FjordWarden (u/FjordWarden)

FjordWarden commented on The silent death of good code amit.prasad.me/blog/rip-g... · Posted by u/amitprasad

I love the sentiment, but 40 years in the business realm of software development has taught me “good code” is never a priority for management. It’s difficult to explain good unit testing, tech debt, or just going through proper solution selection with management.

So having used Claude Code since it came out I’ve decided the resulting code is overall just as good as what I’d see in regular programming scenarios.

FjordWarden · a day ago

Let management argue there case, don't do it for them.

FjordWarden commented on The silent death of good code amit.prasad.me/blog/rip-g... · Posted by u/amitprasad

FjordWarden · a day ago

Man am I getting tired of these articles and we can do without this neurotic melancholic whining. Maybe it is the title of the article that triggered me, but it reminded me of hearing Douglas Murray read excerpts from "The Strange Death of Europe" in his self-aggrandising pompous tone.

The authors colleague needed a couple of tries to write a kernel extension and somehow this means something about programming. If it was not for LLMs I would not have gone back to low-level programming, this stuff is actually getting fun again. Lets check the assembly the compiler produced for the code the LLM produced.

FjordWarden commented on The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology (2013) quantamagazine.org/in-mys... · Posted by u/kerim-ca

blurbleblurble · 13 days ago

Today I thought a lot about this topic and was also trying to find connections to computation. Seems like "computational entropy" could be a useful bridge in the sense that to derive a low entropy output from a high entropy input, it seems intuitively necessary that you'd need to make use of the information in the high entropy input. In this case you would need to compute the eigenvalues, which requires a certain wrestling with the information in the matrices. So even though the entries of the matrices themselves are random, the process of observing their eigenvalues/eigenvectors is has a certain computational complexity involved with processing and "aggregating" that information in a sense.

I realize what I'm saying is very gestural. The analogous context I'm imagining is deriving blue noise distributed points from randomly distributed points: intuitively speaking it's necessary to inspect the actual distributions of the points in order to move the points toward the lower entropy distribution of blue noise, which means "consuming" information about where the points actually are.

The "random song" thing is similar: in order to make a shuffle algorithm that doesn't repeat, you need to consume information about the history of the songs that have been played. This requirement for memory allows the shuffle algorithm to produce a lower entropy output than a purely random process would ever be able to produce.

So hearing that a "purely random matrix" can have these nicely distributed eigenvalues threw me off for a bit, until I realized that observing the eigenvalues has some intrinsic computational complexity, and that it requires consuming the information in the matrix.

Again, this is all very hunchy, I hope you see what I'm getting at.

FjordWarden · 13 days ago

Interesting, I did not know that colors-of-noice was related to this, what you say sounds conceptually very similar to how Maxwell's demon connects thermodynamics to information theory.

FjordWarden commented on The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology (2013) quantamagazine.org/in-mys... · Posted by u/kerim-ca

redleader55 · 13 days ago

This is interesting, do you have a link to any research about this?

FjordWarden · 13 days ago

No, it is a hypothesis I formulated here after reading the article. I did a quick check on google scholar but I didn't hit any result. The more interesting question is, if true, what can you do with this information. Maybe it can be a way to evaluate a complete program or specific heap allocator, as in "how fast does this program reach universality". Maybe this is something very obvious and has been done before, dunno, heap algos are not my area of expertise.

FjordWarden commented on The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology (2013) quantamagazine.org/in-mys... · Posted by u/kerim-ca

FjordWarden · 13 days ago

Maybe also heap fragmentation

FjordWarden commented on Tree-sitter vs. Language Servers lambdaland.org/posts/2026... · Posted by u/ashton314

lioeters · 18 days ago

> extra step to get from CST to AST

Could you elaborate on what this involves? I'm also looking at using tree-sitter as a parser for a new language, possibly to support multiple syntaxes. I'm thinking of converting its parse trees to a common schema, that's the target language.

I guess I don't quite get the difference between a concrete and abstract syntax tree. Is it just that the former includes information that's irrelevant to the semantics of the language, like whitespace?

FjordWarden · 18 days ago

TS returns a tree with nodes, you walk the nodes with a visitor pattern. I've experimented with using tree-sitter queries for this, but for now not found this to be easier. Every syntax will have its own CST but it can target a general AST if you will. At the end they can both be represented as s-expressions and but you need rules to go from one flavour of syntax tree to the other.

AST is just CST minus range info and simplified/generalised lexical info (in most cases).

FjordWarden commented on Tree-sitter vs. Language Servers lambdaland.org/posts/2026... · Posted by u/ashton314

lowbloodsugar · 18 days ago

N00b question: Language parsers gives me concrete information, like “com.foo.bar.Baz is defined here”. Does tree sitter do that or does it say “this file has a symbol declaration for Baz” and elsewhere for that file “there is a package statement for ‘com.foo.bar’” and then I have to figure that out?

FjordWarden · 18 days ago

You have to figure this out for yourself in most cases. Tree sitter does have a query language based on s-expressions, but it is more for questions like "give me all the nodes that are literals", and then you can, for example, render those with in single draw call. Tree sitter has incremental parsing, and queries can be fixed at a certain byte range.

FjordWarden commented on Tree-sitter vs. Language Servers lambdaland.org/posts/2026... · Posted by u/ashton314

FjordWarden · 18 days ago

This is like the difference between an orange and fruit juice. You can squeeze an orange to extract its juices, but that is not the only thing you can do with it, nor is it the only way to make fruit juice.

I use tree-sitter for developing a custom programming language, you still need an extra step to get from CST to AST, but the overall DevEx is much quicker that hand-rolling the parser.

FjordWarden commented on The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly buildsoftwaresystems.com/... · Posted by u/ThierryBuilds

FjordWarden · 24 days ago

Ah, I think I found the reason as to why WebAssembly (in a browser or some other sandboxed environment) is not a suitable substrate for near native performance. It is a very ironic reason: you can't implement a JIT compiler that targets WebAssembly in a sandbox running in WebAssembly. Sounds like an incredibly contrived thing to do but once speed is the goal then a copy-and-patch compiler is a valid strategy for implementing a interpreter or a modern graphics pipeline.

FjordWarden commented on The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know spectrum.ieee.org/the-ris... · Posted by u/b-man

FjordWarden · 2 months ago

The CM DB group YT channel is good place to learn about the basics and advanced topics: https://www.youtube.com/@CMUDatabaseGroup