nomel (u/nomel) - Readit News

nomel commented on Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025) arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon

xvxvx · 3 hours ago

Social media may have been the biggest disappointment and missed opportunity of the internet era. It’s a literal dumpster fire. People do not get what they want from it. Clearly, the market is not dictated by the customer.

nomel · 3 hours ago

I'm a bit confused. What's the alternative outcome? We're talking about humans here, most of which have an IQ below 100! For any social thing, more humans literally means more dumb. The only way around it is silos/migration, which is exactly how it was handled in the early internet, and why this place is reasonable.

Or, is that what was missed? Better silos, with some sort of semi non-community enforcement for the quality of interaction/comment?

nomel commented on The Little Bool of Doom (2025) blog.svgames.pl/article/t... · Posted by u/pocksuppet

Joker_vD · 4 hours ago

Not really, no. Newer versions of standard can (and do, although rarely, I have give it to C standard committee) introduce incompatibilities with earlier versions of standard. E.g. at one point the standard explicitly allowed to #undef "bool", "true", and "false" (and to redefine them later) but IIRC this has been deprecated and removed.

In any case: blindly switching what is essentially a typedef-ed int into _Bool has no business working as expected, since _Bool is a rather quirky type.

nomel · 3 hours ago

I'm using the dictionary definition of expect here, which is compatible with what you're saying.

nomel commented on Amazon delivery drone strikes North Texas apartment, causing minor damage expressnews.com/news/texa... · Posted by u/robotnikman

cmiles8 · 5 hours ago

This is the latest in a string of accidents with these drones crashing into things. Not good.

The earlier ones hit a crane which one could argue was an edge case as a temporary structure. This just hit a building which suggests something much more fundamentally wrong with the tech.

nomel · 4 hours ago

> This just hit a building

Please be specific on what you mean by "just"? From the article:

> Amazon told CBS Texas that it’s investigating the cause of the crash that happened Wednesday afternoon.

Did it hit a bird? Did the wind blow something into it? Was it a 0.01% occurrence of some hardware failure? Who knows. Design flaw?

Extrapolating a few crashes within this new tech use case to a some fundamental flaw of drone flight isn't reasonable, at the moment.

I suppose a safe alternative would be pneumatic tubes dug to everyone's door. But, only things that are economically feasible can exist in the world. So, instead of perfection, we're left with the iteration and compromise that is engineering, regulations and enforcement to bound it, and insurance to catch the edge cases.

A large part of the FAA regulation around drones is one based on existing in reality, and it's lack of perfection, which is how much damage they can do (this is what limits the weight and speed).

nomel commented on Amazon delivery drone strikes North Texas apartment, causing minor damage expressnews.com/news/texa... · Posted by u/robotnikman

thelock85 · 4 hours ago

The presence and operation of drones on one’s personal property appears more corporatist in nature than democratic.

nomel · 4 hours ago

the current legal definition of property does not include the air above. it's what allows them, and airplanes, to fly over.

nomel commented on The Little Bool of Doom (2025) blog.svgames.pl/article/t... · Posted by u/pocksuppet

Joker_vD · 7 hours ago

> 1. Explicitly set the C standard to C17 or older, so the code is built using the custom boolean type.

> Option 1) seemed like the easiest one, but it also felt a bit like kicking the can down the road – plus, it introduced the question of which standard to use.

Arguably, that's the sanest one: you can't expect the old C code to follow the rules of the new versions of the language. In a better world, each source file would start with something like

    #pragma lang_ver stdc89

and it would automatically kick off the compatibility mode in the newer compilers, but oh well. Even modern languages such as Go miss this obvious solution.

On the topic of the article, yeah, sticking anything other than 0 or 1 into C99 bool type is UB. Use ints.

nomel · 5 hours ago

> you can't expect the old C code to follow the rules of the new versions of the language

Well, to be pedantic, the entire point of the C standard, and the standard body, is that you should expect it to work, as long as you're working within the standard!

nomel commented on Hello world does not compile github.com/anthropics/cla... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

sublinear · 18 hours ago

Sure it is. I haven't made discussion impossible. If you choose to reply to my line of discussion, I eliminated an entire category of what I think are trivial arguments that miss the point. Yes indeed calling that stuff trivial is my opinion, but I think you were trying to say something else.

