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sestep

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In case you are curious about Fable: I intentionally did not test it because I was not sure if the classifiers they are running might downgrade me to Opus silently.

Is this still a thing? I thought Anthropic walked back the silent downgrades so now all the different domains downgrade non-silently.

It's slower. Wasm32 can just reserve 8 GiB (32-bit pointer + 32-bit offset) of the virtual address space from the OS for each memory, so checking for out-of-bounds memory accesses imposes no performance penalty. Wasm64 can't do that, so each memory access is a bit slower.

I've seen various posts about Elixir's gradual type system pop up on HN, but haven't been following too closely. Does anyone know whether this particular gradual type system can change the asymptotics of programs vs untyped code? As far as I'm aware, most gradual type systems (e.g. Racket) can make programs run asymptotically slower, although there are some exceptions [1].

[1] https://doi.org/10.1145/3314221.3314627

Squares in Squares 2 months ago

The triangular table view is fascinating. It looks like the periodic table. I wonder if there are number-theoretic lemmas (or at least conjectures?) about what "family" the optimal packing for a given number falls into (like diamond, diagonal strip, two blobs, etc). I didn't see anything when skimming the survey paper linked at the bottom of the site, but I'm sure there's a lot more literature here.

Another great tool, built on top of nix-locate, is comma. So for any program foo, if you have foo installed, you can run it like this:

  foo
And if you don't have it installed, you can run it (without installing!) like this:
  , foo
And if multiple different packages provide a program named bin/foo then comma lets you interactively choose the one you want, and remembers your choice so you don't have to specify again unless you choose to via the -d flag.

I agree with the other replies saying to just run the checks in CI and have the CI error message mention how to install the pre-commit hook.

I'm glad cloning a repo doesn't automatically install hooks since I strongly dislike them: I often use Git commands in the terminal but sometimes I use the VS Code UI to commit, and it's extremely frustrating when simply creating a commit runs for several seconds because of some pre-commit hook.

This is an issue in Python but less so in languages like JavaScript that support "field name punning", where you pass named arguments via lightweight record construction syntax, and you don't need to duplicate a field name if it's the same as the local variable name you're using for that field's value.

Bun v1.3.9 5 months ago

Could you clarify what you mean about Nix missing concurrency and parallelism? I often run builds using nix-output-monitor and it definitely looks like things are running in parallel, although I could be mistaken.

I tried this five years ago back when I was an engineer on the PyTorch project, and it didn't work well enough to be worth it. Has it improved since then?

Ahh no you're right, I forgot about the difficulties for GPU specifically; apologies for my overly curt earlier message. More accurately: I think this is definitely possible (Troels and I have talked a bit about this previously) and I'd be happy to work together if this is something you're interested in. I probably won't work on this if you're not interested on your end, though.

For fiction I read a lot of Brandon Sanderson: the second Mistborn series, plus a few of the Secret Projects. I quite liked Tress of the Emerald Sea. Also currently reading R. F. Kuang's Katabasis which I'm really enjoying so far.

For nonfiction, I found Amanda Ripley's High Conflict to be excellent and insightful. I also finally got around to reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins; I expected it to be fine, but it far exceeded my expectations! On top of that, the edition I read also had "end notes" interspersed throughout the book with retrospectives from decades later, which only added to the book's richness.