(P.S. Yes of course I know about model censorship, a different problem, but all of the models are censored to some degree. It happens to be less of a problem for open weight models anyhow, but I figured I'd just preempt this since it's inevitable.)

I actually kinda like DSv4 over Opus 4.7 for some tasks, although I have not figured out what the deciding factor is. (Opus 4.8 so far has not worked very well for me at all, no idea why.)

It is possible to have thousands of tests and a lot of blind spots, but it's easier to get a grip on that using instrumentation like code coverage and indeed by using LLMs to prod at edge cases.

I am OK with trusting that it is likely the React team understands how to rigorously test based on how well-tested React itself is.

I suspect this won't have as big of a shit storm as the Bun port in part just due to the input/output nature of the React compiler.

That said, while I use React still, I still have never tried the React compiler... So I have no idea how important this is. But you know, very few people are ever upset over faster iteration cycles or CI builds.

When I was in college I had an ARM Chromebook which didn't have the Wacom driver, so I wound up trying to use the then-new Chrome USB APIs to make myself a tablet driver in a Chrome extension. This was long before LLM coding was a thing, but thanks to the Linux wacom.ko it wasn't really an obstacle.

The biggest problem I had was that while I was decoding digitizer inputs just fine I had nowhere to put them. I tried making a simple painting app in JS and it worked but without having native cursor movement it was just too jank and I gave up.

I eventually uploaded the code for posterity sake. I doubt it works at all anymore, even with the specific tablet it was hard-coded for. But it's still online, anyhow.

https://github.com/jchv/crwacom

What a mixed blessing it is now that theoretically, especially as LLMs increase in competence, an idiot like me might actually be able to port Coreboot to an unsupported platform with some LLM-assisted reverse engineering. I mean, it's probably still a long shot without as much arcane knowledge as you gain from working in stuff like this professionally, but at this point it's probably the best shot I have since I probably won't find myself in such a scenario.

I guess I should try to find time to revisit a reverse engineering project that I haven't had time to dig deep into... It does feel like a shame that this way I'll never really improve my skills related to reversing, though.

Simply following Chrome/OpenSSL/etc. yields the best compatibility, but the Go behavior is much simpler in this very security critical path, and I'm not sure if it really occurs on the web. It seems most people are reporting it for other uses of X.509 like TPM. You can certainly see the argument in favor of Go's vastly simpler approach.

Go has a lot of trade-offs like this. If you can't decode from or encode into UTF-8 a given filename, Go's high level I/O APIs can't deal with it - depending on your exact point of view, the kinds of software you write and certainly some level of taste, you may see this as horrible, or you may see it as a totally reasonable trade-off. Some programs can go ahead and say "Sorry, we only support UTF-8 filenames" and some really can't.

But when being rational and reasoned it's really challenging to make the argument that Go's choices are bad due to inexperience from the language designers or standard library authors or general poor attention to detail. Calling the developers "Go kids" is already amusing considering it is very famously a project originally created by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer - not foolish young developers who are likely to repeat mistakes of the past by way of ignorance. Of course, that doesn't mean say, the TLS stack, deserves to carry some special weight just because the language was designed by computer science stalwarts, but I've dug into the Go TLS stack a fair bit in my leisure and to me personally it definitely does not feel like the work of people who are ignorant or foolish.

I may be over-indexing on two recent comments here, but it does sort of feel like there's an undercurrent of this, and it bums me out because I particularly like Go for the exact opposite reason, I really think a lot of the tradeoffs, love them or hate them, are very well thought out.

edit: For posterity sake, it is worth noting that it was wrong for me to say "Chrome/OpenSSL/etc." as Chrome actually has a similar behavior to Go here.

https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2019

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655

And while sentiment is understandably mixed even then, I actually think a lot of people have already come around on PHP as being "not as bad as it once was", if not even "good".

