Tell your fellow lobsters your troubles

score 1 · canonical

Fun fact for the haters: Daniel lemire is one of the original authors of simdjson

score 1 · canonical

Yes but consider the effect on people who are below average.

score 1 · canonical

I see agents as more like a cnc and its effect on manufacturing. You can still make things by hand but for the most part you can achieve the highest quality and scale with automation. Obviously as we become cnc programmers and operators we lose the hand-filing skills we once used, just as our forefathers forgot how to use flint-knapped hand axes.

I think a big part of the angst is that we’ve had to look around and engage with what the things we’re building are actually for, instead of just resting in our craft. There’s lots of good work to be done for things that are good. The question is how do we (or our agent wielding successors) only work on good stuff and not bad stuff.

score 2 · canonical

Right but this all started with a discussion of whether or not using llm agents to find bugs is worthwhile or not. Clearly you can write obscure bugs in rust such that LLMs might be a cheap way to find them.

score 1 · canonical

I don’t think anyone is arguing that C is as safe as Rust? Certainly my point is that Rust can still have bugs, and those bugs can be security critical.

score 1 · canonical

Or something like mojo, sure.

I’m not convinced that Python is the nirvana of readability, even if the syntax is fairly clean. It’s got plenty of spookiness, global state and the like, and very limited ways of declaring contracts and boundaries and delimiting pure and impure code.

My guess is that features that were tried and fell away (or never went mainstream) for “programming in the large” because they were annoying to write and redundant will make a comeback. I know I want more information about how code fits together without trying to work it out bottom up every time.

score 1 · canonical

A memory-safe JSON parser can at worst give you garbage data or heat your CPU or eat your RAM, but it won’t run arbitrary attacker-supplied code

Which is why log4shell was impossible to exploit in the memory safe languages Java and shell.

These sorts of things are called weird machines because they’re really weird.

score 1 · canonical

Well I suppose this is a manifesto for treating programming language research as a pure science.

I’m rather more interested in knowing what factors make programming languages readable. In this new era there’s already a lot of code that humans only read and don’t write. I strongly suspect that the ideal programming language for this era will be easy to read and make no concessions to being easy to write - the LLM can and should grind on checkers and making things consistent, but as humans we’ll be reading the code, commenting it, and very lightly editing it for the llm to follow our lead.

score 1 · canonical

Well it depends on your definition of fuzzing :) but sure, fuzzing, deterministic simulation testing, and the like.

score 1 · canonical

I think it’s the bitterness of the bitter lesson. It’s an area where LLMs have already surpassed programmers.

I suppose the interesting question is whether LLMs can find the same bugs as eg generative test suites or not, or if the result sets are at least partially disjoint.

score 1 · canonical

I’m kind of disappointed that LLM review is so effective. No specification, no simulation testing, no structured method.

My guess is that it reveals that LLMs can really pay attention?

score 1 · canonical

Ok but what if it’s possible to still write bugs in rust?

score 2 · canonical

What happens when the properties of the data change? Does performance change or does this allow some part of the stack to optimize the query execution? Or does it not need that.

score 1 · canonical