Aram Hăvărneanu
@aramh
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Mathematical engineer bringing type safety to the cloud. Previously worked on CUE @cue_lang. JSR PC, @(R6)+; I wrote the arm64, sparc64, and Solaris Go ports.
Joined May 2009
Understanding means understanding the duality between the concrete and the abstract.
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I write about type theory, linear logic, and other computer science subjects. People generally give insightful replies even when disagreeing, the conversation is great. That said, my most viral post is about VLC and my second most viral post is about Markdown. Intelligent
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Also when something is bad it doesn't mean there exists any good alternative.
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Also there is the misconception that useful=good. Just no.
There seems to be this misconception that open source software should be immune from criticism. Nothing is further from the truth. Nothing should be immune to criticism. We have too much slop in the world because people don't criticize enough.
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There seems to be this misconception that open source software should be immune from criticism. Nothing is further from the truth. Nothing should be immune to criticism. We have too much slop in the world because people don't criticize enough.
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Types. Always the answer. Always misunderstood.
"... Loops, conditionals, and error handling can be done with familiar code patterns rather than chaining individual tool calls ..." This is why I was asking for types for MCP tool outputs; I lost count of how many times I was laughed in my face (and cannot even imagine how
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Doing color-management correctly is very easy, in fact if you use platform APIs you have to go out of your way to not do it correctly. On macOS, that is, on Linux there is no way to do color-management correctly. Impossible. I mention this because both Chrome and mpv were using
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Then again, Chrome also didn't do color-management correctly for over a decade. It seems to work correctly now, not sure when it got fixed. I moved over to Safari because of this.
VLC can't do color-managed video, can't play modern codecs, and has one of the most abstruse user interfaces I've ever seen. VLC is not good and has never been good. It was once useful. People lack the capacity of discerning good from bad.
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(I still use it to force encoded audio into my receiver, I don't know of any alternative to that.)
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(It's also a bad Linux citizen because it refuses to use standardized mechanisms of doing things, but I'd excuse that if it were good.)
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VLC can't do color-managed video, can't play modern codecs, and has one of the most abstruse user interfaces I've ever seen. VLC is not good and has never been good. It was once useful. People lack the capacity of discerning good from bad.
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@TravisMWhitaker I start with completely abstract modules (or module interfaces), determine relevant algebraic or subtyping relationship between modules, and refine the modules until they become concrete (instantiable). During this process I can easily see, for example, that a stack and a queue
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There may be a plethora of good reasons not to use a third party library, but it is a factual truth that in some languages introducing a third party library can break your code, while in others it can't. Not acknowledging that different languages have different properties and
>I can use a library written by someone else, without any worries that it will break my own code The poser-engineering reality of modern software development captured in a single sentence
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Rust is not a good example here because of reasons I'll get into shortly, but this message contains a fundamental misconception. You can absolutely state that all programs written in a particular language must posses certain properties, even complex, logical properties. Ryan
@oxcrowx @shstalwart No, it's not; neither is "all Rust". Stop thinking in labels and start thinking about reality. The point is that "safety" (a ridiculous and cringey stand-in for the correct concept, "correctness") is a per-program property. You can analyze & prove that specific code is "safe", in
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Why do people lie like this?
Windows updates are not fun, but let's get a few things clear. 1. Windows 11 or 10 does not force reboot when you are in the middle of work. It actually knows when you are working and updates are scheduled outside those hours, also called Active hours. 2. Windows 11 will only
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TIL about the hot-wire barretter (link below). Incredible stuff.
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