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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

there is a temporary irc channel ##dysfunlang on liberachat for now if people want to discuss ideas.

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

Finally wrote up my post about how I feel about LLMs. I hope this resonates; it was not easy to write and took a lot of re-drafting.

https://theweeklymiscellaneous.co.uk/posts/2026/07/large-language-models-in-2026/

I hope this wraps up my (inadvertant) series of LLM posts, I can't really write about it much further. Next idea I have for a post is to write up some of my gamedev work.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
mastodonmigration@mastodon.online ("Mastodon Migration") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/116984404932257367

So, this guy is not a slick polished pol, but if you actually listen to his speech you can understand why he ran away with the nomination. Why he will trounce Susan Collins. And, why Chuck Schumer is terrified of him and the Progressive Democratic movement. #WeThePeople are rising, and we are coming for their jobs.

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

some of these brave men survived. this one was a teenager when he volunteered.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

when i started writing gnt, i was thinking more green threads than actors tbh, but the way it evolved, i realised actors are actually just a good way of doing it from a performance perspective.

this did surprise me a bit, because i have written quite a lot of erlang and it is not what you'd call blazing 🔥 fast 🚀, even if you had no sense of irony.

that it comes with a nice programming model attached is pretty gravy. you can write synchronous-looking programs and get it all async.

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

So this is a very short quick and dirty, if a bit silly, video where I talk about the place I'm in with the photos I just took, laid out over the audio.

Attachments:

• video: A video of stills over a soundtrack of somebody (me, I'm the somebody) talking about trees and a grove.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

okay apparently people like the idea of 'low level erlang'. yeah, so do i.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

oh yeah, for new followers: please do jump into my responses with comments when i do these tech monologues, it gives me things to think about.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

the only cost i don't like with stackful coroutines is allocating stacks. i have integrated stack watermarking in gnt to help you measure the actual depth your stacks get to in practice, but with compiler support we could do much better than that. just probably not with any of the existing compilers...

otherwise, well spawning an actor is literally under 20 cycles on my machine when branch predicted correctly. this is not your bottleneck and i don't think it takes much polling to make up for it.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
dinobrarian ("Charlie") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Kjaerulv/116986102484944935

I spent a significant part of this week at work writing some guides aimed at people who want to avoid AI when studying. Some of it is standard infolit stuff, some is also explaining to students that not all tools designed to help them (e.g. reference managers) use ai, and the rest is how to switch everything off.

I just need to work out how to market the guide to management so that I'm allowed to publish it!

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

why actors? well it's more the stackful coroutines bit. if you've ever tried to push async rust too far you will no doubt have discovered that recursion is streng verboten and you'd better box something. aside from introducing function colouring, rust's model of async is inherently limiting in the sorts of structures you can do without calling malloc. so stackful is just better ergonomics.

the other side effect of rust's model is that you wake a task and then poll all of its futures. i don't do this in gnt, you get mailed the answer, not told to poll again.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
cholling@bytes.programming.dev wrote:

Are there any small tech companies who are okay with being small tech companies? It seems like every tech company either wants to become the next Google, Meta, or Amazon, or wants to get bought out by the current Google, Meta, or Amazon.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

pre-1.0 rust had actors too. they got rid of them because they wanted to be a c++ replacement (status: ongoing, might be a while lol).

i personally think they should have kept them. even if they shaped the programs you write away from the programs you'd write in c or c++, i don't care, i don't want to write all my code on the lowest level possible, i just want it to be fast and easy and maintainable.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

so i guess the first job would be to settle on a rough design. i would vote for focusing on PC-grade hardware, which would allow us to provide something like gnt-based actors which would certainly not be integrated with async i/o on an embedded platform.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org ("Daniel Lakeland") wrote:

@cwebber @andrewrk

"To me this is completely missing the point, which is to pool effort in order to ensure that in general users of software remain in control of that software. To this end it doesn't really matter if your code gets picked up by AI companies. It primarily matters whether high quality free software is available to users providing competition that limits the degree to which proprietary software can get away with being coercive....

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org ("Daniel Lakeland") wrote:

@cwebber @andrewrk
... If you refrain from participating in the software of the commons, the only thing that you're doing is surrendering more of our collective agency to abusive centralized powers." --Andrew Kelley

Fuck yes, can I get this on a billboard? On a flag? On a t-shirt... paint it on a fucking mural please...

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

this was one thing that annoyed me about zig. comptime is nice for being able to do stuff, but i'm not sure i can work out how to work with an anonymous returned object with methods from C, like what am i even supposed to do with that?

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

oh yeah, here's the big one: whatever we do, i want to be able to use stuff written in it from C. if i can use it from C, i can use it from python, haskell, scheme or whatever i want.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

we need something that fills the gap generics fills in most languages at a minimum. i mean obviously i would like all the powerful types in the world, but i must admit i have been enjoying how quickly C compiles.

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

Okay, time to eat

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
jtruk ("James / jtruk / crow") wrote:

I see some of you sneaky little traitors duplicate the stuff you post here onto Bluesky!
I should probably do the same - fedi interactions are where I get the most joy but there are folks there who aren't here.

I'm presuming you're using some automated thing to do this rather than chopping text to fit and reposting manually? Suggestions welcome, ta!

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

#define SAFE(...) /**/

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

Of course, I don't expect everyone to post exactly the way I want, that's why I'm using the mute button

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

gnt would make an absolutely banger base for a systems language with integrated async i/o btw

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

To keep the peace, I'm readily muting the following accounts:

• Stolen content (please credit artwork/memes you repost)
• LLM writing or images
• Too much LLM news (usually I've just unfollowed these accounts as I don't mind the occasional piece of news in my feed, I just don't want to encounter it all the time)
• Too much doomy news in general (again, only so much doom I can take 😭 )
• Un-CW'd suggestive-ish stuff if I don't feel I'd be comfortable encountering in public
• Posts about a cool new website/article/etc that turns out to be slop (unfortunately not everyone can tell, but seeing these projects depress me far too much... 😭 )

I realise that I would probably end up muting my own account on account of all the LLM posts/general doom, so this is your permission to mute me if I get too much

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

is anybody else feeling a need enough that they'd want to get involved? it sure would be a lot easier if it wasn't a one man band.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

i dunno folks, sometimes i feel like i'm not going to be able to avoid writing that c alternative language that's been in the back of my mind for several years.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

oh yeah, just one other thing: when i finish gnt, it will be memory safe too, despite being written in C.

this idea of memory safety only being possible with languages designed for it is not correct, all you buy is more assurance of correctness.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

that issue is itself incredibly surprising, given that Fil-C is a slop project and zig has a strong anti-slop stance.

but to say this is how we will get memory safety (which btw RUST DOES NOT HAVE!!!1111) is just hilarious

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

this is of course on top of the base issue, which is itself a travesty that makes me not want to write zig.

i have been in communities where i lost respect for the people developing the language too much already, i am not trying to collect them like they're pokemon.