rcfox (u/rcfox) - Readit News

rcfox commented on Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs? · Posted by u/weakfish

e40 · 3 months ago

You didn't say which platform you're on. For Linux, just use the emacs that comes with the distro. For Windows, download the official build for Windows. For macOS, I used to use emacsformacosx.com's version but now I use Homebrew's emacs-plus. It has a native-compiled version and is hella fast.

I use the regular package manager for emacs (package-install).

Been a user since the first version of GNU Emacs, back when RMS was trying to reproduce Gosling's emacs (which I used for a couple of years). That was the early 80's.

rcfox · 3 months ago

> For Linux, just use the emacs that comes with the distro.

Are the major distros shipping packages with tree-sitter support yet?

rcfox commented on Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support aiven.io/blog/exploring-p... · Posted by u/s4i

martinky24 · 4 months ago

Many people have more than 1 server that need to generate coherent identifiers amongst one another. That's not a "Google scale" thing.

rcfox · 4 months ago

Your comment heavily implied (to me) scaling databases horizontally. Yes, it's not necessarily "Google scale" either, but it's a ton of extra complexity that I'm happy to avoid. But a Google employee is probably going to approach every public-facing project with the assumption of scaling everything horizontally.

With multiple servers talking to a single database, I'd still prefer to let the database handle generating IDs.

rcfox commented on Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support aiven.io/blog/exploring-p... · Posted by u/s4i

morshu9001 · 4 months ago

But these are internal IDs only, and public ones should be a separate col. Being able to generate uuid7 without a central index is useful in distributed systems, but this is a Postgres DB already.

Now, the index on the public IDs would be faster with a uuid7 than a uuid4, but you have a similar info leak risk that the article mentions.

rcfox · 4 months ago

"Distributed systems" doesn't have to mean some fancy, purpose-built thing. Just correlating between two Postgres databases might be a thing you need to do. Or a database and a flat text file.

rcfox commented on Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support aiven.io/blog/exploring-p... · Posted by u/s4i

martinky24 · 4 months ago

You don’t scale horizontally, do you?

rcfox · 4 months ago

Do most people? Not everyone is Google.

rcfox commented on Live Stream from the Namib Desert bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/2... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

rcfox · 4 months ago

Just following the chat for a few minutes, people posted links to a couple of other locations:

Okaukuejo waterhole in Etosha National Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeMUdOPFcXI (at the time of posting, a herd of elephants are enjoying the water)

Kalahari Desert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME0dPuBtzug

rcfox commented on I only use Google Sheets mayberay.bearblog.dev/why... · Posted by u/mugamuga

rcfox · 4 months ago

I worked on creating a card game with a couple of my friends. We kept all of the cards in a Google Sheet, allowing everyone to easily edit or create new cards. Then, I wrote a script to compile the sheet into a card atlas so that it could be consumed by Tabletop Simulator. It worked amazingly well.

The only issue was that I had to run the script myself, since my friends were less technical. I'd probably see if I could setup a workflow in Github Actions to do it for me if I were to do this again.

rcfox commented on Python developers are embracing type hints pyrefly.org/blog/why-type... · Posted by u/ocamoss

secondcoming · 5 months ago

I recently had to debug someone else's Python code and trying to figure out what variables are was a massive headache, especially coming from C++.

rcfox · 5 months ago

In Python, every variable is either defined or imported in the file in which it's used, so you always know where to find it. (Assuming you don't do `from foo import *`, which is frowned upon.)

In C++, a variable might be defined in a header or in a parent class somewhere else, and there's no indication of where it came from.

rcfox commented on Markov chains are the original language models elijahpotter.dev/articles... · Posted by u/chilipepperhott

roadside_picnic · 5 months ago

> after an observation you are absolutely at a new state

The essential property of a Markov chain is maintaining the Markov property:

P(X_n+1 = x_n+1 | X_n = x_n, ..., x_1) = P(X_n+1 = x_n+1 | X_n = x_n)

That is the future, given the present state, is conditionally independent of the past states.

It's worth recognizing that decoder only LLMs (which are most the major LLMs used by people) maintain the Markov property and can be properly understood as Markov chains.

> The attention mechanism is the best we have for this and Markov chains struggle beyond stringing together a few syllables.

Attention has nothing to do with the maintaining the Markov property but allows for a fantastically more complex representation of state which is where decoder only LLMs derive the majority of their power.

tl;dr most of the LLMs people use are effectively Markov Chains.

rcfox · 5 months ago

Is this just because LLMs don't have state?

As far as I understand it, as you have a back-and-forth conversation with an LLM, you have to provide the entire history of the conversation plus your new response each time.

rcfox commented on A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code sanity.io/blog/first-atte... · Posted by u/kmelve

cjonas · 5 months ago

Once thing I've noticed is the difference in code quality by language. I'm constantly disappointed by the output of python code. I have to correct it to follow even the most basic software development principles (DRY, etc).

Typescript on the other hand, seems to do much better on first pass. Still not always beautiful code, but much more application ready.

My hypothesis is that this is due to the billions LOC of Jupyter Notebook it was probably trained on :/

rcfox · 5 months ago

With Typescript, I find it pretty eager to just try `(foo as any).bar` when it gets the initial typing wrong. It also likes to redefine types in every file they're used instead of importing.

It will fix those if you catch them, but I haven't been able to figure out a prompt that prevents this in the first place.

rcfox commented on What's New with Firefox 142 mozilla.org/en-US/firefox... · Posted by u/keepamovin

gorhill · 5 months ago

When trying to diagnose performance or memory issues with a browser, always start with the installed and enabled extensions.

rcfox · 5 months ago

These days, I'd say always start with the YouTube tabs.