gwillen

Programming, Bitcoin, puzzles, singing, Burning Man, miscellany? he/him.

[gwillen @gwillen]

@lex_node @GSkrovina My bet is that (1) they are scared of all the actual scams, where the shares don't exist in the first place, and want to hit those as hard as possible, and (2) they are _probably_ bluffing on the genuine sales, because it would be bad PR to crack down hard, but don't test it?

[gwillen @gwillen]

@DosPiano22 @lex_node No, the SEC totally does say that -- they're the ones that enforce a limit on the number of holders of private company shares in the first place, and for example in 2022 they restricted forward contracts in private company shares (which had been used to get around restrictions.)

[Metaculus @metaculus]

1/ Two hantavirus questions are now live on @Metaculus, both tied to a real, ongoing outbreak.

Here's why we're tracking them, & why we were careful in how we framed the questions. 🧵

[gwillen @gwillen]

@absurdseagull @NickMCThree @allTheYud Well played.

[gwillen @gwillen]

@banana_baeee @SethSHowes Wow, this is fantastic, thanks! Did you already have this page, or did you literally put it together just now by pointing Claude at your notes in response to my question? What a fucking world we live in...

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

Because Waymo is rapidly scaling up its operations, we're rapidly accumulating more evidence on the question of whether it's safer than human drivers. The case for Waymo being safer than human drivers in in some sense almost twice as strong as it was in October.

[gwillen @gwillen]

@_exoconnor @LighthavenPR As I comment whenever I see this meme: If you see this in real life, it is likely a fire alarm or other life safety circuit. It is secured like that so stupid people can't turn it off. This does _not_ prevent the breaker from tripping; the trip mechanism is internal.

[Santi Ruiz @rSanti97]

This is why working in public policy can be really high leverage:

17 million students fill out FAFSA each year. When FAFSA broke, they asked Jeremy Singer, president of College Board, to enter the government on a 6-month stint to get the application back up.

As a result of Singer’s salvage operation, 1.7 million more kids are getting the max Pell grant each year.

https://t.co/fJPaGgaDNC

[Isaac King 🔎 @IsaacKing314]

Fun fact: There's an MMO game on Steam with over 100,000 purchases that, if played, can allow any other player in the game world to gain remote access to your computer. The devs are aware of the vulnerability and actively trying to hide it. Steam was notified and did nothing.

[gwillen @gwillen]

@RosieCampbell @cogcelia Same!!! 😅

[gwillen @gwillen]

@waltuuuhr @patio11 A multi-member LLC is still not automatically taxed as an S-corp or a C-corp; it will by default be taxed as a partnership.

[Jonathan Blow @Jonathan_Blow]

I read this article about software development, which I knew about because I saw Prime reacting to it:

https://t.co/oXYuMTRXs0

For the most part I think it is fine: a relatively young programmer is doing the healthy work of introspecting on what he should really be doing.

But there's one part of the article that I think is a deep mistake, and the author doesn't know it's so wrong because he has never experienced the alternative:

"Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Not now, not later, but eventually. Libraries deprecate. APIs change. Performance regressions creep in. Your once-perfect tool breaks silently because https://t.co/KC2vCoIkWK is now https://t.co/KC2vCoIkWK.2. 2

I have had scripts silently fail because a website changed its HTML layout.
I have had configuration formats break because of upstream version bumps.
I have had Docker containers die because Alpine Linux rotated a mirror URL.

In each case, the immediate emotional response was not just inconvenience but something that moreso resembles guilt."

Yes, this is true in much of the programming world. But there is another world in which people build things that last much longer. I have done it many times. I shipped a binary for this game Braid in 2009 that you can still download and play on Steam 16 years later. If you are pretty young (like 35), you can run binaries on Windows that were compiled before you were even born, which is amazing given how hard they have been trying to f up Windows lately.

On an emulator like MAME, you can play arcade games programmed in 1979. If today's software "technology" is so much better, why does it fall apart like tissue paper?

The author is not wrong about the cited decay. But this decay is not inherent to the practice of software. It's due to choices made, usually foolishly, by the people designing the systems being interacted with. And, it's due to a lack of knowing better, non-exposure to the sector of programmers who are very concerned with their code lasting a long time, actually.

The way you make code last a long time is you minimize dependencies that are likely to change and, to the extent you must take such dependencies, you minimize the contact surface between your program and those dependencies.

The actual algorithms you program, the actual functioning machinery you build, is a mathematical object defined by the semantics of your programming language, and mathematical objects are eternal, they will last far longer than your human life. The goal then is to avoid introducing decay into the system. You must build an oasis of peace that is insulated from this constant bombardment of horrible decisions, and only hesitantly interface into the outside world.

This means, for example: If you are shipping on iOS, you only reluctantly use any functions iOS gives you, because when you use them, Tim Apple will come along and break your program next year for arbitrary pointless reasons, because Tim Apple does not respect you or anyone you know.

