sevensor
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- sevensorLast time I measured it, handling KeyError was also significantly faster than checking with “key in collection.” Also, as I was surprised to discover, Python threads are preemptively scheduled, GIL notwithstanding, so it’s possible for the key to be gone from the dictionary by the time you use it, even if it was there when you checked it. Although if you’re creating a situation where this is a problem, you probably have bigger issues.
- I was just looking at an OOM situation this week. I disagree that turning overcommit off helps specifically with locality. Finding the straw that breaks the camel’s back doesn’t necessarily help you fix the problem. If you don’t understand the whole system, it’s going to be hard to debug regardless.
- I’ve done this: I had a hot loop and I discovered that I could reduce instruction counts by adding a branch inside the loop. Definitely slower, which I expected, but it’s worth measuring.
- Thanks for the report! I was hoping for better news, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
- What’s interesting to me about this, reckless as it is, is that the conversation has begun to shift toward balancing LLMs with rigorous methods. These people seem to be selling some kind of AI hype product backed by shoddy engineering, and even they are picking up on the vibe. I think this is a really promising sign for the future.
- I’ve been posting here for a decade, and lurking for a few years before that, and your observation tracks with my experience. There’s a handful of ideas we’re collectively mulling over at any given time. They slowly rotate in and out, and modulate into different keys as they go. For instance, the leading edge of LLM related discourse seems to be improving now that we’re getting bored with both hype and outrage, although there’s still plenty of hype and outrage. Old topics still occasionally blip into focus, but they don’t have the same staying power. Like, you’ll see a Rails post every now and then, but it’s not the darling it was. I doubt we’ll ever see the likes of “Rails is a Ghetto” make the rounds again, because nobody’s worked up about it any more. Or take Skrillex, who must have been on the front page every week for a month. I was annoyed at the time, but I think we’re due for a retrospective on programmers and dubstep. I’m not the one to write it though; not my scene in the first place.
Anyway, thank you dang for your moderation!
- I discovered named ranges only a couple of months ago, and they’re pretty amazing, as is the spilling behavior that fills an entire column from one cell. When it comes to the specifics of dealing with complex formulas, I usually copy paste them to a text editor because the formula bar doesn’t have a great editing ui.
How far did you get with let and lambda? It seems like you could build whole programs on them, but I haven’t pushed very hard on them yet. Do you want to say more about the “heavy technical limitations”?
- Notoriously secretive, siloed Apple, where even internally, teams are said to be entirely in the dark about each other’s work? I think Apple, culturally, can’t do a public post mortem no matter how much they might want to. I would love to be proven wrong on this, because I would very much like to understand what happened.
- I remember this being installed on the unix workstations in the undergraduate engineering computer labs. The default option was CDE, but CDE was slow. You could pick fvwm2 or fvwm95. I liked fvwm2 better and theme it however you liked. I remember people running xsnow this time of year.
- > The issue was never the syntax—it was the runtime. Why readable math still matters in a world aided by LLM-assisted code generation
I’m going to stop you right there. Matlab has 5 issues:
1. The license
2. Most users don’t understand what makes Matlab special and they write for loops over their arrays.
3. The other license
4. The other license
5. The license server
Mathworks seems to have set up licensing to maximize how much revenue they can extract with no thought given to how deeply annoying it is to use.
- I’m in a similar place with an internal tool. I have a two part changelog. In the first part, each release gets 50 words or less justifying its existence. This is ready to be copy pasted for management consumption. The second part goes into detail about what’s in the release, for technical people who care about those details.
- You don’t even need parentheses here.
This expression is a tuple all by itself.42, - No, I’d type the function argument as a Mapping. Frozendict is so that the function will raise an exception if it violates its type signature.
Edit: that is, if as the caller you want foo to be immutable, then you make it a frozendict
- Good point, I was responding to a the parent talking about GaAs, but CdZnTe is certainly II-VI.
- The Python stdlib does not get enough credit. People complain about things like how its http client is dated and slow, but it’s pretty amazing that it’s just right there if you need it, no external dependencies needed. And it’s sitting right next to difflib, graphlib, pathlib, struct, glob, tkinter, and dozens of others. Sure, every one of these is limited individually, but those limitations are stable and well understood!
- Additional factoid: these are known as III-V semiconductors after their columns in the periodic table / number of valence electrons. They all have different bandgaps and lattice constants, and interesting things happen when you modulate composition.
Also, you might actually want to introduce a lattice constant mismatch because the strained lattice has useful properties.
- Concurrency is a good motivation, but this is super useful even in straight line code. There’s a huge difference between functions that might mutate a dictionary you pass in to them and functions that definitely won’t. Using Mapping is great, but it’s a shallow guarantee because you can violate it at run time.
- So do I want the button with the three horizontal lines, three horizontal dots, three vertical dots, nine dots arranged in a grid, the point-down triangle, or the point-right chevron? Generally these convey no information and I have to try each one to find the option I want. If it exists.
- I’ve been there! Stony Creek used to be a little working class seaside village with some quirky artsy folks mixed in. My father would kayak in the sound.