I haven’t done a ton of porting. And when I did, it was more like a reimplementation.

> We’ve verified that every AST produced by the Rust parser is identical to the C++ one, and all bytecode generated by the Rust compiler is identical to the C++ compiler’s output.

Is this a conventional goal? It seems like quite an achievement.

My company helps companies do migrations using LLM agents and rigid validations, and it is not a surprising goal. Of course most projects are not as clean as a compiler is in terms of their inputs and outputs, but our pitch to customers is that we aim to do bug-for-bug compatible migrations.

Porting a project from PHP7 to PHP8, you'd want the exact same SQL statements to be sent to the server for your test suite, or at least be able to explain the differences. Porting AngularJS to Vue, you'd want the same backend requests, etc..

It’s a very good way of getting LLMs to work autonomously for a long time; give it a spec and a complete test suite, shut the door; and ask it to call you when all the tests pass.

I strongly suspect it is just “obviously alive” things that have any sort of subjective experience. But we can’t really prove a negative, so we can thank our coffee machine spirits as a ritual, if we want.

You’d get defederated by instances that find that sort of thing objectionable, I guess. But, if you think it is a popular niche, couldn’t a separate community grow? That’s the whole promise of decentralization.

I do think its a popular niche but currently no one on the fediverse enjoys that stuff. But how can it grow when its rejected?

On one hand, it seems impossible to supplant with Tik Tok without the engagement bait. On the other, replacing the additive sites with something just as addictive seems pointless. It is a tricky puzzle.

It's not necessarily the case that Loops is just as addictive as TikTok. Because TikTok is more than just short term videos. It's also a recommendation algorithm that slurps up as much information as it can about you to predict what you'll want to watch next. This recommendation algorithm plays a big role in making TikTok addictive. And as far as I'm aware, Loops does not have this functionality. It will just show you videos based on a much simpler algorithm that takes into account how recent a video is and how many likes/comments it has, or something like that, which will make it less addictive.

I’ve started wondering if I want a smartphone at all lately. The whole paradigm gets creepier by the day and the global corporate expectation you have one makes me not want it.

Memorizing algorithms doesn’t really make sense to me. Even the trivial ones have edge cases that you might forget of you try to implement it from memory. You aren’t going to ship it before double-checking a textbook or Wikipedia, right? And who wants the naive implementation anyway? Look up the definition to have a really 100% solid description of the steps, so that you can use that as the starting point for optimization (assuming a tuned library doesn’t already exist).

It feels like a strange feedback loop or something. People memorize algorithms to pass interviews, instructors help students memorize them to help them get jobs, then once they get into the jobs they start asking interviewees about the questions to check if they were paying attention in class, or something.

I have mixed feelings here because on one hand I prefer the “axe” when programming (vim with only the right extensions and options). But for trees… chainsaws are quite a bit easier. Once it is chopped down, maybe rent a wood splitter.

It would be pretty funny if the age verification stuff blocked some of these folks.

Discord age verification is only for content filters, adult-themed servers, and a few other features.

They aren’t requiring age verification for everyone to join servers and chat. The headlines and panic really got away from the actual story.

Anyway, the original “power grid” guy was not some master craftsman or engineer, he was the original STEM influencer: Edison. He also popularized short videos.

Tesla was the real power grid guy. The scope of his invention from the generators at Niagara Falls power generation to the transformers to the motors is pretty impressive. More so given that he was eventually given the patents (originally issued to Marconi) for radio transmission.

The fact that Edison is pervasively over-credited is really another example of the highly visible executive claiming personal credit for the labors of employees.

Two others who come to mind are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Scott_(engineer)

Steinmetz contributed heavily to AC systems theory which helped understand and expand transmission. while Scott contributed a lot to transformer theory and design (I have to find his Transformer book.)

Freemium seems to be working pretty well for them—what’s the alternative website, after all. They seem to command their niche.

I think their hope is that they’ll have the “brand name” and expertise to have a good head start when real inference hardware comes out. It does seem very strange, though, to have all these massive infrastructure investment on what is ultimately going to be useless prototyping hardware.