Interesting. From the sounds of it Unity added their own API for it though.

It definitely is.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/32007523/265521

Games might be an area where it isn’t too bad since you can disable the GC while doing all your physics and graphics, and then just after you’ve dispatched a frame trigger a GC with a hard time limit.

I don’t know if Unity works like that but it should.

Nah AI can be extremely useful for learning technologies. You just need to be careful to verify they aren’t bullshitting you.

For example find an explanation of PPM compression that is concrete and simple. As far as I can tell it doesn’t exist.

But I could ask ChatGPT and it told me how it works (probably) in just a few seconds. I haven’t verified yet (at a BBQ) whether it is the correct algorithm but it’s certainly a plausible one that would work.

It told me that you use a trie (typically) of symbol prefixes to record the probability of the following symbols, so for example you know that for the prefix “Th” the probability of “e” is 90%. Then you encode the symbol with arithmetic coding using the modelled probabilities. Apparently the typical max context length is 4-6.

That would have taken me hours to find by reading code and ancient papers but I can verify it a lot quicker.

Your example doesn’t quite fit the crime. A better example would be. “I ran and catch upped to him.” Or “These clothes are available to be try onned.”

To be fair I once asked an Italian what was the hardest part of English and they said compound verbs, so maybe they’re just not native English.

That’s my charitable explanation anyway. If not I’m joining the hunt!

No Pyright is just a type checker. The IDE features are part of Pylance which is closed source.

Only if you are desperate or masochistic.

Not an issue. Install Clangd and CodeLLDB. They are much better anyway (see my other comment).

The real golden jewel that Microsoft keeps to itself is the Remote SSH extension. There’s no open source alternative as far as I know.

There’s also Pylance but that only matters if you’re using Python.

Not the case. There are binary components.

It doesn’t matter though because the Clangd & CodeLLDB extensions completely replace it and are actually waaaaaaay better.

With Microsoft’s C++ extension it always rinsed the CPU - there were files I had to avoid opening because then it would analyse them and I’d have to kill it. The code intelligence also seemed very “heuristic” and was quite slow.

Clangd fixes all of that. It’s fast, doesn’t choke on huge files, and if you have compile_commands.json it’s actually the first properly fast and robust C++ IDE I’ve ever used. You know if you’ve used a Java IDE the code intelligence just works and is fast and reliable. It’s like that.

That’s just assembling a forge from pieces…

That’s a fair point. I don’t think that’s the case here because he talks about all the bad ways he prefers to receive contributions (email, patch files, git bundle etc.).

Pretty dumb not to use a forge. Adds a huge barrier to contribution for little benefit. None of the reasons he gives make sense.

Maybe a good option for projects that you don’t want anyone else to contribute to, but then why make them open source in the first place?

Not using GitHub because it’s proprietary is an especially illogical stance. Virtually all websites are proprietary.

You can’t use that to assert that your view about not having something is correct.

IMO a bug tracker and PR review system are essentially and cannot be taken away. It would seem like most of the world agrees with me.

Yeah good learning experience. We’ve all created projects and then found they already exist.

I guess you could say “the name”!

In fairness the first and second results on Google point to the crc32 tool…

https://askubuntu.com/a/303666

$ sudo apt-get install libarchive-zip-perl
$ crc32 my_file

Again not a great package name and it does require Perl, but in Linux at least that’s a less painful dependency than Python.

It’s definitely improving. I thought the same as you but I looked through my recent ChatGPT prompts and it’s actually decent now, at least at simple/throwaway tasks. It doesn’t stand a chance at the niche domains of my actual job.

Yeah I agree. It’s often easier to start from something that’s wrong than a blank page.

Tool Command Language. It’s a shitty stringly-typed scripting language from the 80s that took a neat hack (function bodies are string literals) way too far.

It’s a bit less shit than Bash, but shitter than Perl.

Unfortunately the entire EDA industry has decided to use it as their scripting interface, which isn’t too bad in itself - the commands they provide are pretty simple - but unfortunately it leads to people stupidly basing their entire EDA infrastructure on TCL rather than wrapping it in a saner language.

No not in the same way Tony Stark did. But Tony Stark is imaginary. Obviously nobody can build an electric car or a rocket in the same way that Tony Stark does.

Of all the criticisms of Musk this is the weakest. There are many way more valid ones… for instance:

• He’s an arsehole.
• He straight up called that diver a paedo, and even paid a scammer to investigate him.
• The scummy lottery thing for votes for Trump. I don’t care if it ends up being technically legal, it’s clearly immoral.
• Selling the promise of FSD for hard cash when it clearly is never going to happen as he claimed. I still don’t know why there’s been no class action suit over that.
• Backing proper insane far right groups in Europe. These people are worse than Trump. I wouldn’t say he is backing neonazis, but he’s certainly in the vicinity.

Despite all that he clearly has a pretty good handle on engineering and is definitely involved. He’s not just a figurehead.

I know right, people are multidimensional. You can downvote if that blows your mind.

Be thankful we got Javascript. We might have had TCL! 😱

Interesting footnote: the founding of Netscape occurred at the same time I was deciding where to go in industry when I left Berkeley in 1994. Jim Clarke and Marc Andreessen approached me about the possibility of my joining Netscape as a founder, but I eventually decided against it (they hadn’t yet decided to do Web stuff when I talked with them). This is one of the biggest “what if” moments of my career. If I had gone to Netscape, I think there’s a good chance that Tcl would have become the browser language instead of JavaScript and the world would be a different place! However, in retrospect I’m not sure that Tcl would actually be a better language for the Web than JavaScript, so maybe the right thing happened.

Definitely dodged a bullet there. Although on the other hand if it had been TCL there’s pretty much zero chance people would have tolerated it like they have with Javascript so it might have been replaced with something better than both. Who knows…