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quincepie commented on Why is Zig so cool?   nilostolte.github.io/tech... · Posted by u/vitalnodo
quincepie · 3 months ago
I think what sets Zig apart from other low level languages is how easy it is to navigate a Zig source code. I was discouraged at the time (things probably changed now) when the best source for documentation was "read the Zig's source code". But I was impressed by how easy it was to find what I needed.

while this is due to Zig maintainers' code quality, I think a large contributing factor is the choice of syntax. As an exercise, try navigating a C, C++ and any other language source code without an IDE or LSP. things like:

- "Where did that function come from?"

- "What and where is this type?"

what do you have to do to find that out? due to the flexible ways you can declare things in C, it may take you a lot of steps to find these information. even in search, a variable and a function can share the same prefix due to the return type placement. hence why some people prefer function return types in a separate line.

Even with languages like Rust for example, finding if a type in a function parameters is an enum or struct and finding its definition can require multiple steps like search "enum Foo" or "struct Foo", in Zig i can search "const Foo" and i will immediately know what it is.

while i do hope that C gets defer and constexpr functions in the next standard or maybe better generics or enums, Zig syntax is much better to work with in my opinion.

quincepie commented on An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia   simonwillison.net/2025/Au... · Posted by u/tosh
quincepie · 5 months ago
I totally agree with the author. Sadly, I feel like that's not what the majority of LLM users tend to view LLMs. And it's definitely not what AI companies marketing.

> The key thing is to develop an intuition for questions it can usefully answer vs questions that are at a level of detail where the lossiness matters

the problem is that in order to develop an intuition for questions that LLMs can answer, the user will at least need to know something about the topic beforehand. I believe that this lack of initial understanding of the user input is what can lead to taking LLM output as factual. If one side of the exchange knows nothing about the subject, the other side can use jargon and even present random facts or lossy facts which can almost guarantee to impress the other side.

> The way to solve this particular problem is to make a correct example available to it.

My question is how much effort would it take to make a correct example available for the LLM before it can output quality and useful data? If the effort I put in is more than what I would get in return, then I feel like it's best to write and reason it myself.

quincepie commented on The success and failure of Ninja (2020)   neugierig.org/software/bl... · Posted by u/quincepie
high_priest · a year ago
> I also believe that programmers feel latency and it affects their mood even if they don't notice it. (Google has recently done some research in this area that kinda confirmed my belief, here's hoping they'll publish it publicly!)

Anyone knows if it happened? Has the google research on latency been published?

quincepie · a year ago
Not sure if it's the exact research that the author is referring to, but it could be this one: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2023/04/10176199/1...
quincepie commented on GitHub was down   github.com/... · Posted by u/frabjoused
quincepie · a year ago
Yet again, this shows how useless GitHub status page is.
quincepie commented on Special-use domain 'home.arpa.' (2018)   datatracker.ietf.org/doc/... · Posted by u/mcp_
quincepie · 2 years ago
There was a also proposal for ICANN to reserve ".internal" (earlier this year) which is what I currently use. I suppose home.arpa has the advantage of being strictly resolved in the local zone while ".internal" would be more for anything in a private network (or a large multi zone network)?

[1] https://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/proceeding/proposed-...

u/quincepie

KarmaCake day371March 20, 2023View Original