mwcampbell (u/mwcampbell)

mwcampbell commented on Using LLMs at Oxide rfd.shared.oxide.computer... · Posted by u/steveklabnik

dcre · 10 days ago

Thanks, this will be perfect for the team of 6 year olds that work for me.

mwcampbell · 10 days ago

Simple language isn't just for children. It's also good for non-native speakers. Besides, even for those who can understand complex grammar and obscure words, parsing unnecessarily complex language takes extra effort.

In this specific case, I don't think the rewritten version of the document is infantilizing.

mwcampbell commented on Chuck Moore: Colorforth has stopped working [video] youtube.com/watch?v=MvkGB... · Posted by u/netten

bitwize · a month ago

Did Microsoft seriously deprecate BitBlt and 2D draw calls?

If so, it seems as if Windows is undergoing a Waylandization. "Yeah, we went ahead and removed those because they're legacy. Modern rendering pipelines don't work that way anymore." I don't WANT a rendering pipeline! I want a surface, and to make calls to scribble on it! That's it!

mwcampbell · a month ago

> Did Microsoft seriously deprecate BitBlt and 2D draw calls?

Very unlikely. Far too many applications depend on those things. It's more likely that they accidentally changed something subtle that happened to break colorForth.

mwcampbell commented on Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper windowslatest.com/2025/11... · Posted by u/DearAll

kridsdale1 · a month ago

I made Facebook and FB Messenger for Windows. It was considered a complete failure by management as it never got above 1% of the usage by windows users vs the website.

mwcampbell · a month ago

If you're allowed to say, are you referring to the Windows 10 ports of the iOS apps that were done via Osmeta in 2016, or the earlier WinRT-native version? If the former, that was a non-starter for me and my blind friends due to deep accessibility issues, probably having to do with the Osmeta port/reimplementation of UIKit. Edit to add: And we wanted something that was easier to use with a Windows screen reader than the desktop website, particularly for Facebook proper.

mwcampbell commented on Zig and the design choices within blueberrywren.dev/blog/on... · Posted by u/lerno

api · a month ago

Rust has been adopted by Microsoft, Amazon, etc. It's past the hype phase and well into the "languages people use for work and complain about" phase.

I still like it -- for systems programming, that is. It's a much better C++ basically.

mwcampbell · a month ago

> I still like it -- for systems programming, that is.

Just curious, what language(s) do you prefer for things that you don't classify as "systems programming"?

mwcampbell commented on LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger bytesauna.com/post/dunnin... · Posted by u/gridentio

everdrive · a month ago

I've been thinking about that comparison as well. A common fantasy is that civilization will collapse and the guy who knows how to hunt and start a fire will really excel. In practice, this never happens and he's sort of left behind unless he also has other skills relevant to the modern world.

And, for instance, I have barely any knowledge of how my computer works, but it's a tool I use to do my job. (and to have fun at home.)

Why are these different than using LLMs? I think at least for me the distinction is whether or not something enables me to perform a task, or whether it's just doing the task for me. If I had to write my own OS and word processor just to write a letter, it'd never happen. The fact that the computer does this for me facilitates my task. I could write the letter by hand, but doing it in a word processor is way better. Especially if I want to print multiple copies of the letter.

But for LLMs, my task might be something like "setting up apache is easy, but I've never done it so just tell me how do it so I don't fumble through learning and make it take way longer." The task was setting up Apache. The task was assigned to me, but I didn't really do it. There wasn't necessarily some higher level task that I merely needed Apache for. Apache was the whole task! And I didn't do it!

Now, this will not be the case for all LLM-enabled tasks, but I think this distinction speaks to my experience. In the previous word processor example, the LLM would just write my document for me. It doesn't allow me to write my document more efficiently. It's efficient, only in the sense that I no longer need to actually do it myself, except for maybe to act as an editor. (and most people don't even do much of that work) My skill in writing either atrophies or never fully develops since I don't actually need to spend any time doing it or thinking about it.

In a perfect world, I use self-discipline to have the LLM show me how to set up Apache, then take notes, and then research, and then set it up manually in subsequent runs; I'd have benefited from learning the task much more quickly than if I'd done it alone, but also used my self-discipline to make sure I actually really learned something and developed expertise as well. My argument is that most people will not succeed in doing this, and will just let the LLM think for them.

mwcampbell · a month ago

> the distinction is whether or not something enables me to perform a task, or whether it's just doing the task for me.