Some of its reputation, though, hinges not on out-of-date internet commentary, but instead on the fact that in practice a lot of the PHP code that's still in production today is simply legacy code and not up to modern standards, and most of the time when someone says PHP, they really mean that PHP. I think that is actually the thing that is holding PHP back hard outside of bubbles like HN. And honestly, even though I don't hate modern PHP, I don't have many codebases that come to mind when I think about modern PHP that are exemplary. I actually was relatively impressed with the s9e TextFormatter library used by phpBB3 when I looked at it, but even that is dated by today's standards.

Still, I think that PHP has an undeservedly bad reputation relative to other languages. I've recently come back into Python lately after having not really touched a ton of Python in a while and I gotta say, other than `uv` and `ty`, I don't feel a whole lot has improved in Python land. It's not that greenlets and gevent were fantastic or anything, but I thought it was satisfactory enough. Now that there's also asyncio, it feels like a nightmare trying to untangle old code and bring it into the async future... So many things just don't really work in this world, like old-school lazy fetching in SQLAlchemy. Python was most famous for the horrible Python 3000 migration, but so many years later and I'm not sure how much was really learned as reconciling greenlet and asyncio worlds feels like yet another Sisyphean task of trying to rebuild everything at once. OK, it isn't as bad, especially since you can at least wrap sync code into thread pools, but it definitely is an absolute PITA, and I feel like what we're getting out of it doesn't exceed what we're putting in.

So that's my thoughts. Internet commentary is probably no longer PHP's biggest enemy; instead, it's more like its own past successes. (And, also, the fact that we easily forgive the tools we use regularly for the faults that we have been used to for years.)

Current LLMs are still kind of shit at actually programming so many jobs do still care to have professional programmers. However, I think it's evident that if things stand where they are, employers will care to have far fewer of them, at least of highly paid highly experienced programmers. If this is the state we're in with LLM adoption when they can't help but create the same helper functions 15 times, god knows we're screwed.

So we should probably work on clearing out our debts and figuring out what else we might want to do with our time, I reckon.

I'm still going to try to do a good job. I'm still trying to learn the best effective ways to apply current LLMs (Right now I still prefer to mostly write code myself but have been using LLMs to bang code into shape via iterative code review; this is a way to exploit LLMs to make better code, especially applicable if your velocity was already good.)

I waited a minute to make sure you weren't going to delete this post because frankly, if I had written it, I would have. Guess not, so... Here goes.

No. It is not the fault of my "attitude" that the Internet is going to suck. That is a complete reversal of the reality. The fact that even people without bad intent are already spreading slop everywhere should be enough evidence to essentially prove that there was never any hope. If this is what good actors are doing, what exactly do you expect from bad actors?

Also, to stress it yet again, I don't care if people use LLMs in general. I'll even say that I don't particularly care very much if people use them without disclosing it in most cases. If you're using it like a normal tool and not merely just dumping the output verbatim there is not any particular need to disclose it any more than you'd disclose other tools, though I think people would prefer if you did just for transparency.

My chief complaint is just how bad LLM slop writing is. It simply is not good at all. It would literally be much better for the Internet if they weren't so turboshit at writing. There is almost no writing style I don't prefer over garbage LLM writing. I'm dead serious. Early LLMs were worse at almost everything else, but they were a lot better at writing for sure. Something went wrong somewhere.

But I do also believe that it is inherently bad to dump prose as-if you are communicating as a human, but said prose isn't actually written by a human. If someone shows me a cool drawing that they made, that means that they sat there and went through the process of sketching, possibly multiple drafts, inking, coloring/shading/painting/etc. to create an expression. This involves many human skills that take years to hone, and every detail carries someone's explicit intention. I think that this is cool, and shows a great degree of skill and effort.

