tekkk (u/tekkk) - Readit News

tekkk commented on WeatherNext 2: Our most advanced weather forecasting model blog.google/technology/go... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

empath75 · a month ago

There is a fairly compelling argument that divination in the ancient world was not a useless waste of time, as is commonly assumed, but that having either a process or a person that can make essentially random choices for them allowed people to make hard, consequential decisions where they might otherwise be paralyzed, especially when the penalty for not acting was worse than making a mistake.

tekkk · a month ago

Never thought of that. Probably a bit too generous given that it could be just as well waste of time and resources, nevermind the bias of the voodoo doctor. Most of it was just weirdly provided therapy I suppose to relieve stress.

But it is funny that humans put a great lot of weight on social contracts and being given explicit orders, maybe even publicly, must help pursuing action instead of rumination. Especially in a world where things seemed to happen randomly anyway.

tekkk commented on The React Foundation engineering.fb.com/2025/1... · Posted by u/DanielHB

darepublic · 2 months ago

I still like React but I agree that it has lost its way somewhat. Hooks are very counter-intuitive and I don't think you can really call them a successful abstraction. You just get used to them over time. I don't use this react suspense stuff, nor have I kept up with the latest server side rendering with React tech. It doesn't appeal to me, I only use next + react with the pre-rendered export path and I think that niche still works fantastic. But at some point in the future they may take this away from me.

This tends to happen with frameworks. A new one arises (next / react) and then over the course of many major version updates tends to just scope creep and try to do too much, or is monetized (next) and needs to find ways to justify people spending money on what was previously just free open source code.

tekkk · 2 months ago

I'd say React has become broken. The fact you have to by default wrap everything in a hook and cycle the boilerplate from one component to another is insane. useMemo, useCallback-use this and that. What are we even doing here in the first place? Playing whack-a-hook?

And then you still can end up with stale closures.

The fact they are over-engineering the server-side rendering is a cherry on top. React used to prize itself as the minimalistic solution but now they invent abstractions just to feel smart it seems.

tekkk commented on Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows? alexmolas.com/2025/07/28/... · Posted by u/alexmolas

monsieurbanana · 3 months ago

> I don't think that the answer to "some PRs are messy" is "let's include all the mess"

Hey look at us, two alike thinking people! I never said "let's include all the mess".

Looking at the other extreme someone in this thread said they didn't want other people to see the 3 attempts it took to get it right. Sure if it's just a mess (or, since this is 2025, ai slop) squash it away. But in some situations you want to keep a history of the failed attemps. Maybe one of them was actually the better solution but you were just short of making it work, or maybe someone in the future will be able to see that method X didn't work and won't have to find out himself.

tekkk · 3 months ago

I can see your point and sometimes I myself include PoC code as commented out block that I clean up in a next PR incase it proves to be useful.

But the fact is your complete PR commit history gives most people a headache unless it's multiple important fixes in one PR for conveniency's sake. Happens at least for me very rarely. Important things should be documented in say a separate markdown file.

tekkk commented on What If OpenDocument Used SQLite? sqlite.org/affcase1.html... · Posted by u/whatisabcdefgh

tekkk · 4 months ago

The fundamental problem in my mind is the mixing of binary and text content. An optimal solution would separate them, allowing systems like Git do the versioning. But separating the tightly coupled parts into own files would also be annoying sharing/management wise.

Base64:ing the images into strings, like one could do with html, would probably not be ideal for compression. As a matter of fact, text-files as such would not be ideal compression-wise.

So I suppose if binary-format cant be avoided, SQLite would be as good as any other compression format. But without built-in collaboration protocol support, like CRDT, with history truncation (and diverged histories can always fall back to diff) I dont think it'd be good enough to justify the migration.

tekkk commented on Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups macrumors.com/2025/08/21/... · Posted by u/greenburger

ben_w · 4 months ago

> Maybe grandpas and grandmas should get a different phone then, like a Doro

They did, they got an iPhone.

> my mother has been scammed by legitimate App Store apps that have charged extra-fees just because they could.

Did it empty her bank balance by abusing the private NFC payment APIs that Apple are being ordered to open up?

Did it cryptolock all her files?

Did it activate the camera and mic to spy on her for blackmail?

These are things that we need to worry about with random things we download on desktop these days. It's not 2007 any more, I have an entire spare computer for untrusted software.

tekkk · 4 months ago

I don't want to get into politics but dont you think it's funny when you can purchase assault rifles, made for killing people, yet we are so afraid of having the poor individuals in control of their own phones. Or farming equipment - the list seems to keep growing.

It's just corporate propaganda that all hell would break loose, you could just offer installing baby mode at Apple physical store that can only be removed at said places. Yeah some people would still climb the fence and touch the power lines but look, can we save them all? Should we? In this world of merciless exploitation, wouldnt it be just fair we stopped pretending it never was about anything else but money?

tekkk commented on Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups macrumors.com/2025/08/21/... · Posted by u/greenburger

labcomputer · 4 months ago

I don’t know whether to feel happy or sad for you.

