V0ldek

joined 2 years ago
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

Wow, I also now found the migrating to codeberg post. I should revisit Zig.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Wait so they figured how to use renewable energy to create something that still generates emissions? Is this a ploy to get Trump on board with renewables?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 21 hours ago

It’s one topological sort, implemented here. What could it cost? Ten lines?

This one idk, some of it could be more concise but it also has to build the graph first using that weird seemingly custom hashmap as the source. This function, however, is immensely funny

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 21 hours ago

There’s a standard algorithm for new backends, NOLTIS

I think this makes it sound more cutting-edge and thus less scathing than it should, it's an algorithm from 2008 and is used by LLVM. Claude not only trained on the paper but on all of LLVM as well.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 21 hours ago

We're Still Early never dies

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I wonder what actual experts in compilers think of this.

Anthropic doesn't pay me and I'm not going to look over their pile of garbage for free, but just looking at the structure and READMEs it looks like a reasonable submission for an advanced student in a compiler's course: lowering to IR, SSA representation, dominators, phi elimination, some passes like strength reduction. The register allocator is very bad though, I'd expect at least something based on colouring.

The READMEs are also really annoying to read. They are overlong and they don't really explain what is going on in the module. There's no high-level overview of the architecture of the compiler. A lot of it is just redundant. Like, what is this:

Ye dude, of course it doesn't depend on the IR, because this is before IR is constructed. Are you just pretending to know how a compiler works? Wait, right, you are, you're a bot. The last sentence is also hilarious, my brother in christ, what, why is this in the README.

Now this evaluation only makes sense if the compiler actually works - which it doesn't. Looking at the filed issues there are glaring disqualifying problems (#177, #172, #171, #167, etc. etc. etc.). Like, those are not "oops, forgot something", those are "the code responsible for this is broken". Some of them look truly baffling, like how do you manage to get so many issues of the type "silently does something unexpected on error" when the code is IN RUST, which is explicitly designed to make those errors as hard as possible? Like I'm sorry, but the ones below? These are just "you did not even attempt to fulfill the assignment".

It's also not tested, it has no integration tests (even though the README says it does), which is plain unacceptable. And the unit tests that are there fail so lol, lmao.

It's worse than existing industry compilers and it doesn't offer anything interesting in terms of the implementation. If you're introducing your own IR and passes you have to have a good enough reason to not just target LLVM. Cranelift is... not great, but they at least have interesting design choices and offer quick unoptimized compilation. This? The only reason you'd write this is you were indeed a student learning compilers, in which case it'd be a very good experience. You'd probably learn why testing is important for the rest of your life at least.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 22 hours ago

This could be regarded as a neat fun hack, if it wasn’t built by appropriating the entire world of open source software

This shouldn't be left merely implied, the autoplag trained on GCC, clang, and every single poor undergrad who had to slap together a working C compiler for their compilers course and uploaded it to github, and "learnt" fuckall

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 22 hours ago

Waiting for some promptfondler to complain that this kind of assignment is not really fair for an AI because it has actual requirements.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Here's a fun exercise: go email the author of that blog (he's very nice) and ask how much of it he still stands by.

Has someone already done it or should I send the email? Ludic would be delighted I'm sure

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I guess my confusion is this – at what point does reality exert any influence on the lies-and-trash accounting? What in the physical reality is the reason they can't just keep fapcircling the economy forever?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

So we don’t have smoking gun evidence that Windows 11 is broken trash literally because of vibe coding. But Windows 11 feels like the most vibe coded thing ever. Nobody cared about Windows 11 working. Microsoft, where quality is job number 55 or so!

I think the timelines don't quite match for that, when Windows 11 came out the LLMs couldn't even output code that compiled more than half the time. However, the moment I've learnt the start menu was coded in React I knew the age of ~~man~~ Windows was over. I don't know how good the guy behind it was in internal politics but everyone on the path from the idea to pushing it to main should be tried for treason and sent to hard labour (debugging the Azure web UI).

I think this was the good old artisinal vibe coding of the previous era, where you still had to not care about quality manually.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

wasn’t audited (...) prompting the SEC to open their own investigation.

Ye, I guess I should've said "investigated" there, precision is important here.

There's not only no stock-holding public to hold them to account, even if there was and they filed a lawsuit nothing would happen. SEC doesn't exist.

I guess this is the part I don't understand - can't they all just play this game of pretend forever? There has to be something that corresponds to music stopping in your musical chairs analogy, but if everyone plays along forever what happens? Is there any load bearing part of this bubble where real reality can have an impact? If the stakes of calling the bluff are a complete collapse of the stock market then why would any NVidia stockholders call the bluff ever?

 

This is a nice post, but it has such an annoying sentence right in the intro:

At the time I saw the press coverage, I didn’t bother to click on the actual preprint and read the work. The results seemed unsurprising: when researchers were given access to AI tools, they became more productive. That sounds reasonable and expected.

What? What about it sounds reasonable? What about it sounds expected given all we know about AI??

I see this all the time. Why do otherwise skeptical voices always have the need to put in a weakening statement like this. "For sure, there are some legitimate uses of AI" or "Of course, I'm not claiming AI is useless" like why are you not claiming that. You probably should be claiming that. All of this garbage is useless until proven otherwise! "AI does not increase productivity" is the null hypothesis! It's the only correct skeptical position! Why do you seem to need to extend benefit of the doubt here, like seriously, I cannot explain this in any way.

 

An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

 

Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a ~~small shell script~~ large language model.

The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

 

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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