Marcos Boyington 🧢

#Father #Gardener #SWE at Google #YangGang #HumanityFirst #MATH

#BikeToWork rain & snow

Former #Cosen2020 Candidate: #UBI #TermLimits #RCV #M4A #GMO

🇧🇷🇺🇸

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

I am but a faint signal in the noise

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

@glukianoff Curious why you don't use mute instead?

I never block, only mute

Block has the weird effect of silencing the person for everyone vs just me

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

The vast majority of "C++ devs" don't understand RAII

It's so simple & works so much better than goto

But most C++ codebases do this 👇 bullshit instead

Why I'm all-in rust, it's not an option

[trish @TrisH0x2A]

Dijkstra called goto harmful in 1968

the Linux kernel contains tens of thousands of goto statements

the label out alone appears thousands of times

Linus's response on LKML in 1997: "there's nothing wrong with gotos, especially for handling error cases"

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

You're missing it

It is possible for a mid-wit to create a question for which they believe there is only 1 pattern

But which an intelligent person can see there are actually multiple

This happens all the time

This question, specifically, is well-formulated & has 1 answer

[Covert QOS @CovertQOS]

Possible without prior exposure to multiplication? Yes. But I meant approaching the integer pattern problems as equations.

The first pattern you're supposed to recognize on an IQ test is that the patterns are meant to be solvable by kids who don't know what equations are.

So if your answer to a pattern question includes ideas like "infinite possible mapping functions" etc then you have failed the IQ test and are now just regurgitating math.

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

@CovertQOS @sewell_herb @2025Blog Pattern recognition like (N+N)*N which definitely isn't math right? 🤣🤣

I guess then a kid who hasn't learned multiplication would still see the pattern?

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

@sewell_herb @2025Blog For sure, but I could see how someone would look at 2*N*N and think "it's just a math equation"

That 2 really throws you off, it wasn't until I saw 2N represented as (N + N), which is obvious of course but easy to miss when the first thing that comes to mind is 2N

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

@sewell_herb @2025Blog Mathematically, he is right, there are infinite equations that fit the points.

The catch is that the implication is "use only what's given" - the "2" throws you off a bit and feels like something which you weren't given

https://t.co/ScYzflc7wP

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

My first reaction was "he's right, there are infinite equations that fit the 2 points"

Part of this is because 2*N^2 feels like just an equation

As I saw posts fly by though & realized 2N is just (N + N), it becomes clear N*(N+N) is the only answer:

N is all that we're given

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

My first reaction was "he's right, there are infinite equations that fit the 2 points"

Part of this is because 2*N^2 feels like just an equation

As I saw posts fly by though & realized 2N is just (N + N), it becomes clear N*(N+N) is the only answer:

N is all that we're given

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

This is why IQ tests don't work too well on really smart people.

Because sorta smart people tend to give the expected answer.

And really smart people tend to point out that the question is wrong, and start arguing with the test, or trying to correct it, thereby making the test impossible to grade and annoying everyone.

The expected answer to this is 72.

Because 2*2*2 = 8 and 5*5*2 = 50, so 6*6*2 = 72.

But the (really) correct answer is "I don't know."

Because what you have is two points on a 3 dimensional graph (x,y) -> z.

z = 2*x*y is one surface that can be drawn through these two points. And I suspect it's the simplest formula for a surface that can be so drawn, although I haven't bothered to check.

But an infinite number of contiguous surfaces can be drawn in three dimensions that encompass these points (2,2,8) and (5,5,50).

Each of these surfaces can be described by its own formula. Some of them will also touch (6,6,72). But others of them will touch (6,6, {something else entirely}) instead.

This might sound really, really pedantic. But it's not.

Everyone knows that the expected answer is the simple one, but that's only on a test... a fake artificial made up problem.

When we start trying to do this in the real world, which, after all is what this "IQ" thing is actually for, then using the same kind of "IQ test thinking" can get you in trouble.

"My 3-month-old son is now TWICE as big as when he was born. He's on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by age 10." -@pronounced_kyle

Fitting the simplest-formula curve, as opposed to the correct curve, makes our predictions of real-world stuff dead wrong.

So this kind of test question promotes a dangerous habit of thought.

But, Devon, I hear some of you ask, doesn't the principle of Occam's Razor demand that we fit the simplest curve?

