Mark Logan

600 posts

Mark Logan

Mark Logan

@technicaldebtor

The dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities that some consider to be unnatural

Присоединился Şubat 2013
160 Подписки268 Подписчики
Mark Logan
Mark Logan@technicaldebtor·
@jb_61820 @SebAaltonen Many? Has a single major (non-research) language since Java included them?
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Sebastian Aaltonen
Sebastian Aaltonen@SebAaltonen·
Exceptions were a big design mistake. Hidden gotos all over the code base. Not easy to write "Strong Exception Safe" code. Rust returns error codes just like C. Wrapped in syntactic sugar. Return type can be error or actual type. Much nicer design.
'(Robert Smith)@stylewarning

I'm overhearing a FAANG tech meeting about how this 10?-year product written in C is being transitioned ("modernized") to C++. Started by changing to a C++ compiler, and slowly rewriting to use classes/exceptions, &c. It's been 3 months, and the C++ service keeps failing in prod.

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Mark Logan
Mark Logan@technicaldebtor·
@jb_61820 @SebAaltonen The problem is not what happens when an exception is thrown (aka hidden gotos). The problem is that you don't know what exceptions a function can throw, which means that every function has an extra invisible dynamic return type.
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Jonathan Bartlett
Jonathan Bartlett@jb_61820·
@SebAaltonen People say stuff like this, but in my experience I’ve never hit an instance where a thrown exception caused problems that wouldn’t be equally caused by return codes, and it greatly reduces code complexity by having error exit routes not have to be explicitly encoded everywhere
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Isaac King 🔍
Isaac King 🔍@IsaacKing314·
Recently met a guy excited to tell me about how Cantor's diagonal argument is wrong. Concerned he was a crackpot, but I heard him out and turns out he was totally right. (Ok, the actual argument is correct, but most popular explanations of it are wrong.)
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Mark Logan
Mark Logan@technicaldebtor·
@paolino The hindering is the point
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Carmine Paolino
Carmine Paolino@paolino·
Types don't help AI, they actually hinder it. Proof: look at Ruby with Steep - a Ruby type checker - and without! Or Python vs Python with mypy. Token efficiency and expressiveness is way more important for AI generated code. That's why Ruby was the best language in this test!
Yusuke Endoh@mametter

I benchmarked which language works best with Claude Code. Ruby, Python, and JavaScript came out cheapest, fastest, and most stable! See my article in detail: dev.to/mame/which-pro…

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Mark Logan
Mark Logan@technicaldebtor·
@SnowFake3 @L8BL0oM3r @IsaacKing314 They are countable in that you can count to any specific integer no matter how large. Same for rational numbers. Not so for the reals.
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Mark Logan
Mark Logan@technicaldebtor·
@unconed The reason he has bad experiences on the internet is because he thinks he knows everything, is often incorrect, and concludes that everyone else is wrong/an idiot
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unconed 🛸💫👻
unconed 🛸💫👻@unconed·
Jonathan Blowhard Jonathan Blown or just Jonathan Blow (cocaine) I want the guy to do well but you get the idea he's had such a poor experience in any open internet interaction he just expects everyone to be retarded and disingenuous, even when the issue is him. (Earned my blow block by daring to have opinions on game asset pipelines after building one)
'(Robert Smith)@stylewarning

A Jonathan Blow story in 3 parts.

