I've heard of him but have never seen any of his content, what should I watch?
it's quite possible you may unknowingly have seen him in Mary Poppins, where he plays _two_ roles, and I was mind blown when I noticed the second after 30 years or so.
Readit Newsriffraff commented on Computer animator and Amiga fanatic Dick van Dyke turns 100 · Posted by u/ggm
riffraff commented on I tried Gleam for Advent of Code blog.tymscar.com/posts/gl... · Posted by u/tymscar
Why does it need generics? There's a great blog post about how you can replace a lot of trait behaviour with just functions. Maybe something like that can be done for generics
the comment is wrong, what Gleam lacks is interfaces.
Which feels super strange, but doesn't seem to really be a problem, e.g. imagine a language where you'd write
fun sum_all_numbers(Iterable<T> it) { it.fold(...) } # an interface
sum_all_numbers(a_list) # a list implements iterable
fun sum_all_numbers(Iterator<T> it) { it.fold(...) } # a concrete type
sum_all_numbers(a_list.iterator) # get the caller to build the right object
riffraff commented on Discovering the indieweb with calm tech alexsci.com/blog/calm-tec... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
Source post: https://indieweb.social/@robalex/115675680018007724
ironically, the blog lacks a rel=me link that would make streetpass work on it :)
> glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver was to web development what ...
I just sat here for 5 minutes and I wasn't able to finish that sentence. So I think that's a statement in itself.
..VB6 was to windows dev?
People with very little competence could and did get things done, but it was a mess underneath.
riffraff commented on Perl's decline was cultural beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
I don’t know about the wider Perl community, but I listened to some interviews from Larry Wall and he just came across as a nerdy guy having fun with what he’s doing. I quite liked listening to him.
I was never a perl programmer, but this was my impression of basically every perl programmer I have interacted with.
Also, I think Larry Wall's "Diligence, Patience, Humility"[0] is among my favourite articles about programming.
[0] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/larry.html
riffraff commented on Roko's Dancing Basilisk boston.conman.org/2025/12... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
I think deepwiki has been popping up in my search results (e.g. for rust.vim) and I did not initially understand what it is.
I am not sure I am happy it appeared there at all.
riffraff commented on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race theverge.com/news/836212/... · Posted by u/goplayoutside
I'd be a little bit more nuanced:
I think there's something off with their plans right now: it's pretty clear at this point that they can't own the technological frontier, Google is just too close already and from a purely technological PoV they are much better suited to have the best tech in the medium term. (There's no moat and Google has way more data and compute available, and also tons of cash to burn without depending on external funding).
But ChatGPT is an insane brand and for most (free) customers I don't think model capabilities (aka “intelligence”) are that important. So if they stopped training frontier models right now and focus on driving their costs low by optimizing their inference compute budget while serving ads, they can make a lot of money from their user base.
But that would probably mean losing most of its paying customers over the long run (companies won't be buying mediocre token at a premium for long) and more importantly it would require abandoning the AGI bullshit narrative, which I'm not sure Altman is willing to do. (And even if he was, how to do that without collapsing from lack of liquidity due to investors feeling betrayed is an open question).
> But ChatGPT is an insane brand
I mean, so was netscape.
Opinion poll:
Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers.
Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).
I usually do it with ruby with is well suite just like python, but last year I did it with Elixir.
I think it lends itself very well to the problem set, the language is very expressive, the standard library is extensive, you can solve most things functionally with no state at all. Yet, you can use global state for things like memoization without having to rewrite all your functions so that's nice too.
riffraff commented on OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030 ft.com/content/23e54a28-6... · Posted by u/akira_067
So despite being preloaded on any android phone, a platform with billions of users, they are still a very distant 2nd to ChatGPT in terms of usage.
the keyword is _will_. New android phones have it preloaded, but the large majority of phones is not a new android.