conorbergin

A lot of this thinking still predates the Vatican 2 significantly, I think this person has made their mind up and is working backwards.

I don't think performance has got much to do with tinkering. IMO the real benefit of Zig is you get the flexibility of C with the ergonomics of a modern language.

I like Python as a tool language, and I am very impressed by projects like Micropython, but you always eventually run into a wall. I.e. you are never going to write a compute shader in python, but I assume someone is going to try.

I think the programmer should meet the hardware in the middle, and Python has a few too many layers of indirection to do this well.

I found your previous comment chain on the matter, in which you conflated Catholicism and Conservatism, the second of which I'm sure you have your own personal definition, as there is no Conservative church that decides on doctrine.

Catholic social teaching, which this encyclical is grounded on, has it's roots in Rerum novarum (1891) by Leo XIII (the Pope's namesake) and it dealt with the changing conditions of people due to the industrial revolution. We are potentially in the midst of another revolution (I suspect it will be less significant the the IR), so it is prudent of the church to develop a house view.

I'm slightly baffled it existed in the first place, considering they also used the small s, and it looks almost exactly like the f. To be fair, I am equally confused that so many modern typefaces don't distinguish I and l.

While less typographically interesting, this is a much clearer treatment of Elements.

I've only used Zulip when checking out the Lean Zulip a few years ago, and I thought it was an infinitely better interface than Discord for serious discussion, and also much easier for lurkers to find information. I wish more projects adopted it.

I don't think LLMs are that chaotic, you can replace words in an input at get a similar answer, and they are very good at dealing with typos.

They are definitely not interpretable, I was reading some stuff from mechanistic interpretability researchers saying they've given up trying to build a bottom up model of how they work.

LLMs are deterministic, the same model under the same conditions will produce the same output, unless some randomness is purposefully injected. Neural networks in general can be thought of as universal function approximators.

I doubt a fork would ever happen, Blender, being computer graphics software, has a huge knowledge gap between it's developers and it's users.

That "syntactic sugar" encompasses the entire value proposition of markdown, there's nothing stopping you using Typst to author blog posts or take notes, they even have HTML export.

Scripts are typically turing complete, config files are typically not.

I wonder if well designed "mutable" operating systems like Arch and Alpine that are going to beat NixOS etc. in the long run. An install script is strictly more powerful that a declarative config language, and typically less verbose.

This is a much more promising technique from Applied Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIqhpxul_og

Not a fan of “texture healing”, a very convoluted and unsatisfying way of fixing a minor problem with monospace fonts, I’d be more interested in seeing letterforms redesigned to be more optically balanced within the grid, another commenter points out ubuntu mono does this somewhat, but I imagine you could make some fairly radical alterations to certain letters and still be legible.

The Osprey's accident rate is not that bad, and the US Army have ordered a new smaller tiltrotor, the v280.

I don’t think PL theory driven design produces good systems languages.

Thank God for Zig

Do you think Vulkan will become "nice" to use, could it ever be as ergonomic as Metal is supposed to be?

Is webgpu a good standard at this point? I am learning vulkan atm and 1.3 is significantly different to the previous APIs, and apparently webgpu is closer in behavior to 1.0. I am by no means an authority on the topic, I just see a lack of interest in targeting webgpu from people in game engines and scientific computing.

Having no CSD at all is unacceptable on small screens IMHO, far too much real estate is taken up by a title bar, you can be competitive with SSD by making them really thin, but then they are harder to click on and impossible with touch input. At the moment I have firefox setup with CSD and vertical tabs, only 7% of my vertical real estate is taken up by bars (inc. Gnome), which is pretty good for something that supports this many niceties.

I use a lot of obscure libraries for scientific computing and engineering. If I install it from pacman or manage to get an AUR build working, my life is pretty good. If I have to use a Python library the faff becomes unbearable, make a venv, delete the venv, change python version, use conda, use uv, try and install it globally, change python path, source .venv/bin/activate. This is less true for other languages with local package management, but none of them are as frictionless as C (or Zig which I use mostly). The other issue is .venvs, node_packages and equivalents take up huge amounts of disk and make it a pain to move folders around, and no I will not be using a git repo for every throwaway test.

microns to inches

absolutely foul

crank check:

  - AI "collaboration" 
  - pure maths in a cosmology paper 
  - Zenodo 
  - small number of citations from a wide range of dates 
  - cosmology

If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.

Your reading of the current political climate is very different to mine.

Can it do fillets?

Very funny to put a bibtex citation under such a small piece of work

Redefining commonly understood phrases to mean something else in your own little world make you look ignorant.

I've being trying out SQLite for a side project of mine, a virtual whiteboard, I haven't quite got my head around it, but it seems to be much less of a bother than interacting with file system APIs so far. The problem I haven't really solved is how sync and maybe collaboration is going to interact with it, so far I have:

1. Plaintext format (JSON or similar) or SQLite dump files versioned by git

2. Some sort of modern local first CRDT thing (Turso, libsql, Electric SQL)

3. Server/Client architecture that can also be run locally

Has anyone had any success in this department?

If you are a hobbyist or small business in desktop manufacturing you are basically forced to buy Chinese products.

I have never owned a Prusa, but I have owned several Creality and Bambu Labs printers, because I could get the same utility at half the cost. The same goes for soldering irons, linear actuators, oscillscopes, etc. I still buy European hand tools (Knipex, Wera, etc) because I know they won't break in a year, so they are good value in the long run.

Often the choice is whether to buy a used, last generation tool of eBay, or a brand new next-gen tool from China. The choice depends on how flawed the Chinese implementation is and the gap in utility between the generations.

The main problem with Chinese products is the lack of accountability. The same product will be sold under multiple brands, or by dropshippers, and you have no idea who actually made it, there are some strong Chinese brands that buck this trend, i.e. Bambu Labs. When you buy western tools you are buying peace of mind, something I can't currently afford.

I think everyone has this reaction until they start using it, then it makes perfect sense, especially when using editors that have multiple cursors and can operate on selections.