kelnos (u/kelnos) - Readit News

kelnos commented on The F Word muratbuffalo.blogspot.com... · Posted by u/zdw

ryandrake · a day ago

Your rental car example reminds me of my own "pizza dinner for the team" example. A company I used to work for would order pizza on Thursdays for folks who were working late. No paperwork, no expenses, no manager approval--at 7PM on Thursday, 5-6 boxes of pizza would show up in the break room, and people would spend a little more time at work hacking away. Win win. As the company grew, of course, people being idiots, the free pizza got abused. People would walk into the break room at 7:01, take an entire box, and leave the office. So, sure enough, free pizza night ended.

Because it's easier to just forbid than eat the cost or (heaven forbid!) talk to people.

How much was this pizza costing the company? Pennies in the grand scheme of things. How much were the rental cars costing? Pennies. Probably a rounding error in even the smallest department's budget. You can afford to hire an army of engineers making $100K each, but $10 pizza is where you draw the line? $100 rental cars? Really???

kelnos · 4 hours ago

If I ran a company like that (I'm very glad I don't; it would stress me out and I'd hate it), I would immediately fire anyone who did something like that. Anyone who would so blatantly steal a communal resource from their peers is an untrustworthy scumbag. Why would I trust them with integral parts of my business if I can't even trust them to not walk away with $20 worth of shared pizza?

kelnos commented on Let's compile Quake like it's 1997 fabiensanglard.net/compil... · Posted by u/birdculture

clarity_hacker · 10 hours ago

Build environment archaeology like this matters more than people realize. Modern CI assumes containers solve reproducibility, but compiler version differences, libc variants, and even CPU instruction sets can silently change binary output. The detail about needing to reinstall Windows NT just to add a second CPU shows how tightly coupled OS and hardware were — there was no abstraction layer pretending otherwise. Exact toolchain reproduction isn't nostalgia; it's the only way to validate that a specific binary came from specific source.

kelnos · 10 hours ago

> The detail about needing to reinstall Windows NT just to add a second CPU shows how tightly coupled OS and hardware were — there was no abstraction layer pretending otherwise.

In this case there was: the reason you need to reinstall to go from uniprocessor to SMP was because NT shipped with two HALs (Hardware Abstarction Layer): one supporting just a single processor, and one supporting more than one.

The SMP one had all the code for things like CPU synchronization and interrupt routing, while the UP one did not.

If they'd packed everything into one HAL, single-processor systems would have to take the performance hit of all the synchronization code even though it wasn't necessary. Memory usage would be higher too. I expect that you probably could run the SMP HAL on a UP system (unless Microsoft put extra code in to make it not let you), but you wouldn't really want to do that, as it would be slower and require more RAM.

So it wasn't that those abstraction layers didn't exist back then. It was that abstraction layers can be expensive. This is still true today, of course, but we have the cycles and memory to spare, more or less, which was very much not the case then.

kelnos commented on We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright

light_hue_1 · a day ago

That's just gatekeeping.

It was and is my craft. I've been doing it since grade 5. Like 30 years now.

Writing tight assembly for robot controllers all the way to AI on MRI machines to security for the DoD and now the biggest AI on the planet.

But my craft was not typing. It's coding.

If you're typist you're going to mourn the printer. But if you're a writer you're going to see how the improves your life.

kelnos · a day ago

A big component to coding is typing. If you aren't doing the typing, then, unless you are dictating code to someone else to mechanically, verbatim type out for you, you are not coding.

I do believe directing an LLM to write code, and then reviewing and refining that code with the LLM, is a skill that has value -- a ton of value! -- but I do not think it is coding.

It's more like super-technical product management, or like a tech lead pair programming with a junior, but in a sort of mentorship way where they direct and nudge the junior and stay as hands-off as possible.

It's not coding, and once that's the sum total of what you do, you are no longer a coder.

You can get defensive and call this gatekeeping, but I think it's just the new reality. There's no shame in admitting that you've moved to a stage of your life where you build software but your role in it isn't as a coder anymore. Just as there's no shame in moving into management, if that's what you enjoy and are effective at it.

(If presenting credentials is important to you, as you've done, I've been doing this since 1989, when I was 8 years old. I've gone down to embedded devices, up through desktop software, up to large distributed systems. Coding is my passion, and has been for most of my life.)

kelnos commented on We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright

iambateman · a day ago

I do not mourn.

For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.

When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic.

When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort.

When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences.

Then I learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software.

Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.

It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making something useful for myself and others. And that has never been easier.

kelnos · a day ago

I love building things too, but for me, the journey is a big part of what brings me joy. Herding an LLM doesn't give me joy like writing code does. And the finished project doesn't feel the same when my involvement is limited to prompting an LLM and reviewing its output.

If I had an LLM generate a piece of artwork for me, I wouldn't call myself an artist, no matter how many hours I spent conversing with the LLM in order to refine the image. So I wouldn't call myself a coder if my process was to get an LLM to write most/all the code for me. Not saying the output of either doesn't have value, but I am absolutely fine gatekeeping in this way: you are not an artist/coder if this is how you build your product. You're an artistic director, a technical product manager, something of that nature.

