Corbin
@Corbin@programming.dev
- Comment on What if we added a social component like "Stories" to this calculator app? 9 months ago:
- Comment on What if we added a social component like "Stories" to this calculator app? 9 months ago:
Free Software is literally communist.
- Comment on The Perfect Solution 9 months ago:
I’ll be informal to boost your intuition. You know how a parser can reject invalid inputs? Parsers can be generated from grammars, so we can think of the grammars themselves as rejecting invalid inputs too. When we use a grammar for generation, every generated output will be a valid input when parsed, because the grammar can’t build any invalid sentences (by definition!)
For example, suppose we want to generate a JSON object. The grammar for JSON objects starts with an opening curly brace “{”. This means that every parser which accepts JSON objects (and rejects everything else) must start by accepting “{”. So, our generator must start by emitting a “{” as well. Since our language-modeling generators work over probability distributions, this can be accomplished by setting the probability of every token which doesn’t start with “{” to zero.
- Comment on The Perfect Solution 9 months ago:
Don’t use OpenAI’s outdated tools. Also, don’t rely on prompt engineering to force the output to conform. Instead, use a local LLM and something like jsonformer or parserllm which can provably output well-formed/parseable text.
- Comment on Functional Programming vs. Object Oriented Programming 9 months ago:
Object-oriented design is about message-passing; messages are more important than objects. Classes are completely irrelevant – there’s an entire branch of object-oriented language design without classes!
- Comment on Instance admin updates + Blahaj 10 months ago:
The conversation was in English, though. I’m sympathetic to your argument – if we all spoke Lojban, as we ought to, then pronouns would be computable from display names and nouns would be non-gendered; however, when speaking English, please be aware of the centuries of colonialism baked into the linguistics.
- Comment on What programming languages aren't too criticized here? 1 year ago:
As a society and as individual computer scientists, none of us actually know what a computer is or how to use them. All programming languages are guesses, mere attempts to encode our natural-language reasoning and philosophy in the purely syntactic and formal fashion required by computers. Don’t let yourself become biased in favor of specific languages; instead, understand that all languages are bad in different ways.
- Comment on Simple trick 1 year ago:
Most consumer-grade NICs have a default MAC address which is retrievable with device drivers, but delegate (Ethernet) packet assembly to the OS. If the OS asks the NIC to emit a packet, then the NIC often receives the packet as a blob, DMA’d from main memory, and emits the bytes as octets. Other NICs do manage packet assembly, but allow overwriting the default MAC address. By the time I was learning Linux, we had GNU MAC Changer available in userland with the
macchangercommand, and many distros have configuration for randomizing or hardcoding MAC addresses upon boot.I want to say that this is all because olden corporate network management policies could require a technician to replace a NIC without changing the MAC address, but more likely it is because framing and packet assembly was not traditionally handed to a second controller, and was instead bit-banged or MMIO’d by the CPU.
- Comment on What's your favorite CICD tool? 1 year ago:
In the Nix ecosystem, I appreciate Cachix quite a bit. It’s much easier than running a Hydra.