This means a program cannot last forever on iOS, because Tim Apple likes breaking your things and watching you submissively clean them up. But the core of your program, which could be 95% of the code, is fine, and you can deploy it elsewhere.

This means you have to insulate from Linux userspace, because of all the jackass decision making that introduces constant incompatibilities while somehow never making the system better.

Using a library dependency to do font rendering or sparse matrix math? That dependency gets checked into your source tree, a copy of exactly the version you use. Ten years later you can pull down that source and recompile, and it works, because your program is a mathematical object. If you want to upgrade to something newer that has bug fixes and so forth, you are free to do so, but you are also free not to do so, and your program still works. (And how many of these bug fixes do you really need? Your program worked correctly when you shipped it to the greatest extent you could measure, because you are a skillful software engineer who wants to ship things of a high quality).

Everyone who got into programming for the joy of it knows, at some level, that the magic of programs is that they represent complexity that is replicable over time (and thus they exist outside of time). But the trashy programmer culture of the past 20 years stopped aspiring to this, and now has forgotten it is even possible.

And so long as people have forgotten, decisions will continue to be made that make the problem worse.

There are programmers who only write glue code, and who think that's what programming is; to these people what I have written above will not make sense. But the good news for that contingent is, they can always just stop writing glue code and start doing something else! If today's software "technology" is so good, why do you think it needs so much glue? Maybe there is a stylistic problem.

So if you are looking for what to do in the world of software that can represent a lasting contribution, maybe this is food for thought.

@NotAShelf @ThePrimeagen

[gwillen @gwillen]

@GergelyOrosz I tried to try Tuple! I remain shocked that it's possible to have a popular programming tool with zero Linux support, and zero plan for Linux support.

[Bilawal Sidhu @bilawalsidhu]

Introducing VibeCon — the world’s largest vibe coding conference.

Make sure you register today: http://127.0.0.1:8080/register

[gwillen @gwillen]

@ciphergoth @braincell__ Once you have the prompt set up (or in my workflow, the Cursor rules), you can pretty much vibecode though. I will say, Cursor is a key part of my workflow. It's doing a LOT of fancy prompting under the hood, to save the model from itself, on top of what I'm adding myself.

[gwillen @gwillen]

@ciphergoth @braincell__ I have half a page of coding guidelines I give it before I even start. And even then I'm mostly using it for very simple stuff. But it still saves hours and hours on the very simple stuff.

[gwillen @gwillen]

@Krishell1985 @jackiehluo If your doctor can't be arsed to pay for an UpToDate subscription, you gotta find a new doctor! 😂

[gwillen @gwillen]

The IRS could maybe get away with that workflow, but a private party cannot. If you owe someone money, you aren't allowed to keep it yourself, just because you can't figure out how to pay them. After a certain time period you will have to send it to the government instead ("escheat"), for the recipient to claim. That process comes with paperwork. Much easier to just mail the check.

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

The baby is sick today. She has a new word - why? - and she uses it when she's in distress, so when she's sick she snuggles up against me and whimpers "why? why? why?" and it is heartbreaking.

When she was three days old we got a preliminary test result suggesting she didn't have a functioning immune system. Severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID); you probably know it as bubble boy disease. The doctors told us it was probably a false positive and not to worry too much while they ran the followup tests. I immediately started worrying, of course. Sure, probably a false positive. But how probably? What were her prospects, if she was immunodeficient? SCID is treatable these days, 95% survivable if you catch it soon enough, but babies have better odds if they don't get an infection before their bone marrow transplant, so we started planning how we'd keep her safe until then. A week later we got the followup test result. False positive, like they'd told us it would be. No immunodeficiency. She is sick and she will fight it off and be completely fine.

There are five hundred thousand kids who PEPFAR provides HIV drugs that keep their immune system working. AIDS kills babies very quickly if they aren't on antivirals. Two to six months, which is also about when most babies with SCID die. It's about how long you can make it in this world without an immune system.

I've spent a lot of time yesterday and today in the shower - the hot steam helps the baby - cradling her to my chest while she whimpers "why, why, why?" and knowing that she will be completely fine. The world where this cold could have killed her feels like it is terribly nearby. The children that immunodeficiencies do kill don't feel very far away, either.

There are a bunch of people in my mentions on the PEPFAR post that seem to imagine that empathy is a limited resource, that if we care about the distant dying children we cannot care about our own. This is not my experience. To love another person, particularly to love a child, is to hate disease, to see it clearly as humanity's oldest enemy, to wake up and fall asleep determined to destroy it. I want to end the common cold. I want to end HIV. I want to end every immunodeficiency out there. I want this selfishly, greedily, desperately. There is no altruism in it and no philosophy. Disease is the enemy and I want to watch it die. It is my enemy, and it is your enemy, and it is on the retreat. I am not asking for your empathy. I am asking you to fight.