You found room by claiming I have some other opinions. In fact, I originally asked some questions you chose not to answer.

That all begs some more questions: what about my statements isn't factual? What about your statements isn't factual?

I have a few guesses. You may think AI can write a better compiler. You may think AI has already written a better compiler. You may think humans shouldn't write code anymore.

All of those are examples of opinions you might declare, but maybe you meant to say something factual. If those really are the only things you meant to debate, I have to agree I didn't think they were going anywhere and have been done to death. I thought maybe you had something else in mind.

nomel · 6 hours ago

I think your perspective is an instantaneous one, which is fine, because that's where facts about behaviors of systems (that are swapped out every few months) must come from. Since we can't know the performance of architectures that will be released in the near future, we can only form opinions and speculate about them. Not wanting to speculate, and framing everything on what exists right now, is fine. Listening to people guess is usually boring. And, knowing the practical outcome of ongoing research is hit or miss.

But, if your perspective is immediate, you need to be more precise with your words, to not confuse the reader into thinking that you're extending your observations, that apply only to the present, into the future.

I personally don't find discussions on current capabilities, about something that was fiction some years ago, and has shown a fairly steady rate of increase in utility, all that interesting. I'm an engineer at heart and live and enjoy the iterative process of improvement. As a consequence, I think the present is the boring place, because that's where iteration dies! I don't think we'll entertain each other. ;)

nomel commented on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used blog.alaindichiappari.dev... · Posted by u/alainrk

farseer · a day ago

I think it would be the opposite and we are all in for a rude awakening. If you have tried playing with Opus 4.6 you would know what I am talking about.

nomel · a day ago

I tell my colleagues we're in the instantaneous peak of the AI developer relationship, especially for code monkeys. We're still valued, still paid really well, and our jobs will get easier and easier probably for the next 5-10 years! After that, maybe not so great for many of us, with the developers that use software as a means of their actual profession continuing to do just fine (hard math/science/optimization/business planning/project planners/etc).

I think it's going to be an amazing shift from those that know intricate details of software to enabling those that have the best ideas that can be implemented with software (a shift from tool makers to tool users).

I think many developers misunderstand the quality of software that people outside of software are willing to live with, if it does exactly what they want when they need it. For a user, it's all black box "do something I want or not" regardless of what's under the hood. Mostly "academic", things like "elegant" and "clean" and "maintainable" almost never practically matter for most practical solutions to actual problems. This is something I learned far too late in my professional career, where the lazy dev with shite code would get the same recognition as the guy that had beautiful code: does it solve the real world problem or not?

Safety critical, secure, etc, sure, but most is not. And, even with those, the libraries/APIs/etc are separate components.

nomel commented on Hello world does not compile github.com/anthropics/cla... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

sublinear · 2 days ago

How does a statistical model become "perfect" instead of merely approaching it? What do you even mean by "perfect"?

We already have determinism in all machines without this wasteful layer of slop and indirection, and we're all sick and tired of the armchair philosophy.

It's very clear where LLMs will be used and it's not as a compiler. All disagreements with that are either made in bad faith or deeply ignorant.

nomel · a day ago

> All disagreements with that are either made in bad faith or deeply ignorant.

Declaring an opinion and then making discussion about it impossible isn't a useful way to communicate or reason about things.

nomel commented on Hello world does not compile github.com/anthropics/cla... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

nomel · 2 days ago

The negativity around the lack of perfection for something that was literal fiction fiction just some years ago is amazing.

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

bhadass · 3 days ago

yeah, but isn't the whole point of claude code to get people to provide preference data/telemetry data to anthropic (unless you opt out?). same w/ other providers.

i'm guessing most of the gains we've seen recently are post training rather than pretraining.

nomel · 3 days ago

Yes, but you have the problem that a good portion of that is going to be AI generated.

But, I naively assume most orgs would opt out. I know some orgs have a proxy in place that will prevent certain proprietary code from passing through!

This makes me curious if, in the allow case, Anthropic is recording generated output, to maybe down-weight it if it's seen in the training data (or something similar)?