sfvisser

Why does “patent pending” almost automatically sounds like it’s going to be an underwhelming technology.

Humans maybe wrote the code, but not the network of weights on top. And that’s where the magic happens.

Even if we’d understand precisely how every neuron in our brains work at a molecular level there is no reason to believe we’d understand how we think.

We can’t simply reduce one layer into another and expect understanding.

I sometimes wonder if city life used to be more bustling, or if photographers just avoided taking pictures of places without many people.

The past feels so alive!

I use the “HN Dark Mode” add-on set to “auto” so it switches with my OS preferences.

Both on iPhone and Mac.

Then you switch?

My entire OS, most apps and 90% of websites switch automatically with a single keyboard shortcut.

“The Netherlands” isn’t selling anything.

The Dutch national government mandated login system relies on technologies and hosting of a private company that was in conversation with an American counterpart about a possible acquisition.

Bad? Yes

The Netherlands selling their login service? No

I don’t understand this comment, yes everything going over the wire is bits, but both endpoints need to know how to interpret this data, right? Types are a great tool to do this. They can even drive the exact wire protocol, verification of both data and protocol version.

So it’s hard to see how types get in the way instead of being the ultimate toolset for shaping distributed communication protocols.

Even if you can reason through a code base a bisect can still be much quicker.

Instead of understanding the code you only need to understand the bug. Much easier!

Don’t know about difficult, but at least less elegant. Lazy evaluation, type inference, abstractions like Functor/Applicative/Alternative/Monad make them so incredibly natural to work with in a language like Haskell. Sure, they exist in other languages (made a few myself) but it’s not the same.

Yes, but that’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid.

We use WASM quite a bit for embedding a ton of Rust code with very company specific domain code into our web frontend. Pretty cool, because now your backend and frontend can share all kinds of logic without endless network calls.

But it’s safe to say that the interaction layer between the two is extremely painful. We have nicely modeled type-safe code in both the Rust and TypeScript world and an extremely janky layer in between. You need a lot of inherently slow and unsafe glue code to make anything work. Part is WASM related, part of it wasm-bindgen. What were they thinking?

I’ve read that WASM isn’t designed with this purpose in mind to go back and forth over the boundary often. That it fits the purpose more of heaving longer running compute in the background and bring over some chunk of data in the end. Why create a generic bytecode execution platform and limit the use case so much? Not everyone is building an in-browser crypto miner.

The whole WASM story is confusing to me.