“just how many people are fucking terrible at their jobs”.

Apparently so. When I review mathematics software it’s clear that non-mathematicians have no clue what they are doing. Many of them are subtlely broken, they use either trivial algorithms or extremely inefficient implementations of sophisticated algorithms (e.g trial division tends to be the most efficient factorization algorithm because they can’t implement anything else efficiently or correctly).

The only difference I’ve noticed with the rise of LLM coding is that more exotic functions tend to be implemented, completely ignoring it’s applicability. e.g using the Riemann Zeta function to prove primality of an integer, even though this is both very inefficient and floating-point accuracy renders it useless for nearly all 64-bit integers.

bc can handle extended-precision integers, unlike bash which maps them to floats.

These might be of interest to software developers but it’s all just style nothing here actually effects the computation. The problem I encounter with LLMs is that they are incapable of doing anything but rehearsing the same algorithms you get off of blogs. I can’t even successfully force them to implement a novel algorithm they will simply deny that it is valid and revert back to citing their training data.

I don’t see LLMs actually furthering the field in any real way ( even if by accident, since they can’t actually perform deductive reasoning).

I think that there are certain attitudes that mainly occur to people outside the domain. Like how people endlessly shit on open-source projects, but few of those people are ever actually at the wheel of one.

Not hentai but “Anubis”, the webscraper deterrent has an anime girl and it looks quite unprofessional, and what’s worse is something like balancing Anubis’ scales would be a much better image than a girl with a magnifying glass.

It’s very hard to get a good look at which arguments are good or not without having the experience to evaluate them.

Here’s my view on Rust vs C or C++. Rust is a stricter language which makes it easier to code with low run-time errors, which is great for writing large scale projects. Now the problem with this is that you can write C++ to also be strict but it’s a lot more verbose than the standard approach, so most developers don’t. This causes disagreement among Rustaceans and C/C++'ers. The C++'ers are correct that you can replicate anything in Rust in C++. A correct program is a correct program regardless of the language it’s written in. Rustaceans also oversell when it comes to program correctness, tons of Rust programs have errors; Rust can help minimize errors but it’s not a silver bullet. Rewriting-in-Rust for an already good program is a fools errand; the outcome will probably be a worse program. However Rustaceans are correct in pointing out that the C++ written programs tend to have more errors, it’s just not the rule they pretend it is.

In summary, Rust is a great language but Rustaceans oversell it. Many of it’s apparent advantages can be mitigated by good development practice. It’s just that good practices are difficult and uncommon.

(Note that there are also 3-rd party tools like static analysers, which can help developers detect errors. So again Rust is better out of the box, but ultimately you can get the same outcome with some work).

If what the original commenter said is true about simply replacing keywords with another string, then it’s questionable if they are actually learning anything about language design or demonstrating skill.

“Take them at their word”

Who? Has there been a survey of contributors?

“Genuinely think that coreutils would be better if it were written in Rust”

I feel like the skill-level of the contributors is high enough that they would not be so naive.

Programs in different languages can compile to the same machine code. Any advantage would be in language constructs. But if you already have an existing C implementation what advantage do you do from a Rust implementation?

I personally write in 3 languages: Rust, C++, and Fortran ( or rarely SPARK). I don’t port my code across languages, because there is no advantage. If I wanted it better, I would work on my existing codebase.

Porting really only helps if the original language was hindering development, deployment or runtime. These arguments don’t really hold with C, a fast, low-dependency language that is more widely used than Rust.

Being written in Rust has mixed effects. Rust is still less mainstream than C, so fewer people can contribute. However, it does attract more interest because it’s different.

However, the reasons why you create/contribute to new-but-similar projects is to add functionality that the original project doesn’t have. By nature a coreutils replacement has to behave like coreutils or else it will break many configurations. This severely limits the functionality you can provide. So why are people (and Canonical) contributing so much labor to something that still doesn’t function as intended?

I say it’s the licensing. I say this as someone who regularly gets requests to change the licensing of my software (more than any feature request). I think licensing is a big deal, and most software devs recognize that.

You are fixating on the incorrect premise. I noted that it was started a decade ago as a analogy for how labor intensive the project is. A project that by design has to mirror the behaviour of coreutils.So why are people investing the time in this? What makes it worthwhile? It’s the permissive license. If uutils used GPL individuals would instead try to contribute to the much more utilised coreutils, where their contributions would be guaranteed to have an impact.

Edit: Some of the earlier issues date from 2013, so it has been a decade, although it probably was very obscure at the time.

I’m fairly certain that people who advocate for teaching ethics, only do it under the assumption that people are being taught to do what the proponent wants. In reality learning ethics is just learning different theories of ethics.

But the permissive license is why it gained traction, otherwise who would spend so much resources on something that a decade later only accomplishes 85 percent of what coreutils does?

The only code generation assistance I use is in the form of compilers. For fun I tried to use the free version of Chatgpt to replicate an algorithm I recently designed and after about half-hr I could only get it to produce the same trivial algorithms you find on blog posts even with feeding it much more sophisticated approaches.

Removed by mod

I write quite a bit of Rust, and I’m still at a loss.

It’s easier to write a low-error program in Rust. But low-error program in any compiled language is going to be essentially identical.

No, I pointing out that the filters don’t actually work.

Transphobic and racist behaviour isn’t going to disappear just because you boycott it.

The consequences of bigotry aren’t reading mean tweets, it’s going to a job interview and having the prospective employer think “eww… I don’t like this candidate”. Boycotting is not going to fix that, because your purity test can’t even detect it.

I don’t purity test people because the reality is that most/all people have some harmful notions, it’s not productive or good for anyone to ostracize them so long as we can promote the good they do, and mitigate the harm.

Let’s not confuse “entitled” with “justified”. Of course you are legally entitled to boycott whatever you want, nobody seems to question that. The issue is whether or not you can be legitimately criticism for it.

Suppose that you had 20 glasses, you tested 4 of them and found that 2 were “too acidic”. Are you then justified in drinking the other 18 glasses?

The reality is that you have probably personally supported people who are far more egregious than the subjects here. Abusers, murderers, rapists, etc… Is your support of them an endorsement of their actions? Is your/societies providing medical care to these people an endorsement of their actions?

No. We can parse between what actions we endorse and what actions we don’t, because we are rational beings. Or rather some of us are.

Left-wing podcasts churn huge amounts of money, Chapo Trapo House, Cool Zone Media etc… Individuals like Ibrahim X Kendi and the BLM project grafted away millions of dollars to buy mansions and luxury office space with do-nothing employees.

Left-wing has no issue making money. Rubes come in all political affiliations.

What advantages come with rust? For a compiled program, I don’t see what benefits you get unless you are editing the source code.

Time and space complexity can become very prevalent, you can quite literally see it from the runtimes. Unlike OOP, which in many cases (Java excluded), you can get away without ever writing it.