Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 03, 2025

• Ruben Schade ☛ I’m so tired of thinking about genAI

  genAI is the next chapter in this calamitous cavalcade of computerised crapulance. This technology, whatever perceived or incidental benefit it has, slops out such enormous and uncaptured externalities that it affects all of us. The slave labour in Africa used to classify data. Our servers creaking under the load of their indiscriminate scrapers, to say nothing of our costs. Open source projects—the ones that deliver so much of the code necessary to make them work—being washed of their licences and clogged with spam. Creative outlets being forced to close under mountains of spam and genAI slop. I waste so much of my job now dealing with automated abuse alerts it beggars belief. I could link to examples of each of these, but I’m tired, and I’m sure you’ve read the same stories.

• Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Tagged vs Untagged Unions (in Scala)

  What’s the difference between Option[A] and A | Null? How about between Either[A, B] and A | B?

  Scala has had the Option data-type for dealing with null values: [...]

• Lawrence Tratt ☛ The Fifth Kind of Optimisation

  In the same way that there are 10 “fifth Beatles”, I could have added many other kinds of optimisation, but I wanted to focus on what my experience has shown me to be the main contenders. In particular, I got a bit of pushback for “accept a less precise solution” but I think that the last 18 months of LLM advances have conclusively shown how many situations there are where this kind of optimisation is applicable.

  However, none of this excuses the fact that I missed off a technique that, even when I wrote that post, I use frequently: [...]

• Hackaday ☛ One Book To Boot Them All

  Somewhere in the universe, there’s a place that lists every x86 operating system from scratch. Not just some bootloaders, or just a kernel stub, but documentation to build a fully functional, interrupt-handling, multitasking-capable OS. [Erik Helin and Adam Renberg] did just that by documenting every step in The Little Book About OS Development.

• Hackaday ☛ Programmer’s Macro Pad Bangs Out Whole Functions

  Macro pads are handy for opening up your favorite programs or executing commonly used keyboard shortcuts. But why stop there?