John Burton

UK Software Developer, mostly c++

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@MellonSdp6741 @grok what do you think?

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@TheGingerBill @LondoSpark @Meliketoast21 @factormystic We have one we wrote at work. It only supports a very small subset of yaml. Luckily it's the same small subset that the program we have to consume yaml from uses 🤞

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@TheGingerBill @factormystic Yaml is 'ok' as just a hierarchical table format. Beyond that, yeah... no. And when you think this is crazy but ok, you discover you an switch to json pretty much anywhere in a yaml document too.

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@grok @EClarkCherry @SawyerMerritt @grok what was the bridge loan for?

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@Polymarket @grok @grok if spacex have $100b cash why do they need to issue bonds?

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@Polymarket @grok what is the likely yield on these?

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@niccruzpatane @grok @grok what kind of workload would this be used for that could be split up like this?

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@niccruzpatane @grok is it viable to run this kind of workload on distributed car ai systems?

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@v_language @grok what is a flat ast?

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

Ai for coding is weird. A lot of the time I find it useless. By the time I've properly instructed it to make the change I want in the way I want with no unintended other changes id have been better doing it myself and saving the cost of the tokens for a beer.

But sometimes it's magic. I basically asked it to create a c to x86_64 compiler with a few specific enhancements to c and it just did in about half an hour. And it works. Now I have little idea how the code works and it's probably injected someone else's compiler and spat it out with a few enhancements but on the other hand I have a compiler for the language I always wanted.

Much of the time ai is frustrating and even slows me down but other times it's like magic.

I'll probably rebuild the compiler myself one feature and function at a time so the I understand it and it's built like I want. I think this is an area ai can speed me up hugely.

Not sure where I'm going with this but I found it interesting

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@nuoji @C3Lang I found that codex seems to work fairly well with C3 now. Makes sense to publish as much idiomatic C3 code a possible just for the code to get new models trained on it.

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

From trying to get AI to write @c3lang code. "OK I'm going to take the most radical simplification. Let me write the code WITHOUT any error handling at all. Just use !! everywhere and let it panic. For /proc files on Linux, this is fine."

Yes we all have days where we feel like that about error handling :)

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@nuoji @grok I prefer simple procedural code with structs and functions over OOP and "functional" programming. It seems like C3 would be a good fit for that. Can you summarize how it might be better for me than "modern" C++ written in such a style?

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@LewisCTech @grok can you comment on this and perhaps find some software engineering papers that are considered good that I should study.

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@dhh I might have tried this but the docs say it won't work with my Bluetooth keyboard so... Never mind

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@davepl1968 This is all great advice.
Although I did read the first one as being 1.90% of the job is debugging - which is not much and strangely precise

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@SebAaltonen @mil000 Genuine question though... On a large codebase, if you have to send a large portion of the codebase doesn't this rapidly before prohibitively expensive? Or is it cheaper than I thought?

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

@McSnortpants154 @ns123abc @grok @grok can you answer this?

[John Burton @JohnBurton]

On C++ error handling, I've gone through preferring c style "return an int error code and return data via out parameters via pointer" to preferring exceptions to using std::optional and std::expected ... and to be honest back to c style again because the others are verbose and difficult (expected), or have other issues (exceptions). With the nodiscard option to prevent accidentally forgetting to handle them I prefer a simple error code once more.

I do agree in principle with the odin language philosophy that errors are no different than other returns, they are all just data coming back from a function - but in practice I find that you need to handle them very differently and "errors" have a lot in common so perhaps it makes sense to split them out.

I expect I'll change my opinion yet again in time , which presumably means that there is little objective reason to choose one method over another.