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Rob Wiblin
Rob Wiblin@robertwiblin·
Huge repository of information about OpenAI and Altman just dropped — 'The OpenAI Files'. There's so much crazy shit in there. Here's what Claude highlighted to me: 1. Altman listed himself as Y Combinator chairman in SEC filings for years — a total fabrication (?!): "To smooth his exit [from YC], Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm's website announcing the change. But the firm's partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later scrubbed from the post." "...Despite the retraction, Altman continued falsely listing himself as chairman in SEC filings for years, despite never actually holding the position." (WTAF.) 2. OpenAI's profit cap was quietly changed to increase 20% annually — at that rate it would exceed $100 trillion in 40 years. The change was not disclosed and OpenAI continued to take credit for its capped-profit structure without acknowledging the modification. 3. Despite claiming to Congress he has "no equity in OpenAI," Altman held indirect stakes through Sequoia and Y Combinator funds. 4. Altman owns 7.5% of Reddit — when Reddit announced its OpenAI partnership, Altman's net worth jumped $50 million. Altman invested in Rain AI, then OpenAI signed a letter of intent to buy $51 million of chips from them. 5. Rumours suggest Altman may receive a 7% stake worth ~$20 billion in the restructured company. 5. OpenAI had a major security breach in 2023 where a hacker stole AI technology details but didn't report it for over a year. OpenAI fired Leopold Aschenbrenner explicitly because he shared security concerns with the board. 6. Altman denied knowing about equity clawback provisions that threatened departing employees' millions in vested equity if the ever criticised OpenAI. But Vox found he personally signed the documents authorizing them in April 2023. These restrictive NDAs even prohibited employees from acknowledging their existence. 7. Senior employees at Altman's first startup Loopt twice tried to get the board to fire him for "deceptive and chaotic behavior". 9. OpenAI's leading researcher Ilya Sutskever told the board: "I don't think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI". Sutskever provided the board a self-destructing PDF with Slack screenshots documenting "dozens of examples of lying or other toxic behavior. 10. Mira Murati (CTO) said: "I don't feel comfortable about Sam leading us to AGI" 11. The Amodei siblings described Altman's management tactics as "gaslighting" and "psychological abuse". 12. At least 5 other OpenAI executives gave the board similar negative feedback about Altman. 13. Altman owned the OpenAI Startup Fund personally but didn't disclose this to the board for years. Altman demanded to be informed whenever board members spoke to employees, limiting oversight. 14. Altman told board members that other board members wanted someone removed when it was "absolutely false". An independent review after Altman's firing found "many instances" of him "saying different things to different people" 15. OpenAI required employees to waive their federal right to whistleblower compensation. Former employees filed SEC complaints alleging OpenAI illegally prevented them from reporting to regulators. 16. While publicly supporting AI regulation, OpenAI simultaneously lobbied to weaken the EU AI Act. By 2025, Altman completely reversed his stance, calling the government approval he once advocated "disastrous" and OpenAI now supports federal preemption of all state AI safety laws even before any federal regulation exists. Obviously this is only a fraction of what's in the apparently 10,000 words on the site. Link below if you'd like to look over. (I've skipped over the issues with OpenAI's restructure which I've written about before already, but in a way that's really the bigger issue.)
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Mark Logan
Mark Logan@technicaldebtor·
@aramh Blow knows a lot about game programming, and has no idea what he doesn't know about the rest of programming
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Aram Hăvărneanu
Aram Hăvărneanu@aramh·
I don't understand why any of these statements are controversial. Clearly S-expressions make the parser trivial. The fact that alternative syntaxes were considered in the beggining yet S-expressions eventually won only reinforces this point. Simplicity of the syntax was valued (and later made macros easy to implement, etc). Semantics wise, Lisp heavily builds on top of λ-calculus. That means that little work on Lisp's semantics was required, the work had already been done in λ-calculus! Of course that modern Lisp implementations have implemented advanced code generation technology, but clearly early Lisp did not. It was an exercise of doing more with less. So clearly that statement was true in the context of its creation. I disagree with Jonathan (in his later replies) that these early decisions impacted codegen, or that it required hereic efforts to fix in later implementations, but that is a separate statement. I see nothing wrong with his original message. I think people read too much into "little work has been done" where in fact the idea of achieving a lot with little effort was critical in early computer history.
Jonathan Blow@Jonathan_Blow

@valigo Lisp is what happens when you put as little work as possible into your parser, language semantics, and code generation.

