tomku (u/tomku) - Readit News

tomku commented on Sheafification – The optimal path to mathematical mastery: The fast track (2022) sheafification.com/the-fa... · Posted by u/atomicnature

marifjeren · 2 days ago

Not much attention given at all to explaining what order in which these should be read or what optimality means. This is just a list of books some guy is proud to have read

tomku · a day ago

Lists like these are almost always more accurately titled "How I wish I'd been taught X" and are aimed squarely at a student who has never really existed, one who simply learns whatever is put in front of them and can therefore be steered by a heavy stack of "the best" books away from all the mistakes and dead ends and frustrations that real students face. Real pedagogy's tougher than that!

tomku commented on Some thoughts on LLMs and software development martinfowler.com/articles... · Posted by u/floverfelt

catigula · 4 days ago

>I’m often asked, “what is the future of programming?” Should people consider entering software development now? Will LLMs eliminate the need for junior engineers? Should senior engineers get out of the profession before it’s too late? My answer to all these questions is “I haven’t the foggiest”

I just want to point out that this answer implicitly means that, at the very least, the profession is at least questionably uncertain which isn't a good sign for people with a long future orientation such as students.

tomku · 4 days ago

It has never been anywhere close to certain, we just had 20 years of wild, unsustainable growth that encouraged people to cover their eyes and pretend the ride would go on forever. 20 years of telling everyone under the age of 30 that of course they should learn to code and that CS was the new medical or legal degree. 20 years of smugly acting like we are the inevitable future when we are, in fact, subject to the same ups and downs as every other career.

tomku commented on Why is D3 so Verbose? theheasman.com/short_stor... · Posted by u/TheHeasman

TheHeasman · 11 days ago

Uh, there are arrow operators in JS. D3.JS in Action Third Edition exclusively uses arrow operators.

(Trust me. I don't know jack about JavaScript, I had to get through the MDN docs to understand what they were, and once I did, made a whole lot more sense).

tomku · 11 days ago

The feature the person you're replying to is talking about is not arrow functions (`=>`), but what are called "threading macros" in other languages. In Clojure[1], the main one is named `->` and used as a way to thread a value through a series of functions that take it as a first argument, using the return value from the first function as the first argument to the second, and so on. It allows you to compose a series of plain functions to transform a value instead of (stateful) method chaining or nesting functions.

JS does not have a straightforward equivalent. The old and deprecated `with` keyword might seem similar but it's only a surface resemblance as it does not perform the return-value threading that makes the above pattern useful, it was meant for methods that mutate object state. There's a TC39 proposal[2] to add a pipe operator that would accomplish a similar thing to threading macros via an infix operator but it's still a draft.

[1]: https://clojure.org/guides/threading_macros

[2]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator

tomku commented on Bluesky: Updated Terms and Policies bsky.social/about/blog/08... · Posted by u/mschuster91

kodt · 18 days ago

I left X because of how bad it got but BlueSky is also quite often useless in terms of good discussion. Recently any substack article posted is just filled with comments about how using substack supports Nazi ideology, no other discussion to be had. When it comes to anything related to AI the comments are all about stealing from artists. It is as if people just wait for the right buzzword to appear and post their canned response. Interesting posts that don't cause any controversy just don't have much engagement.

tomku · 18 days ago

The same trend is noticeable here on HN. Many threads are full of top-level posts that are just someone pattern-matching on a word they don't like in the headline and using it as an excuse to vent about whatever their pet issue is. Usually posts like that are magnets for zero-effort "me too"s and similar. Sometimes interesting discussions happen deeper in the threads, but it's disappointingly rare. It's really sad watching the entire internet turn into this, and I can't help but feel like places like Twitter/X and Bluesky are the source.

tomku commented on Nginx introduces native support for ACME protocol blog.nginx.org/blog/nativ... · Posted by u/phickey

kijin · 19 days ago

Certbot has a "standalone" mode that occupies port 80 and serves /.well-known/ by itself.

Whoever first recommended using that mode in anything other than some sort of emergency situation needs to be given a firm kick in the butt.