When you, of course, generate some crap from an image generator, it may very well look similar. It may emulate some actual defects that make it look like someone really drew it. But someone didn't. A model went directly from a text prompt and dumped out pixels on screen. No sketching. No layers. No thought processes about how to frame things or what details to include. That doesn't mean zero effort went in: I'm sure in many cases someone sat around and fudged with LoRas and inpainting for a couple hours and pulled the slot machine lever to get good seeds and etc. That doesn't mean that an AI model does not have some model for how to structure an appealing image: it does, that's obviously why the results can look decent to begin with. But when you dump out an image from an image generator and you wink wink nudge nudge present it as your own and people evaluate it as if you drew it, this is basically fraud. Everyone looking at it who doesn't know it is AI generated actually believes you went through the normal effort of drawing that image and all of the years of practicing skills and acquiring knowledge that takes. That's bullshit, and it takes away from the actual accomplishments of people who put in the work like cheating in sports does.

Like yeah, a lot of people are cheating at chess, by passing off engine play as their own, but does that really make it okay? When the entire point is using your brain and not just the raw outputs themselves, doesn't that hit you as a problem?

For generative AI, I personally draw this line at what I feel are expressions of creativity. If you use AI for drawing references, whatever. If you use AI to generate globs of repetitive code, whatever. Code can be creative but I do not view it as an expression of creativity and almost any tool is fair game. If you are using ML models for motion capture or some other data processing thing where humans had to do repetitive work before, whatever. Maybe these tools sometimes do devalue the work, but the LLMs are not doing the interesting part here, they're doing the boring part. (This is, in part, an admission that actually writing code is often pretty boring in and of itself, something that I realize programmers have been inconsistent with in an attempt to justify their value. But, I still believe it to be true.)

So okay fine. People are reluctant to disclose that they used AI to generate text because they fear the backlash that it will get them. This is understandable. What upsets me about this is that well-meaning people are apparently falling back to the idea that because LLM backlash is strong, what would be better than either trying to just simply write your own damn posts or be honest about your usage of LLMs... Is to just try to wink wink nudge nudge pass off more or less verbatim LLM writing as if it's a post that you wrote.

I am not ruining the Internet. There is literally nothing I or any group of angry mobs could do that would even remotely slow down the decay of the Internet even if we desperately wanted to.

So in fact, I'm not even trying to not ruin the Internet. I don't particularly care if my attitude is not helping or hurting. I'm not having an attitude as part of some grand strategy to save or destroy the internet. I'm having an attitude, because I am pissed off.

And I am pissed off because I am tired of reading posts the author probably only skimmed themselves.

However, Mnesia seems like it is quite a bit more of a complete distributed database engine than Redis. To me the nicest thing about Redis is just the convenience of what it offers: very fast data structures, serialized, optimized (at least by default) for cases where speed is more important than durability. It is simple on many levels and somewhat constrained in scope. Mnesia seems to be aiming more generally in the distributed database category.

So how do you feel they compare?

It would also be useful because of the ability to switch modalities. When running a multi node service, you can use Redis to share data between nodes and use Redis pubsub as a communication bus. If you wanted to support a simple single node configuration too, then it wouldn't need to be a special case, it could just go through the same mechanism but with an embedded Redis instance.

It's pretty similar to SQLite: being able to embed more or less a complete storage engine into your app can be very convenient and powerful.

Poor prose does not just make writing ugly — it creates friction, obscures nuance, and introduces ambiguity.

You can eat a gourmet meal out of a dirty paper bowl. You still get the calories, but the delivery mechanism definitely impacts the experience and the perceived value of the food. Same food, different response.

See? I can write slop too, I don't even need to burn down a forest to do it. If you are OK with every fucking thing being written exactly like this, good for you. I am not.

And while the comments are always flooded with people like me, the upvotes seem to tell a different story; clearly LLM writing really does appeal to some people. Or idk, maybe a lot of people who vote on stories and don't comment don't actually read them. Hard to say for sure.

> A simple distributional analysis of every rsync release with bug data. No model. No assumptions. Just placement.