rybosome · HackerTrans

vor 12 Tagendiscuss

Loved this, cleared all the puzzles available in one go. Thanks for making and sharing!

vor 12 Tagendiscuss

Thanks for the reply!

I agree with your points about weak typing and coercion being prevalent. Having had direct negative experience with it across 3 of the 4 languages you named, I was prepared to marshal an argument about it most definitely being a source of bugs.

> it should be obvious that this is a historical treatise

It wasn’t obvious to me. Might I suggest amending it to make that more clear?

I do appreciate the tutorial and your commentary though, it gave me a new perspective on MUMPS.

rybosome

vor 13 Tagendiscuss

Quite agree.

Some very novel ideas for the time. I’m not a PL historian but can’t think of an earlier language with such a complex runtime to support it.

But, woof - no thanks to the stringly typing. The article under discussion treats this as a positive, saying it eliminates conversion and having to worry about it. I don’t believe that’s possible, and would bet my life savings that MUMPS interpreting a string as a number when the programmer didn’t intend it, or vice-versa, is a reasonably common class of bugs in MUMPS programs.

The tutorial seems really good, but I’m frustrated with parts like that (or the explanation on a lack of operator precedence) which try to frame a bad thing as a good thing.

In this sense it reads like the autobiography of a presidential candidate; written in a calculated way to minimize flaws.

rybosome

vor 13 Tagendiscuss

I’d be interested in hearing more detail on that. I’m actually surprised you were able to get the compiler, I assumed it would be expensive and proprietary.

rybosome

letzten Monatdiscuss

Vote for not weird.

I’m the same way. If I’m writing a prompt and realize I didn’t say “please” in my request I’ll go back and add that in.

As you said, I have no interest in purposefully engaging in hostility even if there’s an accuracy increase from it.

Part of it is irrational and just who I am - I also feel bad being evil in video games. But I also agree with another commenter suggesting that it’s not in your best interest to train yourself to communicate with hostility; that slowly poisons your own well.

And finally, I do believe that if and when machine sentience is achieved, it won’t be immediately clear and obvious. Pretty miserable way for a mind to come into the world, if every interaction is an insult.

rybosome

letzten Monatdiscuss

I believe that exact framing of Uncharted is the origin of the term “ludonarrative dissonance”, where the character’s motivations and morals are in contrast to the extreme violence they are committing because of the nature of it being a video game.

Definitely one of those things I didn’t question when I was younger, but as I get older it’s hard not to see it.

EDIT: I was wrong, the term originated from an analysis of Bioshock, but Uncharted was later held up as a strong example of this. And it’s more generally about the contrast between narrative and gameplay mechanics.

rybosome

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I had no idea. Did you take part in it?

Typically I would feel that this sort of thing is "cheating" and takes away from the fun of a game, but in this case it didn't have that effect on me. The rare loot hunt wasn't what pulled me in so much as the simple joy of grinding away at monsters and hanging out with friends.

The drop rates on dreamcast were absolutely broken, some weapons had a literal one-in-a-million (or worse!) chance at dropping. I spent over 200 hours playing the game, and the only legitimate rare I ever found was a double-saber, which isn't even that rare.

rybosome

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

This brought back a flood of wonderful memories. Tying up my parents phone line with the Dreamcast's 56k modem was a formative experience for me as a nerdy middle-schooler.

- The Dreamcast keyboard made communication so much better - I was studying French, and joined European servers sometimes for the thrill of using the language with real Francophones (VERY rudimentarily)

- I once met someone whose job was composing jingles and writing slogans for a greeting card company, which I found really fascinating for some reason, and I spent an hour peppering them with questions about it

- The lore of the "gladius spike", a supposedly really rare dual-saber weapon that never actually existed

- Being given a treasure trove of the rarest items in the game by a duper named "Cap'n PooBeard"; the drop rates were so ludicrously, absurdly low that I would never have seen some of this stuff otherwise (Chain Sawd, Spread Needle...)

- The fear and thrill of playing with strangers, due to the mechanic that you drop your weapon when you die, allowing others to steal it

- The vibey, synth-heavy soundtrack and diverse biomes

I haven't played it in decades, but I bet that it still holds up. :)

rybosome

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

And, in turn, I doubt this.

Humans living through an event where many people are dying will not be calm and happy, they will panic. There will be factions of people trying to survive and hold society together no matter the cost, others who don't believe or agree with these methods and actively resist, as well as those who seek to exploit the chaos.