Happy because you have nobody in your life in a vulnerable position to be taken advantage of the inevitable malware that will be installed on their device as a result of your wish.

Or sad because those people are most likely to be grandparents or elderly aunts and uncles. Perhaps you never even got to know them.

tekkk · 4 months ago

What a stupid argument. Maybe grandpas and grandmas should get a different phone then, like a Doro, and stop bringing the rest of us down. And it doesn't even hold water as my mother has been scammed by legitimate App Store apps that have charged extra-fees just because they could.

tekkk commented on CRDT: Text Buffer madebyevan.com/algos/crdt... · Posted by u/skadamat

josephg · 4 months ago

The thing that can make real world text CRDT implementations complex is that the optimisations kinda bleed into all the rest of your code. The 2 big optimisations you want for most text CRDTs - including egwalker - are:

- Using a b-tree instead of an array to store data

- Use internal run-length encoding. Humans usually type in runs of characters. So store runs of operations instead of individual operations. (Eg {insert "abc", pos 0} instead of [{insert "a", pos 0}, {insert "b" pos 1}, {insert "c" pos 2}]).

But these two ideas also affect one another. Its not enough to just use a b-tree. You need a b-tree which also stores runs. And you also need to be able to insert in the middle of a run. And so on. You need some custom collections.

If you do run-length encoding properly, all iteration throughout your code needs to make use of the compressed runs. If any part of the code works character-by-character, it'll become a bottleneck. Oh and did I mention that it works even better if you use columnar encoding, and break the data up into a bunch of small arrays? Yeahhhh.

So thats why diamond types - my optimized egwalker implementation - is tens of thousands of lines of code instead of a few hundred. (Though in my defence, it also includes custom binary serialization, testing, wasm bindings, and so on.)

Rust makes the implementation way easier to implement thanks to traits. I have simple traits for data that can be losslessly compressed into runs[1]. A whole bunch of code takes advantage of that, by providing tooling that can work with a wide variety of actual data. For example, I have a custom vec wrapper that automatically compresses items when you call push(). I have a "zip" iterator which glues together other iterators over run-length encoded data. And so on. Its great.

Though now that I think about it, maybe all that trait foo is what makes it headache inducing. I swear its worth it.

[1] Eg MergableSpan: https://github.com/josephg/diamond-types/blob/00f722d6ebdc9f...

tekkk · 4 months ago

Jeezs. Thanks for the breakdown. I suppose the layering of different, complicated patterns make it too thick to parse. And some of the CRDT APIs leak quite a bit of complexity once you want to do something a little more complicated eg wrap rich text editor content.

tekkk commented on CRDT: Text Buffer madebyevan.com/algos/crdt... · Posted by u/skadamat

josephg · 4 months ago

I invented it, so personally I like it very much.

The big benefit of eg-walker is that you don't need to load any history from disk to be able to do collaborative editing. There's no need to keep around and load the whole history of a document to be able to merge changes and send edits to other peers. Its also much faster in most editing situations - though modern optimizations mean text based CRDTs are crazy fast now anyway.

The downside is that eg-walker is more complex to implement. Compare - this "from scratch" traditional CRDT implementation of FugueMax:

https://github.com/josephg/crdt-from-scratch/blob/master/crd...

With the same ordering algorithm implemented on top of egwalker:

https://github.com/josephg/egwalker-from-scratch/blob/master...

Eg-walker takes about twice as much code. In this case, ~600 lines instead of 300. Its more complex, but its not crazy. It also embeds a traditional CRDT inside the algorithm. If you want to understand eg-walker, you should start with fuguemax anyway.

tekkk · 4 months ago

Wow. Didnt know there were these CRDT examples for mere mortals. I supppose once you put Rust in the mix the heads start to explode, mine included. Cool!

tekkk commented on Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C github.com/Beariish/bolt... · Posted by u/beariish

tekkk · 4 months ago

Really impressive, great job! I was interested to see how you had solved Result type and that seems quite developer-friendly—no wrappers just value & error union. I should try it out to see how it's to write if I can run it on ARM64. I wish Godot Script looked like this.

tekkk commented on Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny techcrunch.com/2025/08/02... · Posted by u/bingden

ptero · 5 months ago

Yes. But Google being Google it got top notch planning advice from world class auction experts that Goldman pulled in to advise them on the IPO.

Most companies without such expert advice could step into some pitfalls. Just a guess, I am not an expert, but if my company were doing an IPO I would prefer it not to play financial games to eke out a percent of IPO price and instead focus on long term price stability to become a solid stock. My 2c.

tekkk · 5 months ago

Figma's stock quadripled in price from 33 to whatever it is now. Not saying it's good or bad, just that those gains must have been nice with effort akin to staring spreadsheets a while and babbling in meetings.