That said, I never derived joy from every single second of coding; there were and are plenty of parts to it that I find tedious or frustrating. I do appreciate being able to let an LLM loose on some of those parts.

But sparing use is starting to really only work for hobby projects. I'm not sure I could get away with taking the time to write most of it manually when LLMs might make coworkers more "productive". Even if I can convince myself my code is still "better" than theirs, that's not what companies value.

kelnos commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless

cheema33 · 3 days ago

As others have pointed out, humans train on existing codebases as well. And then use that knowledge to build clean room implementations.

kelnos · 3 days ago

No they don't. One team meticulously documents and specs out what the original code does, and then a completely independent team, who has never seen the original source code, implements it.

Otherwise it's not clean-room, it's plagiarism.

kelnos commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless

NitpickLawyer · 3 days ago

We've been hearing this for 3 years now. And especially 25 was full of "they've hit a wall, no more data, running out of data, plateau this, saturated that". And yet, here we are. Models keep on getting better, at more broad tasks, and more useful by the month.

kelnos · 3 days ago

Yes, and Moore's law took decades to start to fail to be true. Three years of history isn't even close to enough to predict whether or not we'll see exponential improvement, or an unsurmountable plateau. We could hit it in 6 months or 10 years, who knows.

And at least with Moore's law, we had some understanding of the physical realities as transistors would get smaller and smaller, and reasonably predict when we'd start to hit limitations. With LLMs, we just have no idea. And that could be go either way.

kelnos commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless

NitpickLawyer · 3 days ago

This is a much more reasonable take than the cursor-browser thing. A few things that make it pretty impressive:

> This was a clean-room implementation (Claude did not have internet access at any point during its development); it depends only on the Rust standard library. The 100,000-line compiler can build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V. It can also compile QEMU, FFmpeg, SQlite, postgres, redis

> I started by drafting what I wanted: a from-scratch optimizing compiler with no dependencies, GCC-compatible, able to compile the Linux kernel, and designed to support multiple backends. While I specified some aspects of the design (e.g., that it should have an SSA IR to enable multiple optimization passes) I did not go into any detail on how to do so.

> Previous Opus 4 models were barely capable of producing a functional compiler. Opus 4.5 was the first to cross a threshold that allowed it to produce a functional compiler which could pass large test suites, but it was still incapable of compiling any real large projects.

And the very open points about limitations (and hacks, as cc loves hacks):

> It lacks the 16-bit x86 compiler that is necessary to boot [...] Opus was unable to implement a 16-bit x86 code generator needed to boot into 16-bit real mode. While the compiler can output correct 16-bit x86 via the 66/67 opcode prefixes, the resulting compiled output is over 60kb, far exceeding the 32k code limit enforced by Linux. Instead, Claude simply cheats here and calls out to GCC for this phase

> It does not have its own assembler and linker;

> Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.

Ending with a very down to earth take:

> The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

All in all, I'd say it's a cool little experiment, impressive even with the limitations, and a good test-case as the author says "The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities". Yeah, that's fair, but still highly imrpessive IMO.

kelnos · 3 days ago

Honestly I don't find it that impressive. I mean, it's objectively impressive that it can be done at all, but it's not impressive from the standpoint of doing stuff that nearly all real-world users will want it to do.

The C specification and Linux kernel source code are undoubtedly in its training data, as are texts about compilers from a theoretical/educational perspective.

Meanwhile, I'm certain most people will never need it to perform this task. I would be more interested in seeing if it could add support for a new instruction set to LLVM, for example. Or perhaps write a complier for a new language that someone just invented, after writing a first draft of a spec for it.

kelnos commented on Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition krzysztofjankowski.com/fl... · Posted by u/GalaxySnail

pjmlp · 6 days ago

Some of us do actually use such machines every now and then.

The point being made was that for many people whose lives doesn't circle around computers, their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.

For those people, using digital typewriter hardly requires more features than Final Writer, and for what they do with numbers in tables and a couple of automatic updated cells, something like Superplan would also be enough.

kelnos · 5 days ago

> their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.

So in other words, their computer needs have changed significantly.

You can't do most modern web-related stuff on a machine from the 90s. Assuming you could get a modern browser (with a modern TLS stack, which is mandatory today) compiled on a machine from the 90s, it would be unusably slow.

kelnos commented on Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition krzysztofjankowski.com/fl... · Posted by u/GalaxySnail

anthk · 6 days ago

Ram shortages are not dreams.

kelnos · 5 days ago

I think GP was dreaming about Electron developers being fired, not suggesting that RAM shortages weren't happening.

But perhaps I'm just projecting. Ugh, Electron.

kelnos commented on The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal frommers.com/tips/airfare... · Posted by u/donohoe

scott_w · 6 days ago

> I’d hazard that this may be true now, but this feeling was created by the same “security measures” we’re discussing.

Slight tangent but I recall travelling within the Schengen Zone for the first time and just walking off the plane and straight into a taxi. When I explained what I did to someone she asked "but what about security? How do they know you've not got a bomb?" I don't think I had the words to explain that, if I did manage to sneak a bomb onto the plane into Madrid, I was probably not going to save it for the airport after I landed...

kelnos · 6 days ago

Er, I don't get it. I do the same thing at every airport in the US: walk off the plane and straight into a taxi.