threading bugs are sometimes hard to catch
Putting it mildly! Threading bugs are probably the worst class of bugs to debug
Definitely debatable if this is worth the risk of impossible bugs. Python is very slow, and multi threading isn't going to change that. 4x extremely slow is still extremely slow. If you care remotely about performance you need to use a different language anyway.
Meanwhile current AI is pretty much useless for any purpose where you actually need to rely on a decent chance to get quality results without human review.
Sure but there are tons of applications where you can tolerate lower than human levels of performance.
The amount of time ChatGPT has saved me programming is crazy, even though it struggles with more complex or niche tasks.
Here's what I used it for most recently:
Write an HTML page that consists of a tree of elements with interspersed text. These are log files with expandable sections. The sections can be nested.
The difficult part is I want the text content that is stored in the HTML file to be compressed with zlib and base64 encoded. It should be decompressed and inserted into the DOM once when each DOM node first becomes visible.
Be terse. Write high quality code with jsdoc type annotations.
It write a couple of hundred lines of code that was not perfect but took 5 minutes to fix. Probably saved me an hour writing it from scratch (I'm not a web dev so I'd have to look things up).
Modern AI (LLMs etc) is definitely a revolution. Anyone that has tried ChatGPT can tell that, just like the only people saying the iPhone was a fad were the ones that hadn't used it.
The thing that is hyped around AI is companies just trying to shove it into everything, and say stuff uses AI when it is totally inappropriate. That doesn't mean AI itself is nonsense though. The same thing happened with the iPhone (everything had an app even if it made no sense).
I think it depends on your field and level of experience. I work in silicon verification and most jobs seem to be from recruiters. There's a domain specific recruitment company in the UK that has all the market.
But previously I've mostly got jobs from sending CVs.
Sooo much inane naysaying in that Rust for Filesystems article. I'm glad there are people with the stamina to push through it.
Part of the problem, Ted Ts'o said, is that there is an effort to get "everyone to switch over to the religion" of Rust
I would say a bigger problem is that there are people that think Rust is some kind of religion with acolytes trying to convert people. Is it really that hard to distinguish genuine revolutions (iPhone, Rust, AI, reusable rockets, etc.) from hyped nonsense (Blockchain/web3, Metaverse, etc.)?
These things are very obvious IMO, especially if you actually try them!
I have yet to see one of these that gives any benefit over ncdu, which is amazing. I guess if you need to log the output this makes sense but that's pretty niche.
Yeah LaTeX definitely has some of the jankiest log outputs of any program. I just looked it up actually and it's basically a warning that that but it the document might not look great (I guess something like in newspapers with justified columns where you sometimes see s t r e t c h e d w o r d s.) Definitely insane to print warnings like that by default. Maybe it made more sense in the 70s?
Depends on your specialisation. Also immigration laws. But yeah I think in general the job market for programmers is very easy (as long as you are decent).
Jesus SF salaries are insane.
Gil looks quite interesting, thanks for the link!
Do you actually have any specific, tangible issue with submodules?
Yeah sure. These are few that I can remember off the top of my head. There have been more:
Submodules don't work reliably with worktrees. I can't remember what kind of bugs you run into but you will run into bugs if you mix them up. The official docs even warn you not to.
When you switch branches or pull you pretty much always have to git submodule update --init --recursive. Wouldn't it be great if git could do that for you? Turns out it can, via an option called submodule.recurse. However... if you use this you will run into a very bad bug that will seriously break your .git directory.
If you convert a submodule to a directory or vice versa and then switch between them git will get very confused and you'll have to do some rm -rfing.
Even in the cases you’re clearly and grossly misusing them
Oh right, so the bugs in Git are my fault. Ok whatever idiot.
Unless the C++ code was doing something wrong there's literally no way you can write pure Python that's 10x faster than it. Something else is going on there. Maybe the c++ code was accidentally O(N^2) or something.
In general Python will be 10-200 times slower than C++. 50x slower is typical.