Certbot also has a mode that mangles your apache or nginx config files in an attempt to wire up certificates to your virtual hosts. Whoever wrote the nginx integration also needs a butt kick, it's terrible. I've helped a number of people fix their broken servers after certbot mangled their config files. Just because you're on a crusade to encrypt the web doesn't give you a right to mess with other programs' config files, that's not how Unix works!

tomku · 19 days ago

Those choices and Certbot strongly encouraging snap installation was enough to get me to switch to https://go-acme.github.io/lego/, which I've been very happy with since. It's very stable and feels like it was built by people who actually operate servers.

tomku commented on I am a SOTA 0-shot classifier of your slop christopherkrapu.com/blog... · Posted by u/ckrapu

jacob019 · a month ago

I've been seeing AI slop being used as ad-hominem. If I'm writing a couple paragraphs, I'll often run it through a model and ask it to make minimal edits for spelling and grammar. It makes it more readable and saves me time editing. If someone doesn't like my thoughts and they see an em dash, they can call it AI slop instead of responding, which is really annoying because the model otherwise does a good job of editing. In some cases I've been accused of AI slop for original unedited content.

tomku · a month ago

"AI slop" is following the same path as "Dunning-Kruger effect," "enshittification," and so many other terms. Someone introduces a term that's useful to describe an actual phenomenon, it rapidly spreads to dominate the discourse because it's topical and punchy, and pretty soon using it is such a strong signal of being one of the "cool people who hates all the correct bad stuff" that people use it to describe stuff they merely don't like or disagree with. Once everyone's using it, it becomes useless for both its original descriptive purpose and as a social signal, so all the trendy discourse addicts move onto the next linguistic innovation and you only see random people on Facebook or Reddit who are behind the times using it, usually inaccurately as they're just following the misuse they learned it from.

It's particularly scary watching "AI slop" follow that path because of the extreme moral polarization associated with using LLMs or generative art. There's people who will see some casual mention of a game or film or app or something "using AI" on social media without evidence and immediately blast off into a witch hunt to make sure the whole world knows that whoever involved with that thing are Bad People who need to be shunned and punished. It has almost immediately become the go-to way to slam someone online because it carries such strong implications, requires little/no evidence, and is almost impossible to fully refute. Think there's a lot to learn from observing this, and it does not bode well for the next few years of discourse.

tomku commented on I'm switching to Python and actually liking it cesarsotovalero.net/blog/... · Posted by u/cesarsotovalero

tomku · 2 months ago

If you use Make as a task runner like in the article, please make sure that you're also declaring your tasks as .PHONY targets: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Phony-Tar...

Otherwise, the existence of a file or folder with the same name as your task ("test", for example) will stop that task from being run, which might be very annoying if you're using the Makefile as part of a script or CI or something where you won't notice the "Nothing to be done for..." message.

tomku commented on Breaking Git with a carriage return and cloning RCE dgl.cx/2025/07/git-clone-... · Posted by u/dgl

lossolo · 2 months ago

It seems like Homebrew still provides a vulnerable version, the same goes for Debian Bookworm.

tomku · 2 months ago

2.50.1 is available on Homebrew now, for anyone seeing this.

tomku commented on Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws chessprogramming.org/Ches... · Posted by u/Mr_Minderbinder

RUnconcerned · 5 months ago

This is primarily for computer chess, where the draw rate is even higher than in super-GM level chess. It's an alternative to having engines play from a preset position where one side starts with a significant advantage, which is what usually happens in computer chess tournaments. It's essentially the subset of Chess960 positions that don't need modifications to the castling rule, and thus should work on all engines without requiring any changes to the code.

tomku · 5 months ago

It's not quite a subset of Chess960 positions, because Chess324 allows different piece layouts between white and black and Chess960 does not.

Edit: A comment further down points out that only 18 of the 324 positions are symmetrical, so the vast majority of Chess324 positions could not happen in 960.

tomku commented on A powerful free and open source WAF – UUSEC WAF github.com/Safe3/uuWAF... · Posted by u/uusec

ssddanbrown · 6 months ago

The license used [1] would mean this very much wouldn't be widely considered open source, since the license sets limits on use and does not seem to provide open modification nor distribution.

[1] https://github.com/Safe3/uuWAF/blob/393262d525d0e35c14819bfa...

tomku · 6 months ago

I don't think it's even source-available? The repo has docs, a bunch of Lua scripts (for what software?), a small PHP module and a compiled "geo-ip firewall" binary. Most of the features mentioned on the Github page appear to only be in the paid version of the software, and this limited "free" version is delivered as a mystery-meat Docker image pulled from Huawei Cloud.

At best this is an advertisement that lies about being open source.