Principal Engineer for Accumulate

  • 11 Posts
  • 212 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Scripting languages being languages that are traditionally source distributed.

    • Source distributed means you can read the source if it hasn’t been obfuscated. OTOH, it is trivial to decompile Java and C# so this isn’t a real difference for those languages (which happen to be compiled languages). So it’s only relevant for languages specifically compiled to machine code.
    • Source distributed means the recipient needs to install something. OTOH, Java and C#, again.

    So the only ways that the distribution mechanism matter are really a difference between How does the distribution mechanism matter beyond that? And even those points are

    They tend to be much easier to write

    I’m assuming you are not saying “real” languages should be hard to write…

    run slower

    Objective-C and Go run slower than C and they’re all compiled languages. Sure, an interpreter will be slower than a compiled language but modern languages aren’t simply interpreted (i.e. JIT, etc).

    often but not always dynamically typed, and operate at a higher level

    There are dynamically typed compiled languages, and high level compiled languages.

    It’s not a demeaning separation, just a useful categorization IMO.

    Calling one class of languages “real” and another class something else is inherently demeaning. I wouldn’t have cared enough to type this if you used “compiled vs scripting” instead of “real vs scripting”. Though I disagree with using “scripting” at all to describe a language since that’s an assertion of how you use the language, not of the language itself. “Interpreted” on the other hand is a descriptor of the language itself.

    As someone who loves C there are lots of languages that seem too limiting and high level, doesn’t mean they aren’t useful tho.

    I personally can’t stand Java because the language designers decided to remove ‘dangerous’ features like pointers and unsigned integers because apparently programmers are children who are incapable of handling the risk. On the other hand I love Go. It’s high level enough to be enjoyable and easy to write, but if you want to get into the weeds you can.


  • That line is blurring to the point where it barely exists any more. Compiled languages are becoming increasingly dynamic (e.g. JIT compilation, code generation at runtime) and interpreted languages are getting compiled. JavaScript is a great example: V8 uses LLVM (a traditional compiler) to optimize and compile hot functions into machine code.

    IMO the only definition of “real” programming language that makes any sense is a (Turing complete) language you can realistically build production systems with. Anything else is pointlessly pedantic or gatekeeping.








  • If the ask is, why was the hardware like that in the first place the answer is because it can’t be fully validated.

    But that’s not the question. There are two questions: Who should be responsible for patching hardware vulnerabilities? And if the answer is “the kernel” then should speculative but never demonstrated vulnerabilities be patched? Linus’ answer is the hardware manufacturer, and no.

    Is this really the hardware vendor’s problem though? It’s the consumers problem.

    Maybe we’re running into the ambiguity of language. If you mean to say, “Who does it cause a problem for? The consumer.” then sure. On the other hand what I mean, and what I think Linus means, is “Who’s responsible for the vulnerability existing? Hardware vendors. Who should fix it? Hardware vendors.”

    If the ask is why should a speculative fix go into the Kernel […]

    Depends on what you/we/they mean by “speculative”. IMO, we need to do something (microcode, kernel patches, whatever) to patch Spectre and Meltdown. Those have been demonstrated to be real vulnerabilities, even if no one has exploited them yet. But “speculative” can mean something else. I’m not going to read all the LMK emails so maybe they’re talking about something else. But I’ve seen plenty of, “Well if X, Y, and Z happen then that could be a vulnerability.” For that kind of speculative vulnerability, one that has not been demonstrated to be a real vulnerability, I am sympathetic to Linus’ position.



  • Of course but presumably on occasion you do work in other languages? I work in all kinds of languages and so jumping between them it’s pretty handy to bridge the gap.

    If I were jumping languages a lot, I definitely think it would be helpful. But pretty much 100% of what I’ve done for the last 3-4 years is Go (mostly) or JavaScript (occasionally). I have used chatgpt the few times I needed to work in some other language, but that has been pretty rare.

    I think you could definitely still get value out of generating simple stuff though, at least for me it really helps get projects done quickly without burning myself out

    If simple stuff == for loops and basic boilerplate, the kind of stuff that copilot can autocomplete, I write that on autopilot and it doesn’t really register. So it doesn’t contribute to my burnout. If simple stuff == boring, boilerplate tests, I’ll admit that I don’t do nearly enough of that. But doing the ‘prompt engineering’ to get copilot to write that wasn’t any less painful that writing it myself.

    For small one off scripts it makes them actually save more time than they take to write

    The other day I wrote a duplicate image detector for my sister (files recovered from a dying drive). In hindsight I could have asked chatgpt to do it. But it was something I’ve never done before and an interesting problem so it was more fun to do it myself. And most of the one off stuff I’m asked to do by coworkers is tied to our code and our system and not the kind of thing chatgpt would know how to do.


  • func randomRGB(uid int) color.RGBA {
    	b := binary.BigEndian.AppendUint64(nil, uint64(uid))
    	h := sha256.Sum256(b)
    	return color.RGBA{h[0], h[1], h[2], 255}
    }
    

    That took me under three minutes and half of that was remembering that RGBA is in the color package, not the image package, and uint-to-bits is in the binary package, not the math package. I have found chatgpt useful when I was working in a different language. But trying to get chatgpt or copilot to write tests or documentation for me (the kind of work that bores me to death), doing the prompt engineering to get it to spit out something useful was more work than just writing the tests/documentation myself. Except for the time when I needed to write about 100 tests that were all nearly the same. In that case, using chatgpt was worth it.



  • If I’ve been working in the same language for at least a year or two, I don’t have to look up any of that. Copilot might be actually helpful if I’m working in a language I’m not used to, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had to look up syntax or functions (excluding 3rd party packages) for the language I work in.


  • I won’t say copilot is completely useless for code. I will say that it’s near useless for me. The kind of code that it’s good at writing is the kind of code that I can write in my sleep. When I write a for-loop to iterate over an array and print it out (for example), it takes near zero brain power. I’m on autopilot, like driving to work. On the other hand, when I was trialing copilot I’d have to check each suggestion it made to verify that it wasn’t giving me garbage. Verifying copilot’s suggestions takes a lot more brain power than just writing it myself. And the difference in time is minimal. It doesn’t take me much longer to write it myself than it does to validate copilot’s work.



  • I have to strongly disagree with you. I’ve used WSL 2 with VSCode, and I experienced waaaaaaaay more weird broken shit than I ever have running Linux. And even if it weren’t for that, it’s still not at all worth it IMO because using WSL 2 means every interaction I have with my development environment has to go through a Linux-to-Windows translation layer. I will never use Windows again for anything beyond testing unless I’m forced to.




  • it’s not inconceivable it could happen in the next two generations.

    I am certain that it will happen eventually. And I am not arguing that something has to be human-level intelligent to be considered intelligent. See dogs, pigs, dolphins, etc. But IMO there is a huge qualitative difference between how an LLM operates and how animal intelligence operates. I am certain we will eventually create intelligent systems but there is a massive gulf between what LLMs are capable of and abstract reasoning. And it seems extremely unlikely to me that linear algebraic models will ever achieve that type of intelligence.

    Intelligence is just responding to stimuli

    Bacteria respond to stimuli. Would you call them intelligent?