drewm1980 (u/drewm1980)

drewm1980 commented on Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language flix.dev/... · Posted by u/freilanzer

daxfohl · 8 months ago

Any code agents work well with this or do we have to start thinking with our own brain again?

Seriously though, looks like a cool language and makes me sad that LLMs will probably inhibit the adoption of new languages, and wonder what we can do about it.

drewm1980 · 8 months ago

I have the opposite gut feeling about LLM's; I think they're going to break down the barriers to adopting new programming languages, since they'll lower the cost of porting code dramatically.

The code in a language's standard library is probably enough to train an LLM on the new syntax, and even if it isn't, agents now observe the compiler output and can in principle learn from it. Porting code from one language to another doesn't require deep creativity and is, barring API aesthetics, a perfectly well defined task. It will be one of the first programming tasks to be perfectly automated by LLM's.

We are going to have to use our brains again to start thinking about why we're doing any of the stuff we're doing, and what effects it will have on the world.

drewm1980 commented on Requiem for a Solar Plant 7goldfish.com/articles/Re... · Posted by u/akkartik

giblfiz · 9 months ago

Hey, I'm the original author here.

I didn't want to do BTC for two reasons: 1) I'm already WAY over exposed on crypto in my portfolio 2) I consider energy burn on mining to be part of a "zero sum helps no one" situation. I was trying to actually do something net positive for the world so didn't want to just drop more into that bucket.

drewm1980 · 9 months ago

It's good that you repented and at least tried to do something good with the money, but it would have been even better to donate it to an environmental organization with better judgement than you have. Proof of work crypto mining was an inexcusably bad idea for humanity from day one.

drewm1980 commented on A lost decade chasing distributed architectures for data analytics? duckdb.org/2025/05/19/the... · Posted by u/andreasha

drewm1980 · 10 months ago

I mean, not everyone spent their decade on distributed computing. Some devs with a retrogrouch inclination kept writing single threaded code in native languages on a single node. Single core clock speed stagnated, but it was still worth buying new CPU's with more cores because they also had more cache, and all the extra cores are useful for running ~other peoples' bloated code.

drewm1980 commented on They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955) press.uchicago.edu/Misc/C... · Posted by u/thunderbong

BiteCode_dev · a year ago

I remember I once stumbled upon pictures of the daily life of ordinary nazis.

They looked so normal, having fun, teasing each other, drinking and playing instruments.

There is even a video where hitler is shying away from his love companion.

This was a shock to me as a kid: evil doesn't look like the caricature of "the very bad guy", it emerges in every day people.

I think we failed to communicate that. It was too tempting to have a universal vilain you could use in Hollywood movies and instantly recognize. That you can't identify to. Black and white is so easy to sell.

But what it means is a huge part of our society cannot make the link between what is happening in their own life and the past. Because they have a vision of the past that looks like a kid show, not what really happened.

Worse, on the other side, outraged people abused the term nazi to call out anybody that had a bad behavior. But there is a huge difference between being an asshole and being ready to commit genocide.

Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.

In the last too decades, we surely spent a lot of time playing with words until they could not be useful anymore. But it made us feel good for a moment.

drewm1980 · a year ago

Did you read the article? The section about "alarmists" and "troublemakers" is directly relevant to your take on the use of the word "Nazi". Some people have been calling Musk a Nazi for what, a decade? They sounded like alarmists a decade ago, but now he's literally doing Nazi salutes on TV, acting like it's normal.

drewm1980 commented on How big data created the modern dairy cow worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

drewm1980 · a year ago

I put whipped soy milk on my vegan homemade pumpkin pie last night and it was great. Do not miss dairy, and am thankful for modern food innovations that are helping us get past the suffering and environmental devastation of dairy.

drewm1980 commented on Preserving the history of retiring cruise ships afar.com/magazine/histori... · Posted by u/trevin

drewm1980 · a year ago

No mention of how cruise ships are essentially entire cities powered by fossil fuels that dump their waste directly into the ocean?

drewm1980 commented on Reasons not to take Lumina's anticavity probiotic trevorklee.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/gdudeman

b112 · 2 years ago

One could just eat other fruits, is there some reason the tomato, other than marketing "antioxidants", need be the purple fruit one eats?

Maybe it's a different question. Does the flavour seem mostly the same? A drop in for recipes?

drewm1980 · 2 years ago

Grapes are for luddites! Seriously though, my grapes are so reliable at cropping compared to tomato plants I think it would be more interesting to engineer grapes to be tomato-like.

drewm1980 commented on Fishing for oil and meat drives defaunation of deepwater sharks and rays science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/etiam

drewm1980 · 2 years ago

I've got 99 reasons to be vegan, but shark extinction... is yet another one.

drewm1980 commented on The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002) joelonsoftware.com/2002/1... · Posted by u/skm

cloogshicer · 2 years ago

I've long been having a hunch that we're currently in the "wild west of abstraction".

I think we're missing an essential constraint on the way we do abstraction.

My hunch is that this constraint should be that abstractions must be reversible.

Here's an example: When you use a compiler, you can work at a higher layer of abstraction (the higher-level language). But, this means you're now locked into that layer of abstraction. By that I mean, you can no longer work at the lower layer (assembly), even if you wanted to. You could in theory of course modify the compiler output after it's been generated, but then you'd have to somehow manually keep that work in sync whenever you want to re-generate. Using an abstraction kinda locks you into that layer.

I see this problem appearing everywhere:

- Use framework <--> Write from scratch

- Use an ORM <--> Write raw SQL

- Garbage collection <--> Manual memory management

- Using a DSL <--> Writing raw language code

- Cross platform UI framework <--> Native UI code

- ...

I think we're missing a fundamental primitive of abstraction that allows us to work on each layer of abstraction without being locked in.

If you have any thoughts at all on this, please share them here!

drewm1980 · 2 years ago

You can probably find an IDE plugin that inlines the assembly for a c function. Most ids can show the assembly side by side with your c code so it wouldn't be that much of a step. To fulfill your vision you would also need a decompiler (and an inliner) to convert a block of assembly back into C if a corresponding C routine exists.

drewm1980 commented on The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002) joelonsoftware.com/2002/1... · Posted by u/skm

jfoutz · 2 years ago

I added 2 numbers and came up with 5. What numbers did I add?

You can’t know, because the abstraction (add) destroys information. A “good “ abstraction destroys information that doesn’t matter, or maybe matter in a given context.

You can hang on to all of that extra detail, but it seems like that extra detail slows down drawing inferences.

When I claimed adding resulted in 5, you probably didn’t care if it was 5 apples or 5 skyscrapers. The addition results of 5 are the important part.

Kinda hand waving, but what is included and what is left out is the heart of abstraction imho. And when it’s left out, you can’t get it back.

drewm1980 · 2 years ago

There actually is such a thing as reversible computing(?) that keeps around enough intermediate values to run the code backwards to the inputs. Not sure what it is actually good for. Not to be confused with time travel debuggers, though they are similar in spirit.