Aransentin

It's sorely missing a few figurative usages of "quietly", too. And not to forget the "honest caveats" and "smoke tests".

His large comment here is blatantly LLM slop as well. 100% on Pangram, but it's not like one need it to realize that. Just a bleak situation in general how few people here can tell.

I mean, the comment you are replying to is absolutely AI-generated; I wouldn't say being able to prompt that is any direct evidence of deep understanding of networking.

The website is also vibecoded; at least partially - it has the exact same design choices like that purpleish blue colour scheme that Claude likes to spit out by default.

Reminds me how people on 4chan/g/ back in the day (mid to late 2000s I think?) would start threads where one user put up a livestream of a movie on some IP address, and the participants would connect and watch it together (using mplayer or VLC) while doing live commentary in the thread itself. Good times. I think I first watched Hackers like that.

The article about the Sun was quite fun; even though they didn't know about fusion, the article dismisses most theories about how it could generate such a large amount of energy (like chemical combustion or gravitational contraction).

IT says the most likely cause is some sort of "rearrangement of the structure of the elements' atoms" and "supposing a gaseous nebula is destined to condense into a sun, the elementary matter of which it is composed will develop in the process into our known terrestrial and solar elements, parting with energy as it does so". Pretty much as bang on as one could reasonably be given what they knew.

Your project was very much something I looked into when designing this! Fun to see you commenting.

But yes, different goals. I did look into using z3, but quickly found out that it's pretty slow compared to just checking if a test case passes when ran through the candidate program.

Having it only use operations that use a specific set of zero-page addresses is already supported, yep!

20-30 ops is probably impossible, unfortunately. The combinatorial explosion is just too enormous.

Sure. Note that I picked those examples to demonstrate the two fairly quirky classes of things the optimizer tends to find. If the programmer has different requirements they can specify that, and it'll spit out the examples you gave (or something equivalent).

Thank you!

Demo coding is indeed the primary usecase for this, and the reason for why I started tinkering on it in the first place. That, and people who make homebrewed NES / C64 video games should find it fairly useful for optimizing tight loops and such.

I skimmed the pdf; they show a model where having such an early "filter" is beneficial to the scammer, but doesn't provide any actual evidence that it applies in reality beyond restating the just-so story.

authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes

This "just-so" story gets repeated constantly in threads about scams, but I've never seen anyone put up any actual proof. The more likely explanation is that scammers are just bad at English since they're predominantly from poor third-world countries.

I'm a moderator for a decently large programming subreddit, and I'd estimate about half the project submissions now being obvious slop. You get a very good nose for sniffing that stuff out after a while, though it can be frustrating when you can't really convince other people beyond going "trust me, it's slop".

I'm more unhappy than happy, as there are plenty of points about the very real bad side of AI that are hurt by such delusional and/or disingenuous arguments.

That is, the topic is not one where I have already picked a side that I'd like to win by any means necessary. It's one where I think there are legitimate tradeoffs, and I want the strongest arguments on both sides to be heard so we get the best possible policies in the end.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone.

This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity.

What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

I agree for sure, but that's a problem with the spec, not the website. If there are multiple ways of doing something you might as well do the minimal one. The parser will have always to be able to handle all the edge cases no matter what anyway.

You might want always consistently terminate all tags and such for aesthetic or human-centered (reduced cognitive load, easier scanning) reasons though, I'd accept that.

Note that <html> and <body> auto-close and don't need to be terminated.

Also, wrapping the <head> tags in an actual <head></head> is optional.

You also don't need the quotes as long the attribute doesn't have spaces or the like; <html lang=en> is OK.

(kind of pointless as the average website fetches a bazillion bytes of javascript for every page load nowadays, but sometimes slimming things down as much as possible can be fun and satisfying)

If you're at that point, the logical step would be to just support replying to the HTTP request with a "content-type: application/wasm" and skip the initial html step entirely.

The 4-paragraph business case was useful for creating friction, which meant that if you couldn't be bothered to write 4 paragraphs you very likely didn't need the computer upgrade in the first place.

This might have been a genuinely useful system, something which broke down with the existence of LLMs.

For X11, from the top of my head:

The global variable that toggles a bunch of legacy cruft is called "party_like_its_1989": https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/di...

The changelog for the DRI2 extension is "Awesomeness!", "True excellence", "Enlightenment attained" etc: https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/dri2proto/dri2proto.t...

Wordpress is indeed a nice backdoor, it even has CMS functionality built in.

Do you have any examples of sites that do that?

Perhaps ideally we'd change English to count the "first" entry in a sequence as the "zeroth" item, but the path dependency and the effort required to do that is rather large to say the least.

At least we're not stuck with the Roman "inclusive counting" system that included one extra number in ranges* so that e.g. weeks have "8" days and Sunday is two days before Monday since Monday is itself included in the count.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting#Inclusive_counting

Sure, but the structure seems quite ChatGPTish as well, with e.g. the bullet points and section choice. You wouldn't get that by just faithfully translating a french source text from English.

This article has a strong ChatGPT smell. Things like "in the world of", "let's dive into", the bullet points, "conclusion" section, etc. Anyone else have the same feeling?

We try to hide some of the differences between arches when reasonably feasible. e.g. Newer architectures no longer provide an open syscall, but do provide openat. We will still expose a sys_open helper by default that calls into openat instead.

Sometimes you actually want to make sure that the exact syscall is called; e.g. you're writing a little program protected by strict seccomp rules. If the layer can magically call some other syscall under the hood this won't work anymore.

I found Gwern's review of that quite good: https://gwern.net/review/crumb

No discussion in the article of how likely this is to be simply a coincidence?

There's a ton of ancient artifacts depicting humans in fanciful and non-realistic ways, and a ton of diseases that affect the body. That two of these will happen to superficially coincide is basically guaranteed.

The similarity here isn't even that great; if the statue had a huge goitre or something I'd be more inclined to buy it, but here it just looks like a little chubby squinting dude.

I live in Sweden and don't think I've touched physical money for about a decade. Cash is more or less on life support by now, with a small and dwindling list of places you can even use it anymore - basically grocery stores and e.g. hairdressers that cheat on their taxes. And illegal drugs, I suppose, though from recent news where people get busted by paying dealers using Swish (a Swedish Venmo-ish service) I'm not sure it's used even for that.

There are some hard-to-handle edge cases when doing display length truncation in Unicode, e.g. the character U+FDFD or "﷽" is four bytes but can be very long depending on the typeface*, so "completely" solving it is quite hard and has to depend on feedback from your rasterization engine.

(*Rendered version on Wikipedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lateef_unicode_U%2BF... )

It should be noted that Xlib has been a compatibility wrapper around XCB – the "modern" X11 client library replacement – for about 15 years now, so it might make more sense to just target that.

(The only thing on the top of my head that absolutely requires Xlib is some niche Vulkan stuff; e.g. VK_EXT_acquire_xlib_display unfortunately has no XCB analogue.)