ummonk's comments

On: Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

[ummonk]

That factor was downstream of its complexity though. It's far harder to implement a compiler for Ada 83 than even for modern C.

On: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

[ummonk]

What's a situation where one needs to use `eval` in benign way in JS? If something is precomputable (e.g. `eval("1 + 1")` can just be replaced by 2), then it should be precomputed. If it's not precomputable then it's dependent on input and thus hardly benign -- you'll need to carefully verify that the inputs are properly sanitized.

On: Claude mixes up who said what

[ummonk]

I don't see why the transformer architecture can't be designed and trained with separate inputs for control data and content data.

[amw-zero → ummonk]

Give it a shot

[vrighter → ummonk]

because it's all one (unexplainable) matrix of weights.

On: Finding all regex matches has always been O(n²)

[ummonk]

Great stuff.

I would argue that hardened mode should be default though, similar to how siphash is the default hashing function in Rust hash maps. Faster mode should be opt in if the user is confident that the supplied data is nonmalicious and they need the speed up.

[ieviev → ummonk]

I’m still open to it and thinking about it actually. I will explore if it’s possible to eliminate the large losses on common patterns and if it turns out it is then it’s a no brainer.

Going forward this and the extended operators + large pattern perf will hopefully be a strong selling point to gain more traction

On: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

[ummonk]

That's Rule 5 no?

[tartoran → ummonk]

You're responding to a bot

On: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

[ummonk]

The boilerplate and indirection isn't done for performance

On: Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

[ummonk]

I've worked on optimizing modern slow code. Once you optimize a few bottlenecks it turns out it's very hard to optimize because the rest of the time is spread out over the whole code without any small bottlenecks and it's all written in a slow language with no thought for performance.

On: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

[ummonk]

I would argue that making the company experience the consequences of its choice of metrics / mandates is in fact a moral imperative.

On: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

[ummonk]

In fairness though, it does give you good practice for the essential skill of maintaining / improving an old codebase.

On: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

[ummonk]

Amazon has had a really bad string of various outages recently. Assuming they're internally treating this as business as usual in post-mortems then perhaps the newsworthy thing is actually that they aren't taking their outages seriously enough.