aryonoco

Very interesting that I followed a very similar reasoning and settled on F#. Tells me that our process must have been very similar.

Gemma 4 31B as hosted by Cerebras is almost too fast! Like I gave it a few different queries and the response was instant and I thought there was something wrong and there was a glitch and I had to double check that I had actually given it the correct prompt.

Mind you Gemma 4 is still Gemma 4, but the speed was really eye opening. Like a glimpse into the future of AI

Depends on your point of view.

It can be argued that it’s Docker that is reinventing the wheel and doing its own bespoke process management, journal management etc when all of these are solved problems on Linux. Podman is instead reusing the platform which exists, Quadlets are just reusing systemd, so as a sysadmin I can manage, control and monitor docker containers using the same standard tooling that I already use to manage, control and monitor all the other processes which are running on the system.

Architecturally I find the above argument attractive. The problem is chronology. Docker and docker compose came before systems was ubiquitous and long before Quadlets, so it’s natural to think of Quadlets as reinventing the wheel.

Personally I wish docker had not rejected composition/integration around systemd. Would have made everyone’s job a lot easier in the long term.

I took the advice of the other Mullvad founder in the other thread here on HN and signed up for IVPN.

So far I have to say I am really impressed. Clients are all open source, really configurable, and speed and reliability seems as good as Mullvad.

Will I find out tomorrow that their founder is also a fascist? Hopefully not.

Land of the free, land of the brave. Free market. Freedom of speech. Market economy.

These words don’t mean what they use to anymore. Newspeak is in full swing. Words still sound the same and are written in the same way but now mean something completely different. If Mao and Stalin were alive, they would be nodding approvingly.

I don’t have hard data to back this up, but I estimate that plenty of main Usenet binary providers easily exceed that.

For similar reasons, I have been working in the public sector (Australian state government) for the past 5 years and couldn’t be happier.

I’m lucky that I’m in a team which is hands on and does a lot of very interesting things. From building CRUD apps which are used in management and response to bushfires (wildfires) to more interesting things like building a datalake which amalgamates and stores weather data from multiple sources to building near real time CDC pipelines and making our transactional data available to our in house team of data scientists who then use that data to do fascinating stuff that eventually results in for example making sure that our response to bushfires takes into account the impact and safety of endangered species.

And when I look at the underlying data and the trends and and projections of just how bad bushfires are going to get in the next 30 years and how we must be so much nimbler and smarter just to survive, the work takes on a whole new level of meaning.

Don’t get me wrong, there are times the internal bureaucracy absolutely drives me mad. And I am aware that I could be earning much more in the private sector. But I get to work with a team who are really passionate and enthusiastic about their job, and I get to sleep at night knowing that unlike my previous jobs, this time I am not just making someone who is already uber rich, richer.

If you had told the teenage Utilitarian me that I would one day work for, and enjoy working for, government, I would have thought hell must have frozen over.

If you care about the publication, you are very welcome to pay and become a subscriber and enjoy an ad free experience like I do.

If you don’t, do you really get to complain about ads?

If you believe, like I do, that there are a lot of parallels between the US of today and the Rome of yesteryear, you might find the answer by reading Tacitus.

It turns out, long after Rome had become an Empire and was only a Republic in name only, most Senators still thought of it as a Republic and that this extraordinary state of affairs with the Senate just being a glorified rubber stamp body would soon come to an end and that, they will very soon restore the Senate to its former rightful place, just as soon as this current very limited crises was over.

As it turns out, they were never able to do that again.

It’s so interesting to me that nearly all of the Founding Fathers had read Tacitus and were keenly aware of this and explicitly tried to design a system to prevent that from happening. To their credit, their system lasted a good while.

Have a look at Nim

Pascal inspired syntax

Ada inspired type system

Lisp inspired templating and Macros

Compiles to C

I vibe coded a library in Nim the other day (a language I view very much as a spiritual continuation of the Pascal/Modula line), complete with a C ABI.

The language has well defined syntax, strong types, and I turned up the compiler strictness to the max, treat all warnings as errors etc. After a few hours I put the agent aside, committed to git then deleted everything and hand coded some parts from scratch.

