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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Key detail in the actual memo is that they’re not using just an LLM. “Wallach anticipates proposals that include novel combinations of software analysis, such as static and dynamic analysis, and large language models.”

    They also are clearly aware of scope limitations. They explicitly call out some software, like entire kernels or pointer arithmetic heavy code, as being out of scope. They also seem to not anticipate 100% automation.

    So with context, they seem open to any solutions to “how can we convert legacy C to Rust.” Obviously LLMs and machine learning are attractive avenues of investigation, current models are demonstrably able to write some valid Rust and transliterate some code. I use them, they work more often than not for simpler tasks.

    TL;DR: they want to accelerate converting C to Rust. LLMs and machine learning are some techniques they’re investigating as components.









  • A major caveat I’ve noticed some people misunderstand: it’s corporate CLAs that are problematic. The Apache Foundation also requires contributors sign a CLA, but it’s to provide a legal fail safe and a way to update to say Apache 3.0 if need be one day. Apache’s non profit, open source mission aligns with respecting the rights of contributors and the community. Corporations, on the other hand, not so much.



  • If you want vertical tabs with the ability to organize them in trees I suggest the Sideberry extension. It legitimately makes me nervous that the functionality would ever go away, it improves my productivity so much.

    You can bookmark trees, collapse them, search them, load/unload them manually, I could go on. It makes it easy to organize dozens or hundreds of tabs. I have some trees for emails, news, forums, projects, etc. When I’m done just fold it up: the top tab bar can hide tabs that aren’t in the active tree you’re using, so you can still navigate the tabs normally.





  • Curiosity, back around 2010 before I was a teenager. No clue how I heard about it, but the concept of replacing the entire operating system was fascinating. I figured it must be really good if it was such a well kept secret.

    A few years later, when I started to learn programming, Linux was the obvious winner. The online course taught C in a Linux environment, and I was amazed that the default Ubuntu build at the time had everything built in, whereas a Windows equivalent required visual studio and licensing adventures.

    It really stuck as a daily driver after Windows 7, where a clear trend emerged: Windows got in my way, Linux got out of my way. Simple as.


  • Architecture emulation for current gen games is exceptionally unlikely right now. At a fundamental level, wine/proton doesn’t change the instructions the code describes, rather it translates the input and output. It’s a reimplementation of the same instructions in Windows. For architecture crossing you’d either have to create virtual hardware, which adds tremendous overhead, or recompile the binary. Recompilation is theoretically possible, but for x86_64 to ARM64, for games no less, it’s beyond the realm of mortals. It’s like how some jokes can’t be translated between languages; the structure and vocabulary is just too different.