No. No, it does not. It does not require that we select the simplest possible answer, given what we have currently seen. It requires that we prefer hypotheses that make fewer assumption to those that make more.

These are two different things entirely.

If I see one black sheep, the simplest hypothesis is that all sheep are black.

The hypothesis requiring the fewest assumptions is that at least one sheep is black on at least one side.

You will note which of these is correct.

All of this is, of course, irrelevant to questions on IQ test. But questions on an IQ test only matter as much as they are relevant to the actual universe...

Where ideas like this are very relevant indeed.

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

That is the key, though: what is consciousness?

Can it be defined?

Unlike taking on the phone to the spirit world, which is definable, (the test: is there a physical person on the other end), consciousness isn't so easy

We thought we could define it, until LLMs

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

Hilarious. And, I think, true.

I have yet to encounter anybody taking a strong position in the argument over whether LLMs are conscious - on either side - that shows any sign that they know what they're talking about.

Want to persuade me otherwise? Define the predicate. Show me your experimental test for "is conscious".

Once you've done that, we can have a conversation that won't be completely meaningless.

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

How is gradle at 9.3.1 yet still so god damn slow

Maybe instead of the constant stream of releases, take some time to actually make it fast

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

You're right that JVM is extremely powerful

But Java is outdated

Kotlin + KMP wipe the floor with it

You get everything JVM has to offer + you get a compiler that targets just about everything

[embersunn @embersunn]

Java didn’t survive 30 years because it’s exciting

It survived because predictability scales better than hype

Doesn’t matter how many times vibe coders say “Java is outdated” while their global banking system is literally running on it

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

Games use a collector anyway, just through ref-counting

Most assets in a game are ref-counted

So GC is actually a perfect fit for games, because you are effectively already doing it anyway through ref counting (just unpredictability)

[Lucas Meijer @lucasmeijer]

Using a garbage collector in a videogame is crazy.

It’s a miracle unity succeeded by putting a gc into every produced game.

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

Google's internal source control is just so much better than git

I have used both

Git is unnecessarily complex and achieves in 10 steps what the Google system achieves in 1

[slash1s @slash1sol]

THE GUY WHO BUILT GIT GAVE A FULL LECTURE AT GOOGLE BECAUSE 99% OF DEVELOPERS USE IT WRONG

70 minutes of pure firepower from Linus Torvalds himself - the man who wrote both Linux and Git from scratch.

-> The moment you watch it, you realize why "I'll just figure out merge conflicts on the job" is the dumbest sentence in modern software engineering.

He spends the first 10 minutes calling out every other version control system in existence and he's not joking. He literally tells Google engineers using Perforce to find a new tool.

Git isn't a "nice-to-have" anymore -> it's the operating system of every codebase you'll ever touch.

If the man who built it had to explain it to a room full of Google engineers, you don't get a pass either.

Don't forget to bookmark & watch it today.

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

Because CD recorders were so expensive (as a high schooler), I had one of these instead

[倉津ゆえ @YueKuratsu]

Anyone who used this type of CD-R back then was a true veteran. They’d buy the shortest cable to connect the drive, or even custom-make one to minimize jitter. While writing, they’d close all apps, freezing without touching a key or mouse.

If the burn failed, they’d literally see a $10 bill ascending to heaven. 💸💀

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

@andreeliasdev What you should be testing is KMP

Not only is it more portable, but realistically if you were making a game, that's what you'd target

If you really want to get exciting, given that you already have native interfaces having done rust, see what fps the Kotlin/native binary gets

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

@memcculloch People often conflate kindness with niceness

We need more kindness, less niceness

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

Though I can get behind this, maybe we also stop overspending on wars & cut back on our debt

Because yes, the 3% doesn't matter much - but when you're going in the red 3% MORE every year, it does matter

[Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos]

Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

@fivestarmichael Except...

The same people voting in these fools are the people who would need to revolt

There are good candidates out there, like Yang and Kennedy

I don't know if they'd actually change anything, but maybe

But people love the status quo & voting with their team

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

@GAndrewStone @TrisH0x2A Rust precalculates stack sizes for async coroutines

And kotlin suspension does similarly (being GC, it doesn't need to track the coroutine stack size)

So it is solved, you just need to use the right language

[Marcos Boyington 🧢 @iBringBalance]

@graykevinb Hashes can often be cached, especially for immutable structures, and generally should be

But obviously it's still true that simple arrays are faster when n is small