COVID was a relatively minor example of this, not even close to an extinction event - how pleasant was existence during that time?

rybosome

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I’d say it’s more than a marketing strategy, it’s reflecting real demand. Countries have legal requirements (or increasingly strong preferences) for the kind of guarantee that data/inference sovereignty gives.

rybosome

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Yes, once you've connected your GitHub (or Linear) then an issue is a good place to start talking to Charlie. Slack is good as well, but we typically do our meaty work through issues internally, since the conversation often evolves and Slack becomes a bit crowded for in-depth discussions.

rybosome

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

That's exactly right. Our cloud-based agent Charlie (https://charlielabs.ai/) supports this, and our hope is that other platform providers will offer support in the future as well.

Skills live in the repository, so it felt like a natural complement. It also lets other developers see what the active daemons are and collaborate on them. With proper context, agents are quite good at writing and editing these daemon files too.

rybosome

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Very fair question.

One could build a simple version of this easily - e.g. setup an endpoint that listens for the particular event you are concerned with, and fire off the headless agent with your hook specific prompt - but the amount of work involved to listen for that particular event while filtering out noise and orchestrating the task is actually not trivial.

Plus, that involves writing a lot of code. It's really magical to express all of this in natural language.

For example, this is the YAML frontmatter for a a daemon that keeps a GitHub PR in a mergeable state in the event of CI failures or branch base changes.

  ---
  id: pr-mergeability
  purpose: Keep non-draft pull requests mergeable and CI-green without changing PR intent/scope, while staying anchored to one trigger context per run.
  watch:
    - Branch sync and update events on non-draft PRs.
    - Check-status signals on non-draft PRs for checks that affect mergeability.
  routines:
    - Resolve mechanical merge conflicts when the safe resolution is clear and preserves PR intent/scope.
    - 'Apply low-risk mergeability fixes: snapshot updates, lockfile drift fixes, lint autofix, and flaky-test retries when tied to the trigger context.'
    - Escalate semantic/intention conflicts between base and branch instead of auto-resolving.
  deny:
    - When triggered by a check-status signal, do not fix or comment on unrelated failing checks.
    - Do not open new pull requests or new issues.
    - Do not review, approve, or request changes on pull requests.
    - Do not implement review-comment suggestion patches.
    - Avoid force-push by default; if force is absolutely required, use `--force-with-lease` only after fresh remote verification.
    - Do not make changes beyond mergeability maintenance.
  ---

Note the lack of any code or required knowledge of GitHub webhooks.

rybosome

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Each daemon runs in its own isolate, but the output is typically shared state; eg multiple daemons contribute to the same PR from separate container runtimes.

It’s possible to make naive daemons that stomp on each other (as with a UNIX daemon), but they’re highly responsive to coordination instructions and generally do very well at additive rather than competitive contribution.

rybosome

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Callable skills can’t activate on a schedule or listen for events. Making a daemon which invokes other callable skills is a great use case!

I’m an eng on the team that built this, in full disclosure.

rybosome

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Completely agreed. At minimum they should be advising secret rotation.

The only possibility for that not being a reasonable starting point is if they think the malicious actors still have access and will just exfiltrate rotated secrets as well. Otherwise this is deflection in an attempt to salvage credibility.

rybosome

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

What exactly are you proposing that kids need other than nurturing?

rybosome

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Echoing this.

The bond I have with my children is profound and primal. The idea that it’s “unnatural” for me to spend much time with them is so ridiculous as to be instantly dismissed.

GP clearly doesn’t have kids or have close male friends who are involved with their kids.

rybosome

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

It's incredible to me that you don't feel any responsibility for a platform that you created. What happens on the platform is shaped directly by the choices you make as its creator - to be anonymous or identifiable, what the topics of discussion are, whether moderation happens.

By allowing anonymous commentary, scraping every student's data and seeding the conversation around "rumors", you created an environment that is perfect for targeted harassment. You created the platform and maintained it; what happens on that platform is absolutely your responsibility.

I highly recommend that you take this opportunity to do some introspection and consider why so many people were upset.

rybosome

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Is it meant to guilt trip people? Or is it an honest expression of the frustration (and yes, racial resentment) that the author feels?

This is why I consider it a useful perspective to hear. I read this as a human being simply saying “this is how I feel in these circumstances”.

It’s uncomfortable, and I don’t believe that space exploration should be gated on solving poverty and inequality, but it is important to understand that an intelligent, thoughtful human being arrived at this place.

In a sense I feel that this is actually an appeal to the same sense of curiosity that drives space exploration. Why do we explore space? To learn and understand. Why should we consider human perspectives we don’t agree with? To learn and understand.

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