Seen from the other side of the Atlantic, I've regularly felt that the US is rather prone to hero worship, see e.g. the passion dedicated to presidential candidates, former presidents, billionaires, but also how the main characters of pretty much all American biopics I recall can't ever be wrong.

If my observation is correct, I guess what we're witnessing with Musk could be a case of hero worship – and in any narrative in which Musk is a hero, he's of course right.

And would have lasted 3 minutes.

Speaking of - I remember my first digital camera (Fujitsu 1Mb resolution using SmartMedia)… it used so much power that you could take 20-30 photos and then needed to replace all 4 batteries lol

An LLM in a .com file? Haha made my day

SLM

All the 'Small' language models and the 'TinyML' scene in general tend to bottom out at a million parameters, hence I though 'micro' is more apt at ~150k params.

When the server goes up in smoke, you won’t be able to restore from your track record.

A simple ‘scp remote local’ once a month will save you from years of “damn… if only I had backed up”

Ah. I see below you’re using rsync. Phew!

First up, make sure that the Big Ass Textfile is stored in Git (you don’t want your life’s TODO list suddenly vanish).

Now that it’s in Git, feel free to delete each DONE task.

And finally, have a cron job that on the hour does something like ‘git diff > message.txt; git commit -F message.txt’

<— this way, you have your day’s TADA list AND your list in now searchable with dates via ‘git log’

(This was my TODO list for years until I declared TODO bankruptcy and have gone back to physical cards)

Tbh I’ve found that whenever I’ve hit MAX RAM, failed allocations are not the biggest problem you should be focusing at that time.

Sure, it would be nice to get an error, but usually the biggest threat to your system as a whole is the unapologetic OOM Killer

While this is 100% true for the system allocator, hitting OOM there you're likely hosed, it isn't true if you're using arenas. I work on games and being able to respond to OOM is important as in many places I'm allocating from arenas that it is very possible to exhaust under normal conditions.

Tbh I think `rust-toolchain` solves most of these issues

George Orwell showed us that small languages constrain our thinking.

A small language but with the ability to extend it (like Lisp) is probably the sweet spot, but lol look at what you have actually achieved - your own dialect that you have to reinvent for each project - also which other people have had to reinvent time after time.

Let languages and thought be large, but only used what is needed.

I can take anything I wrote in C since ~1982 or so and throw it at a modern C compiler and it will probably work, I may have to set some flags but that's about it. I won't have to hunt up a compiler from that era, so the codebase remains unchanged, which increases the chances that I'm not going to introduce new bugs (though the old ones will likely remain).

If I try the same with a python project that I wrote less than five years ago I'm very, very lucky if I don't end up with a broken system by the time all of the conflicts are resolved. For a while we had Anaconda which solved all of the pain points but it too seems to suffer from dependency hell now.

George Orwell was a writer of English books, not a programmer and whatever he showed us he definitely did not show us that small programming languages constrain our thinking. That's just a very strange link to make, programming languages are not easily compared with the languages that humans use.

What you could say is that a programming languages' 'expressivity' is a major factor in how efficient it is in taking ideas and having them expressed in a particular language. If you take that to an extreme (APL) you end up with executable line-noise. If you take it to the other extreme you end up some of the worst of Java (widget factory factories). There are a lot of good choices to be found in the middle.

> What you could say is that a programming languages' 'expressivity' is a major factor in how efficient it is in taking ideas and having them expressed in a particular language

You mean:

> small languages constrain our thinking.

:)

Coming from 14 years of Perl, and dabbling in Perl 6, I don’t consider Rust a “large language”… but like Perl (and to an extent C++) I do find people craft their own dialects over time via osmosis.

And I don’t see anything bad about this!

After 11 years of full-time Rust, I have never needed to use Pin once, and it’s only having to do FFI have I even had to reach for unsafe.

Unless you memorise the Rust Reference Manual and constantly level up with each release, you’ll never “know” the whole language… but IMHO this shouldn’t stop you from enjoying your small self-dialect - TMTOWTDI!

>And I don’t see anything bad about this!

As someone else who has learned (and forgotten) a great deal of Perl and C++ arcana: The badness is that it makes it harder for one person to understand another person's code.

> Software licensing is just another form of property rights

That's a pretty substantial assertion and without much to back it up.

The framing of copyright as basically the same as ownership of chattel or land is a propaganda campaign.

I guess who cares about civility if you're the last man standing.

Also - that word: civility. We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here

> We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here

That self-interest has led to cooperation between humans. Humans have evolved to work together, cooperate, form social bonds, and friendships because doing so improves survival and wellbeing over the long run. Civility is part of that toolkit. It is not a denial of self-interest. Civility is part of that self-interest.

Thank you, this is what I was trying to say… there are incentives to cooperate, even though individually we can be selfishly evil.