I see quite a lot of announcements of compatibility and porting efforts -you would never know if someone used an LLM to help, but I would bet money it is being done without admitting it.
I agree with him. All software should be written in safe languages, but there is a wide selection available. For new projects you should pick a language that does as much for you as possible. Ruby and Rails both go out of their way to provide the developer with as much power as they can. They make development less expensive. That’s exactly what you want when you are first building something, before you know exactly what you will need.
Later after you have lots of users and your hosting costs are rising, then you can rewrite it in a language that gets you closer to the machine. You won’t need to do any exploration at that point, and you’ll already know where the performance hot spots are. Of course I recommend Rust for that, but that is merely my personal preference.
You can accuse DHH of many things, but not of grifting, insincerity, political politeness/correctness just not to offend people. The guy speaks his mind and is unapologetic about it.
The drastic change in the ethnic/cultural makeup of people leaving in many Western countries is a fact. In Finland it is +70% foregners only in the past 10 years. Do you want to dispute stats? Write to the Finnish department of statistics.
Or are you arguing that this is a natural process and politicians can't influence it? Wrong. Pre-post Brexit stats show the opposite. As do the stats from Denmark, after politicians started working on the issue.
You are fine with stats, but don't like DHH's opinions about those facts? Well, those are opinions and everyone has a right to them. Opinions and feelings based on morals can't really be proved incorrect.
Or are you tone policing?
So what exactly is the actual problem? "Someone on the internet has wrong opinions and is not a carbon copy of me, politically"? What a silly and totalitarian behavior to call other people dirty names!
Are you really so ignorant or just pretending to be? White replacement is a conspiracy theory with no basis in reality. You are not under attack. You are not being suppressed or silenced. DHH just doesn’t like people with skin tones darker than his own and who don’t live their lives as presented on nazi party’s propaganda posters. Statistics ain’t on his side. I’m just relaying what he said, if you don’t like that, take that to DHH. I do not endorse nazism.
And I’m not saying anyone’s opinions are wrong, I’m just saying calls to violence, such as DHH’s suggested deportations of people based solely on their skin color, are not opinions. Violence mustn’t be re-labeled as an opinion. Advocating for harming people or violating their agency cannot pass as political position, not even fringe one. You are free to have opinions, values and beliefs, but don’t think other people will be fine with that when your opinion starts affecting their lives. No matter what someone’s external appearance makes you think about a person, they also have opinions, values and beliefs.
(This just a short summary of what basic human decency is.)
Stop calling anyone with differing opinions a racist or xenophobe. It really feels like these activists are deliberately misusing powerful words in order to weaken them (if everyone is called a racist, no matter how undeservedly, then no one is). Or they are simply stupid and do not understand the reaction they are causing with their totalitarian tactics.
He was't talking about the color of the skin or a passport. He was talking about the culture, does it integrate well, is it compatible, is it "enriching" or actually enriching. Is the person and the group this person belongs to, a negative or a positive for the country, the society, the original/native people.
This has nothing to do with the race or a color of one's skin. Like Idris Elba is British as is Rishi Sunak.
What would be the point of that though? I think the reason Kevin wants to optimize it is for the understanding that will result from the process, not because anyone cares about having a Lean proof that compiles quickly...
I think the new Astra computer use demos show that the models might be able to do things like inspection of real world objects if given a camera.
Super excited to see real world feedback added into the agent loops we have gotten used to working with. Could you
let the model print and test the circuit boards it is prototyping with a jig?
In July I was struggling with writing DIY Rust firmware for an e-ink screen. I mistakenly thought I'd ordered an Inkplate 6 ED060SC7 and actually had the later version, which confounded my efforts. I was also mistaken about the pixel resolution.
The way I found this out is I propped it up next to a webcam so it was more or less full frame, and I had the (then new) Fable write a python script to bezier warp the camera capture to a flat projection of the screen. At that point I couldn't address the whole screen. Once I'd guided the capture script I just left the LLM overnight with the instruction to get full control confirmed by a capture round trip, and it was meaningfully finished in a couple of hours. I don't really have the skills to attempt that myself in a reasonable time frame.
I don't know about pcbs but i gave chat gpt a picture of my window to help design a mesh screen frame to hold the feline hostage in, and it gave a fairly convincing impression of understanding what was going on, although at one point it thought the window swung inwards (it's an outie).
Would love to see someone try to automate the bootstrap chain from a working C89 compiler to Rust.
At this point I think current LLMs are able help these incredible feats of bootstrapping as they can grind out the impossibly long built times over multiple days/weeks.
I am very optimistic for deterministic builds in general.
I am working on this![0] But this is actually a herculean task, I've been chipping at it for weeks and even trying to cheat somewhat by translating mrustc from C++ to C89. If anyone has ideas/cheaper ways to run it I would like to know.
In the meantime, months ago I achieved bootstrap of TCC (then GCC 4.6) via the same path as the live-bootstrap project but replacing the Scheme part with a C compiler in Ben Lynn's Haskell dialect.[1] This was a project I wish I had time to do years ago[2] but never had the time or motivation for, and the type of things agents can do well now (they couldn't write good Haskell a year ago).
> If anyone has ideas/cheaper ways to run it I would like to know
GCC 4.7.4 was the last version of GCC fully written in C, with full C++98/03 support and a decent subset of C++11. As far as I know it is used by the bootstrap project presented in the article.
Specifically the expensive part is getting a C89 port of mrustc to compile rustc 1.90.0. mrustc needs C++ right now, bootstrapping via TCC by writing it in C89 would be the shorter chain.
Sounds pretty difficult (if not impossible, see cfront 4.0) to translate C++ code to C89. You have to keep track of all constructors and destructors and their progress along the body yourself, and I assume it must be fit for exceptions as well?
Yes, this isn't meant to be a complete port and I only started dipping into mrustc because the previous agents were going off the rails. I have mostly been throwing spare weekly quotas at this but deeper thought will be required to get an actual working Rust compiler in C. Rust is an enormously more complex language, so it might just be at the capability limit.
I have no doubt that a Rust compiler can be implemented in C. But it's a different project to write one in C from start than trying to migrate an existing C++14 based project to C. The former is likely "easier". An alternative approach could be to migrate the C++14 code back to C++98 and get rid of the exceptions, which makes it transpilable to C (using the cfront approach). Though the result might not be maintainable C, but still C.
> Would love to see someone try to automate the bootstrap chain from a working C89 compiler to Rust.
We did that in stagex over a year ago actually and several major orgs are using it in production. Also no dependency on libgcc. LLVM native. We presented it at Open Source Summit and Linux Security Summit this year.
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