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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2024

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  • Yeah, and Android has had some 16 years of “optimize later”. I have some very very limited experience with writing mobile apps and while I found it to be a PITA, there is clearly a lot of thought given to how to not eat all the battery and die in the ecosystem there. I would expect that kind of work to also be done at the JVM level.

    If Windows Mobile had succeeded, C# likely would’ve been lower as well, just because there’d be more incentive to make a battery charge last longer.





  • Yeah, none of that with bat:

    λ bat $(type -P bat)
    ───────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
           │ File: /usr/bin/bat   <BINARY>
    ───────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
    λ bat < $(type -P bat)
    ───────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
           │ STDIN   <BINARY>
    ───────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
    λ
    




  • As if anyone cared if they had to wait a total of 3 seconds in a workday.

    That depends on when it appears. Some tasks kind of have to feel instantaneous, and there might be a pretty slim margin between okay and frustrating.

    But yeah, that’s the kind of savings that mostly matter on the scale of regional or national grid planning.

    Most engineers already write bloated, abstracted, glacial code that burns CPU cycles like a California wildfire. Clean code? Ha! You’re writing for other programmers’ academic circlejerk, not the hardware.

    It’s interesting that everybody else preaches ‘Write for the human first, for the machine second’.

    Yeah, the author seems to lean too hard into the “programming is electronics” model, where the opposing end is “programming is math and formal logic”; most of us take some mixed view. And most of us have higher correctness requirements than what a reasonable effort in memory unsafe languages like C and C++ gives us, so we trade away some machine efficiency. In the authors parlance, most of us aren’t interested in the demoscene circlejerk; we need to make tradeoffs between maintainability and everything else. Write-once code isn’t good enough.

    There have been attempts at establishing a third pole of “promptgramming is natural language” or whatever ever since COBOL promised programming in plain English, but the ambiguity of natural language when used to encode a business logic machine means that a “sufficiently advanced compiler” will have to be extremely advanced, on the order of including the manager and the entire engineering methodology.


  • I think some of the stuff you worry about as a kid will just arise naturally. Ideas like not stepping on cracks, or imagining monsters in dark places are likely produced spontaneously and naturally by an underdeveloped ape brain.

    But it’d be nice if we didn’t tell kids about old superstitions, yeah. Wait until they’re old enough to react with dismissal about the stupid stuff people used to believe.