I think school has taught us to believe that if we're assigned a task, and we take a shortcut to avoid doing the task ourselves, that's wrong. And yes, when the purpose is to learn the task or the underlying concepts, that's probably true. But in a job environment, the employer presumably only cares that the task got done in the most efficient way possible.

Edit to add: When configuring or using a particular program is tedious and/or difficult enough that you feel the need to turn to an LLM for help, I think it's an indication that a better program is needed. Having an LLM configure or operate a computer program for you is kind of like having a robot operate a computer UI that was designed for humans, as opposed to having a higher-level program just do the higher-level automation directly. In the specific case of the Apache HTTP Server, depending on what you need to do, you may find that Caddy is easy enough that you can configure it yourself without requiring the LLM. For common web server scenarios, a Caddyfile is very short, much shorter than a typical Apache or nginx configuration.

mwcampbell commented on Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines? codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/flail

api · a month ago

There have been serious efforts at software engineering, like the OOP movement in the 1980s and 90s to construct software very methodically.

Programmers hate it and rejected it.

To be fair, it does tend to create its own pathology. Instead of a layer cake made of congealed spaghetti, you tend to get over-engineering.

https://github.com/Hello-World-EE/Java-Hello-World-Enterpris...

Software engineering leads to software over-engineering because unlike in physical material engineering there is no capital or material cost to push back against complexity. You can just add things, and add things, and add things, forever, and it costs very little (a bit of RAM and CPU but that's cheap).

I have this weird hypothesis that part of why methodical "correct" software engineering fails is that it succeeds. It is able to manage complexity, which allows complexity to grow without bound. A mountain of ugly shit will start crashing in mysterious ways if it gets too complex, which has the virtue of limiting complexity.

A root problem is that programmers tend to add complexity, not remove it, and the incentive structure of the software business tends to encourage this. Each new bit of complexity or layer is something you could build a business around, or a feature you could sell. Nobody pays for simplicity. It has value, often massive value, but it's not intuitive. In what other domain would you pay more for the absence of something? This would make sense in software since simplicity is harder than complexity, but it feels weird and wrong.

mwcampbell · a month ago

> there is no capital or material cost to push back against complexity

On a thread about software bloat and inefficiency, @josephg once speculated about an alternate universe where Moore's Law stopped decades ago. I've kept thinking about that. Unfortunately, I kept coming up with counterfactuals where important things like accessibility weren't as advanced or (relatively) widespread as they are in this world.

mwcampbell commented on Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines? codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/flail

tptacek · a month ago

Helps to have more of the quote:

He said that programming today is “More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?'”. The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant.

mwcampbell · a month ago

Shouldn't that make us want to fight to simplify our software stacks to the point where we can do analysis by synthesis, building from simple, well-understood parts, again?

mwcampbell commented on Dead Framework Theory aifoc.us/dead-framework-t... · Posted by u/jhuleatt

simonw · a month ago

> Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. [...] I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?

Yes! That's exactly what I was trying to get at.

mwcampbell · a month ago

Are you saying that frameworks might become less important because LLMs can just generate boilerplate code instead? Or do I misunderstand? Personally, if the vibe-engineering future that some executives are trying to foist on us means that I'll be reading more code than I write directly, then I want that code to be _doubly_ succinct.

mwcampbell commented on Ribir: Non-intrusive GUI framework for Rust/WASM github.com/RibirX/Ribir... · Posted by u/adamnemecek

the__alchemist · a month ago

How does this compare to EGUI, GPUI, and Slint?

I like the idea of using macros to clean syntax; am writing some for EGUI right now to make colored text easier.

mwcampbell · a month ago

This may not be what you're after, but note that egui and Slint have accessibility support (at differing levels of completeness), e.g. for blind people using screen readers, while Ribir and GPUI do not.

mwcampbell commented on You should write an agent fly.io/blog/everyone-writ... · Posted by u/tabletcorry

tptacek · a month ago

Honestly, I didn't think very hard about how to make `ping` do something interesting here, and in serious code I'd give it all the `ping` options (and also run it in a Fly Machine or Sprite where I don't have to bother checking to make sure none of those options gives code exec). It's possible the post would have been better had I done that; it might have come up with an even better test.

I was telling a friend online that they should bang out an agent today, and the example I gave her was `ps`; like, I think if you gave a local agent every `ps` flag, it could tell you super interesting things about usage on your machine pretty quickly.

mwcampbell · a month ago

What is Sprite in this context?