work. In Scion, every commit, rebase, or merge happens on the server, so there’s nothing to push,

Yep not beating the allegations with this one

To be fair 90% of the companies I've ever worked for always used git in a way that turned it into Subversion, but with 10x the storage usage (note: I hate Subversion with a passion, I'd rather send patches via email than that)

I don't really agree with this. Having strong types and guardrails like in Haskell, Rust or OCaml helps _massively_ with LLMs because they get very clear messages back, and can express their logic using semantic types they can easily follow. Conversely, I've noticed that AIs (just like humans) tend to kind of lose the thread with very dynamic code

> What if I told you that Docker Desktop has always used microVMs?

I'd say that I don't think it's that relevant? Hopefully everyone was aware that you required a VM to run Linux software on Windows and Mac, and then who would really care about what VM docker used to run development containers? The more expendable the better. Hopefully nobody is using a Windows PC with docker desktop in a production scenario - but given how utterly incompetent some people I met was, I'd not be too surprised from that

Yes, but at least it was a real thing with a serious proposal behind. Even if Carbon ships, what value would it give in 2029 or whenever it is in a world where writing rust or heck even C++ is now way easier and foolproof (as long as you know where to guide an LLM)

In my experience LLMs are way better when they "know" a language "instinctively". It's just that unless your language is very niche, the corpus is usually good enough. I tried using Claude to write my own personal language a while ago (I wrote a toy compiler decades ago) and it struggled a bit, because you could see in it's reasoning it had to "repeat" the syntax equivalence to itself while it read the code. It didn't just "know" it could use a given construct to do something; conversely Astra, when carefully instructed to do so, can plop down esoteric template code that works the first time, because it just "knows" it's the right stuff to write

Carbon was clearly DOA the moment it was announced, IMHO. It looked cool but it served none but Google, and now with LLMs you have a massive incentive not to use a niche or new language due to how better LLMs get the bigger the corpus is

The only somewhat realistic proposal in this space is Herb Sutter's cpp2, which is arguably a massive improvement and I'm puzzled why nobody in the standard thought to give it a spin, there's just to much cruft they'll never be able to get rid of unless they make an alternate yet backward compatible syntax with C++ that changes the defaults from "random 80s nonsense" to something better