d3ckard (u/d3ckard) - Readit News

d3ckard commented on The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat bayramovanar.substack.com... · Posted by u/Bayramovanar

d3ckard · 17 days ago

The main issue IMHO is the monopolization of the industry, especially in the US. Once the giants do layoffs, the rest of the market can't absorb the people effectively, which leads to oversaturated job market.

We can of course discuss how many people got into industry during COVID heyday and whether they should have, but mostly I think it's about those behemoths having disproportionately high impact on the entire labour market.

d3ckard commented on 150k lines of vibe coded Elixir: The good, the bad and the ugly getboothiq.com/blog/150k-... · Posted by u/InternetGiant

logicprog · 21 days ago

It's interesting that Claude is able to effectively write Elixir, even if it isn't super idiomatic without established styles in the codebase, considering Elixir is a pretty niche and relatively recent language.

What I'd really like to see though is experiments on whether you can few shot prompt an AI to in-context-learn a new language with any level of success.

d3ckard · 21 days ago

I would argue effectiveness point.

It's certainly helpful, but has a tendency to go for very non idiomatic patterns (like using exceptions for control flow).

Plus, it has issues which I assume are the effect of reinforcement learning - it struggles with letting things crash and tends to silence things that should never fail silently.

d3ckard commented on Static Allocation with Zig nickmonad.blog/2025/stati... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

kibwen · 2 months ago

> It’s the only kind of program that can be actually reasoned about.

Theoretically infinite memory isn't really the problem with reasoning about Turing-complete programs. In practice, the inability to guarantee that any program will halt still applies to any system with enough memory to do anything more than serve as an interesting toy.

I mean, I think this should be self-evident: our computers already do have finite memory. Giving a program slightly less memory to work with doesn't really change anything; you're still probably giving that statically-allocated program more memory than entire machines had in the 80s, and it's not like the limitations of computers in the 80s made us any better at reasoning about programs in general.

d3ckard · 2 months ago

Yes, but allocations generate ever increasing combinatorial space of possible failure modes.

Static allocation requires you to explicitly handle overflows, but also by centralizing them, you probably need not to have as many handlers.

Technically, all of this can happen as well in language with allocations. It’s just that you can’t force the behavior.

d3ckard commented on Static Allocation with Zig nickmonad.blog/2025/stati... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

mikepurvis · 2 months ago

I'm not an academic, but all those ByteArray linked lists have me feeling like this is less "static allocation" and more "I re-implemented a site-specific allocator and all that that implies".

Also it's giving me flashbacks to LwIP, which was a nightmare to debug when it would exhaust its preallocated buffer structures.

d3ckard · 2 months ago

Personally, I see dynamic allocation more and more as a premature optimization and a historical wart.

We used to have very little memory, so we developed many tricks to handle it.

Now we have all the memory we need, but tricks remained. They are now more harmful than helpful.

Interestingly, embedded programming has a reputation for stability and AFAIK game development is also more and more about avoiding dynamic allocation.

d3ckard commented on Static Allocation with Zig nickmonad.blog/2025/stati... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

dnautics · 2 months ago

i think you mean "exactly not Turing complete"

d3ckard · 2 months ago

Nice correction :)

It’s actually quite tricky though. The allocation still happens and it’s not limited to, so you could plausibly argue both ways.

d3ckard commented on Static Allocation with Zig nickmonad.blog/2025/stati... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

d3ckard · 2 months ago

Personally I believe static allocation has pretty huge consequences for theoretical computer science.

It’s the only kind of program that can be actually reasoned about. Also, not exactly Turing complete in classic sense.

Makes my little finitist heart get warm and fuzzy.

d3ckard commented on The Miracle of Wörgl scf.green/story-of-worgl-... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

BrenBarn · 3 months ago

That's true, but most of those can be cracked down on simply by saying that any undeclared wealth is forfeit. Also, the great proportion of most rich people's actual wealth is in forms that are easier to trace (e.g., shares of corporations, real estate).

d3ckard · 3 months ago

Problem does not lay in not declaring wealth.

d3ckard commented on The Miracle of Wörgl scf.green/story-of-worgl-... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

webnrrd2k · 3 months ago

How is high marginal taxes and high inheritance taxes not simple?

If complexity is the problem then close the loopholes that let people get out of this.

America was not supposed to be a country of monarchs and wealthy dynasties, and high inheritance taxes helped towards that goal.

d3ckard · 3 months ago

Because only poor people need income. If you have enough assets, income is optional.

d3ckard commented on The Miracle of Wörgl scf.green/story-of-worgl-... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

webnrrd2k · 3 months ago

If the problem is that the system is very skewed to the top, then isn't the solution to be found in addressing that skew? In closing those particular loopholes?

Shouldn't everyone pay their fair share of taxes? Warren Buffett and others seem to think that they should.

d3ckard · 3 months ago

You don’t get it. Tax system is already very skewed to the top, as in majority of the income comes from a few.

The problem is that the top paying those taxes are not the rich people.

d3ckard commented on The Miracle of Wörgl scf.green/story-of-worgl-... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

Bjartr · 3 months ago

If they don't affect the rich, why have the rock didn't so much time, effort, and money eroding such taxes over decades?

d3ckard · 3 months ago

Eroding them is beneficial to other groups of society, not the rich.

It's like with corporations. Corporations love complex legal systems, as they are the only ones with money to deal with them. Simplification actually benefits smaller enterprises.