gollum999's comments

gollum999 | 1 year ago | on: How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect

> Suddenly, everyone was talking about HTTP APIs, when they said API.

I had a junior dev try to correct me when I used "framework" and "API" outside of a web context.

It caught me off guard at first, but the more I've thought about it, it seems inevitable as time goes on. The more abstractions we build, the more unreasonable it becomes to expect every developer to start with "bare metal" and work their way up. Schools are forced to teach with "the other side" (i.e. the highest-level abstractions) as the benchmark for graduating, because that's what employers need. So at some point they have to cut some of the more esoteric CS fundamentals and concepts to make room.

gollum999 | 1 year ago | on: The two factions of C++

Which features in particular?

One of C++'s core tenants is (and has been since the 90's) zero-cost abstractions. Or really, "zero-runtime-cost abstractions"; compile times tend to increase.

Obviously some abstractions necessarily require more computation (e.g. raw pointers vs reference-counted smart pointers). But in many cases new features (if implemented correctly!) give better semantics and additional compile-time safety while still compiling down to equivalent binary.

gollum999 | 1 year ago | on: Intuition

I always wondered why drag-and-drop in particular was what they chose. Why not just a "Confirm" button?

gollum999 | 1 year ago | on: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

From the article:

> At the end of 2023. Jane Street employed 2,631 people, so that equates to almost $4mn of net revenue per head on average. In adjusted EBITDA, it comes to $2.83mn per employee (or nearly $22mn for each of the 482 traders actual traders at Jane Street.)

And regarding compensation:

> Given Jane Street’s disclosed compensation and benefits of $2.4bn last year, this works out to over $900k for each employee on average.

gollum999 | 2 years ago | on: Emacs from Scratch Part Two

I know a couple people who subscribe to this philosophy. I think that, like customizing Emacs itself, the decision of how much to customize is an important consideration when optimizing your workflow.

Personally, I do 99.9% of development on one machine. If I need to edit a file while ssh-ing, I use vim. I put my .emacs.d in a private repo so setting up a new machine is done with `git clone`. Upgrading emacs does sometimes break things (which can be quite frustrating), but that also is rare enough that I wouldn't want to let that constrain my daily workflow. So since all of those things fall in the 0.1% for me, I have no problem tweaking things to my liking.

gollum999 | 2 years ago | on: Google Imagen 2

Allegedly Imagen 2 is indeed better at producing hands: https://deepmind.google/technologies/imagen-2/

> Imagen 2’s dataset and model advances have delivered improvements in many of the areas that text-to-image tools often struggle with, including rendering realistic hands and human faces and keeping images free of distracting visual artifacts.

gollum999 | 2 years ago | on: Magit

In my experience it's pretty rare that a frontend comes along and fundamentally changes my workflow around the underlying tool, but Magit falls into that category for me. Truly a great piece of software.
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