I then compared the results. Found one or two bugs in the AI code but honestly, the rest of our differences were “maters of taste” (is a helper function actually justified here or not kind of things).

Since 1979, every US president has known that the US can send a couple of aircraft carriers and bomb the shit out of Iran.

And yet none did. Because they listened to their security chiefs and advisors who would tell them, Iran is a highly complex multiethnic geographically complex country. If you can contain it with diplomacy, that’s preferable.

When listening to “experts” becomes taboo, there will be consequences.

The inhabitants of the Iranian plateau have been the subject of the ire of the military superpower of their era quite a few times. Alexander the Great conquered them and set their capital and their sacred books on fire and yet a mere 70 years later his Hellenic dynasty was gone. They were conquered by the Arabs and were forced to give up their religion but somehow, unlike Egypt and Syria/Lebanon and many other ancient places, these guys somehow kept their language and distinct culture intact. They were decimated (maybe even worse ) by Genghis Khan and followed quickly by Tamerlane and yet, it was their Turco-Mongol rulers who ended up adopting their language and culture.

The inhabitants of this land have deep memory of knowing how to suffer, to endure and to survive. It wasn’t that long ago that from Constantinople to New Delhi, the language of the Imperial Court was Persian.

Little known fact, a small piece of BeOS survives to this day and is an integral part of Android

BeOS came up with “Binder” for doing inter process communication. Just before Be Inc. was acquired by Palm, some Be engineers somehow convinced management to release Binder as open source, which came to be known as OpenBinder.

After the Palm acquisition many Be engineers moved to a startup called Android Inc, and adopted OpenBinder for IPC. And the rest as they say, is history.

We live in a timeline where you don’t have to have strong morals to be crushed. If you have any morals, you will be crushed.

Yes but only if you call them export taxes.

If it’s payments to continuously verify National Security protections, it’s all good.

I think that choice of words to call them the Department of War and Secretary of War multiple times in that statement was very much intentional. And a point well made.

Used my webcam just fine multiple times today on Fedora Silverblue.

I did this last year. Reluctantly. And using iOS still hurts. But it’s better than that Google crap.

I developed my own Android ROMs from 2009-2011, complete with my own tuned kernel. I ran the local Android developers MeetUp group and evangelised Android development. When Honeycomb launched I helped OEMs test their beta firmware. For free.

But as Google has become certified Evil, the direction of Android has been very clear. In practice I honestly can’t say it’s now any more open than iOS. Except it has a lot more avenues for Google to mine your data to sell ads. And the quality of third party apps on it is decidedly worse.

I thought long and hard about getting a Linux phone. But I need a good camera on my phone to take random snaps of kids/pets/etc. And the Linux phones just aren’t there.

I hate the shitty duopoly we have ended up with. But I now realise that the openness of x86 and pc as platform really was an accident of history.

I’m old enough to remember the days that banking apps required Internet Explorer and didn’t work on Firefox. Eventually, they were dragged kicking and screaming to support all modern browsers.

Hannibal knew the elephants would have minimal impact by themselves, they were mainly an instrument of shock and awe and served their purpose well.

For centuries, Romans had grabbed land and defeated enemies mostly by projecting immense power and using shock and awe tactics. Hannibal of course learnt a lot about Roman tactics from his father, Hamilcar, and the “treachery” with which Rome had taken Sicily off Carthaginians. But he also grew up in Spain, in close proximity to Romans, and studied them and their methods for years.

He knew he needed to have an instrument of shock and awe himself, something the Romans had never seen before, and elephants were perfect for that.

For those interested, the Rest is History podcast did a 4 series on Hannibal last year which is highly engaging and informative

https://therestishistory.com/series/hannibal

There are people who believe that KDE 3 was the perfect desktop. They forked it when KDE 4 was released (initial KDE 4 releases were really rough), called it the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). I actually really like modern Gnome but every once in a while I try out TDE and it does give me a nice cozy feeling, like looking at old album photos.

I have a friend who refuses to use anything other than CDE and still manages to compile and run it on modern Linux distros.