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ish.exe
ish.exe@ishtwts·
A programmer had a problem. He thought to himself, "I know I'll solve it with threads!". has now problems. two He
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airtx (🥚,🥚) 🇦🇲
afLP has deployed almost half of its TVL into 4 markets in it's first 10 days and is the largest market maker on @AftermathFi. We just deployed our first epoch of incentives and APY is looking great at 30% on top of the trading PnL and liquidations it's collected. Expect more markets this week! Trade & deposit today: aftermath.finance/perpetuals
airtx (🥚,🥚) 🇦🇲 tweet media
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Terrible Maps
Terrible Maps@TerribleMaps·
The true size of Portugal compared to Spain
Terrible Maps tweet media
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Mark Logan
Mark Logan@technicaldebtor·
@warriormomLA @chamath tax brackets are on income, not wealth, and while CA is expensive anyone with $1M/year AGI is doing just fine
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LA Mom
LA Mom@warriormomLA·
Yeah but they need to change the top tax bracket to at least +$10 million. At 1 milllion in CA you are barely at the level of living good, you are still making cost cutting decisions to live….which is wild but true. Just look at the costs of private schools in the state, which have gone up in price due to demand because state schools are shit!
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Haseeb >|<
Haseeb >|<@hosseeb·
With all due respect to Chris, I completely disagree with this take. Chris argues that "web3," particularly crypto-powered gaming and media, failed due to scams and regulation, and that better regulation will unlock these non-financial cases. OK, think about this for a second. Does this pass the smell test? Do you think web3 gaming failed because of Gary Gensler? Do you think web3 media plays failed because the scammers crowded out the honest media innovators? Really? If this is true, why didn't they kill financial crypto, which had WAY more of both? Financial use cases were right in the crosshairs of the regulatory harassment, and they also attracted way more scams. Why shouldn't we instead accept the more obvious answer: non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them. Let's just admit it. They were bad products. They failed the market test. It was not Gensler or SBF or Terra that caused these things to fail, it was that no one wanted any of it. Pretending otherwise is cope. Enormous sums of capital and talent explored these ideas, and we should acknowledge what we learned. That lesson is not "if we just had better laws, then finally people would finally be using decentralized Spotify" or whatever. Call a spade a spade. Every single use case in crypto that has worked at scale has been financial in nature. 2008: Bitcoin - non-sovereign store of value 2014: Tether - stablecoins 2015: Ethereum - programmable money 2017: ICOs - capital formation 2018: Prediction markets (Augur, later Polymarket) 2020: DeFi - literally finance is in the name 2021: NFTs - non-fungible financial assets (to the extent they worked) 2024: RWAs (the year BUIDL took off) All this stuff was adopted bottoms-up. We as investors discovered that people wanted to do these things with crypto. The web3 consumer stuff, on the other hand, was primarily conjured up by investors and pitch decks, ZIRP accelerationism, and "wouldn't it be crazy if" blog posts. This was the opposite of the "what smart people are doing on their weekends" thesis. In fact, if you go back to the Ethereum white paper from 2014, almost every single Ethereum use case Vitalik describes is financial in nature: token issuance, stablecoins, derivatives, on-chain treasuries/DAOs, on-chain savings, insurance, price feeds, escrow, gambling, prediction markets. It's all in there. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Finance is almost 10% of GDP. It's an enormous part of the world economy, and banks are some of the lowest NPS score companies in the world. People hate their banks and the outdated financial architectures their money runs on. It's literally why Bitcoin was created. There is so much to innovate in the realm of finance, and I truly believe we are only at the beginning of that displacement. You don't need to assume anything more to project the next 10x in crypto. The old saying goes "crypto will do to finance what the Internet did to every other industry." I respect Chris's optimism. But 18 years in, we should not be propagating this meme about consumer web3 use cases as though they're inevitable. If you are hanging around the rim hoping that crypto is going to disrupt media and gaming, you should know the history and look at it with clear eyes. Now if you as a founder believe that despite that, you know the secret to cracking this market--I respect that, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone to follow their convictions. But I think it's important that investors be honest that all the evidence points the other way.
Chris Dixon@cdixon

x.com/i/article/2019…

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Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias
1/ High-throughput blockchains are hitting the physical limits of LSM trees. While RocksDB is great for general workloads, it chokes when storing terabytes of hashed data (transactions/objects).
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Mark Logan
Mark Logan@technicaldebtor·
@josefbender_ @erfanium 1ms is 1/16th of your frame budget on a 60hz display. (I would be surprised if the code shown in the QT differs by 1µs)
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