I don’t mind fusion recipes or substituting with what you have. I have a fusion recipe collection I enjoy, and I substitute ingredients too. But sometimes I want to experience a certain taste that is unlike everything else around: break the pattern, have something how I remember it tasted. I don’t want to eat an “adapted” version of the dish, and it really annoys me that restaurants consistently fail.

Take, for example, pad thai and the way its simplest version is commonly cooked in Thailand today. There’s a set of ingredients commonly used to make pad thai. Some serving sides are optional and maybe uncommon (e.g., banana flower); some ingredients are adjusted individually at the table (e.g., amount of dry chili powder). But you’d always see it with garlic chives and never with mushrooms, for example. So the dish has a certain flavor profile and a feel to it you’ll remember after eating enough of them.

A pattern, and likely the source of annoyance to some, is that restaurants have a tendency to adapt foreign cuisines to the local taste as opposed to preserving the “authentic” taste. I’ll give credit: sometimes a new interesting dish gets created that even appears in the home country: California sushi roll. Oftentimes, though, it results in something that tastes like neither the original nor a distinct new dish. It kind of tastes like the “authentic” but wrong - an uncanny valley. For example, Indian restaurants in Europe tend to significantly underseason their food, making it taste bland to anyone who has tasted the real thing.

Take, for example, PHP… look at the features released in the last 6 or so years, starting with PHP 7, and how mature the language has become.

With the advance of AI-assisted programming, I feel like Python is always a bad choice.

[1] https://github.com/cdlewis/snowboardkids2-decomp/tree/main

I’m doubtful this is a meaningful result. Kernel contains a lot of legacy code and generalizations to support different hardware etc.; removing that would result in a speedup. Next are all the mitigations for hardware vulnerabilities and attacks. If removed would give a nice speedup as well at the cost of security. And then finally, just specializing the Kernel in whatever the benchmark is measuring, making it useless as a general piece of software would also make it fast.

I’m learning Japanese, and I’ve started learning Chinese characters, both their meanings and how to read them. Reading them feels different than English... I have a hypothesis that our brains work differently when processing symbols that encode meanings as opposed to just sounds. English requires an extra step, where characters are translated into sounds and then into words.

With Chinese characters, you are immediately looking at the meaning; you don’t need translation into sounds. This feels like a more efficient process cognitively to me, even though I have to memorize to recognize more characters.

They all roughly produce junior developer-level code, continue to have mental breakdowns in their “thinking” stage, occasionally hallucinate things, delete pieces of code/docs they don’t understand or don’t like, use 1.5 times the necessary words to explain things when generating docs and so on.

I'm now testing "avoid sycophancy, keep details short and focus on the facts" in my AGENTS.md files.

Somehow, employers of these establishments convinced the staff that it's the customer’s fault that their wages are inadequate and that they should go after the customers to get the difference. I would much rather pay a higher price and not hear anything about the tips.

> A diff can show what changed in the artifact, but it cannot explain which requirement demanded the change, which constraint shaped it, or which tradeoff caused one structure to be chosen over another.

That's not true... diffs would be traceable to commits and PRs, which in turn are traceable to the tickets. And then there would be tests. With all that, it would be trivial to understand the whys.

You need both the business requirements and the code. One can't replace the other. If you attempt to describe technical requirements precisely, you'll inevitably end up writing the code, at very least, a pseudocode.

As for regenerating the deleted code out of business requirements alone, that won't work cleanly most of the time. Because there are technical constraints and technical debt.

I currently own a Lenovo Legion laptop. Still, a very powerful machine, but the screen now has a spot in the middle with multiple dead pixels, the topcoat on the trackpad is peeling off, and the main body has spots where palms rest. I'd happily buy replacement parts and install them, but I can't.

If they were to measure a person who performs mental arithmetic on a daily basis, I'd expect his brain activity and oxygen consumption to be lower than those of a person who never does it. How much difference would that make?

Even if this was an accident, isn't it theoretically possible for one of the trustees to intentionally not provide the key to trigger the re-election? There's no guarantee that the people will vote the same. I see this as a kind of vulnerability.