I think plenty of ML languages have similar things. In F# SQL Type Providers have long been a mainstay (which makes using an ORM with F# almost meaningless IMO)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/tutorials/ty...

SQLProvider is probably the most well known one: https://fsprojects.github.io/SQLProvider/

It’s really beautiful. You get type safety with SQL. If your code compiles, you guaranteed to have valid executable both F# code and SQL. Also you get to create composable queries.

And there are other, thinner/leaner type providers as well. My favourite Postgres one is: https://github.com/Zaid-Ajaj/Npgsql.FSharp

This simple sample executes query and read results as table then map the results

open Npgsql.FSharp

type User = { Id: int FirstName: string LastName: string }

let getAllUsers (connectionString: string) : User list = connectionString |> Sql.connect |> Sql.query "SELECT * FROM users" |> Sql.execute (fun read -> { Id = read.int "user_id" FirstName = read.text "first_name" LastName = read.text "last_name" })

Interesting how the definition “real programming” keeps changing. I’m pretty sure when the assembler first came, bare metal machine code programmers said “this isn’t programming”. And I can imagine their horror when the compiler came along.

My favourite languages are F# and OCaml, and from my perspective, TypeScript is a far better language than C#.

Typescript’s types are far more adaptable and malleable, even with the latest C# 15 which is belatedly adding Sum Types. If I set TypeScript to its most strict settings, I can even make it mimic a poor man’s Haskell and write existential types or monoids.

And JS/TS have by far the best libraries and utilities for JSON and xml parsing and string manipulation this side of Perl (the difference being that the TypeScript version is actually readable), and maybe Nushell but I’ve never used Nushell in production.

Recently I wrote a Linux CLI tool for managing podman/quadlett containers and I wrote it in TypeScript and it was a joy to use. The Effect library gave me proper Error types and immutable data types and the Bun Shell makes writing shell commands in TS nearly as easy as Bash. And I got it to compile a single self contained binary which I can run on any server and has lower memory footprint and faster startup time than any equivalent .NET code I’ve ever written.

And yes had I written it in rust it would have been faster and probably even safer but for a quick a dirty tool, development speed matters and I can tell you that I really appreciated not having to think about ownership and fighting the borrow checker the whole time.

TypeScript might not be perfect, but it is a surprisingly good language for many domains and is still undervalued IMO given what it provides.

Car enthusiast here. I raced in Formula Ford in Europe in my younger days. I still dream about the day I drove a 911 GT2. Nearly every car I’ve ever owned has been a manual.

But with the ridiculous tax incentives here in Australia (at least while they last), my new car turned out to be an EV. Specifically the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N. And let me tell you, while the logical part of my brain knows that the gear shifts and the exhaust notes and everything about it is “fake”, when I’m driving it around a track or a challenging B road, every part of my body is fooled into thinking it’s real. And reluctant as I might be to admit it, it might just be the most fun car I’ve ever had

Is it perfect? No. I wish it was 10cm lower to the ground. I wish it was at least 600kg lighter. But it has completely disabused me of the notion that electric cars can’t be fun.

They don’t. It stays on the same side as it was. They don’t move the bonnet opening lever or the indicator stalk either.

Because capitalism.

As someone who has recently switched from Android to iOS, I can tell you uBlock Origin Lite on Safari on iOS is a poor man’s imitation of the real uBlock Origin on Firefox on Android.

Safari is the modern IE. the fact that PWAs didn’t take off in the last decade js purely due to Safari.

The only reason Apple has banned alternative engines and continues to hold back on major web technologies is anticompetitive behaviour.

I’m always on the hunt for single language cross platform solutions, and I thought I knew every player in the field but had not heard of Elements before. So I followed your link enthusiastically. But these are just some of the excerpts from the website:

Java Build code for any of the billions of devices, PCs and servers that run JavaSE, JavaEE or the OpenJVM.

.NET Core

The cross-platform .NET Core runtime is the future of .NET and will fully replace the current classic .NET 4.x framework when .NET Core 5 ships in late 2020.

It really seems like it was last updated sometime in the last decade. Not sure I want to base a future project on it.