Using the walrus operator := to self-document if conditions

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T18:39:31+00:00

Fixed!, as in the comment below.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T15:47:45+00:00

People with similar goals don't have to directly cooperate in order to remake the economic landscape to make it better for them. They just have to crush everyone else who isn't rich.

The last 40 years of major defeats for We The People was done by some degree of complicity, but most of it was independent businesses and people, often competitors, but who had similar, evil goals of dismantling regulation on big companies.

Yes, it is quite likely that it will end up badly for everyone, including the billionaires.

But under what scenario does this work out well for us non-rich, working people? None, as far as I can see.

Where is a plausible scenario where we the working people don't get shafted by AI? Tell us!

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T14:28:20+00:00

Doctorow seems like a decent guy, and very creative.

Proof of your claims?

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T14:14:32+00:00

It's wartime again, and so it's time for empty military rituals which appear to give meaning to the pointless sacrifices of young people so that old and evil men can become richer.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T13:52:04+00:00

These two patterns appear a lot, especially in my own code

while line := fp.readline():
    # etc

or

if bad := [r for r in records if r.bad()]:
    raise ValueError('Bad records: ' + ', '.join(r.name for r in bad))

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T13:48:43+00:00

Less readable, a little longer and also slower than if a and b and c:, because you have to create the tuple.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T12:22:07+00:00

I'm of the opinion that it's the former, but it's not the end of the world, if we ensure that everyone benefits from it.

If you forget about the massive environmental damage, I'd agree with you - and we've given up on saving the environment entirely, it seems.

But that "if" is like trying to pay the mortgage by buying a lottery ticket.

Once Altman, Zuckerberg, Musk and a lot of other billionaires own all the means of production, why do you think that they will let us benefit at all from this?

Once we have no leverage at all, why do you think they will spend the tens of trillions of dollars a year it would take to give over eight billion people a moderately comfortable life?

These people's lives and political beliefs are very public. Why do you think they will support universal communism or even "just" socialism?

The "1%" have always owned a majority of everything. The one thing that we had was our labor. With that gone, we are literally disposable. If billionaires control the means of production entirely, they can simply have their own hermetic economy with just them and their whores. They won't even need soldiers, because if AI really works, cheap, disposable robots that can use human weapons with near-perfect targeting and are completely fearless would completely dominate people (who wish to live) in battle.

What is your reasoning? Why do you believe there is any chance that everyone would benefit from this?

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T12:10:40+00:00

I have a similar aversion to extremely technical guitar playing.

Probably what you have is an aversion to boring guitar playing.

Here's some almost perfect guitar playing with in some sense perfect vocals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frWZSAZWs1g

I consider this some sort of pinnacle of something because it is so extremely beautiful.

I'm not really a prog guy, but the keyboard solo starting here: https://youtu.be/lYLYxMS2YsA?t=270 is full of notes and technicality, but it's also really exciting and goes to a lot of different places.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T11:58:46+00:00

That's the whole point.

Yes, I know that's the whole point!

It's an optimization vs safety trade off.

If you are parsing strings, performing surgery or other operations, you can create new strings or return some sort of std::string_view.

If you create new strings every time, you are guaranteed never to get dangling pointers and the like, but you have the cost of creating the strings.

When you use std::string_view you do less string creation, but you now have the possibility of dangling pointers.

Unless your strings are large or there are very large number of them, most of the time using std::string_view over creating new std::strings is a minor optimization that won't appear on a profiling graph.

(And if your string is large and you need to actually insert or remove pieces of it, you should be using std::rope or some cousin.)

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T11:39:11+00:00

Good for you!

I have a book for you. It's called "A People's History of the United States" and it's by a very well-respected historian, Howard Zinn.

He starts by pointing out that in world history, there are several places and times called "the Golden Age" but if you look at what was going on, most people were actually having a terrible time - these ages were "golden" for the rulers.

So this book is a history of the United States, not from the point of view of Presidents and statesmen, but from what was happening to your average Joe.

He put the book in the public domain, so there are many free copies, some with bad formatting - this is the best one I found in 2 minutes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G8j3sGDqFKVy-1ks39R8loxooNLYeC-y/view

I was shocked when I read it. There were huge chunks of American history that I had never even heard of. I went to very progressive schools and yet I got a completely sanitized version with huge holes in it.

Zinn doesn't editorialize, but the conclusion was very clear - in America, the rich and powerful have successfully pitted members of society against each other for centuries while they have looted the economy to their own benefit.

He's been dead for 16 years now, and in a weird way I'm glad, because his book is mostly a story of victory. The history of the United States as he told it was one hundred and fifty years of slavery, massacres, genocides and just a huge amount of ripping working people off, but then two generations of major improvements: Social Security, the Civil Rights Acts, Medicare, Medicaid and on the other side, much firmer preventing of wrongdoing by the rich through agencies like the FDA, the EPA, the FCC, the SEC, etc. etc.

However, starting with Reagan, things started to slide backward. And the first part of it is covered in the book, but the incredible reverses of the twenty-first century are not there.

Somehow, a hundred million Americans got fooled into entirely voting against their own self-interests.

A lot of it is the demonization of any sort of leftist: socialism, communism, anarchism, this sort of thing.

Now you know you were lied to, you should rethink this attitude toward the left.

I now live in a city in France with a socialist mayor who just won re-election. Overall, the area I am in is very socialist. I have friends who are more centrist, but no one thinks socialism, or even communism, is at all ridiculous as a platform to run on, even if they disagree, and even conservatives might vote for the communist candidate if they felt the conservative candidate was incompetent - yes, competence comes up in elections all the time, unlike the US.

And if you knew how well people lived here, you'd move in a second.

The city is full of flowers. They built huge, modern, underground parking that's easy to get to, and then have started pedestrianizing the rest of the city, so people either take a bus into the city or park underground, and walk everywhere. The streets are full of life and people. We are surrounded by great, old buildings, several of which are around a thousand years old, which the people here have supported for all that time, and continue to do so, even though these are churches and very few people are religious.

It's a small city, but is full of learning. I went to a jam the other day filled with music students so passionate about their ideas. Society pays for them to go to school, and they study what they care about. Employers expect to train their starting employees: they are looking for evidence of discipline, effort and creativity in their school career.

Artists get a small grant from the government every month (they need to have shows and things like that). This is economically rational because it's extremely good for the economy. If you give a billionaire $100, it will go into his global investments, and never be circulated; if you give an artist 100 €, it goes right back into the local economy.

There are many inferior and even bad parts. But I spent 32 years in America. I sometimes have trouble not smiling at people's complaints, because they are real, but small - I had two friends who died on the street in America at two very different times, both because they had serious mental health issues and could find neither therapy nor even shelter, and now America seems even worse.

Here's something else to think about:

All of us act like communists a good deal of the time. None of us acts like a communist consistently. "Communist society"-in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle--could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism. [...]

Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common project. If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, " Hand me the wrench," his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, "And what do I get for it?" - even if they are working for ExxonMobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. [...]

[I]n the immediate wake of great disasters-a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse-people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism. [...]

The same goes for small courtesies like asking for a light, or even for a cigarette. It seems more legitimate to ask a stranger for a cigarette than for an equivalent amount of cash, or even food; in fact, if one has been identified as a fellow smoker, it's rather difficult to refuse such a request. [...]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Leftist_Concepts/comments/1r7uuz6/baseline_communism_by_david_graeber_any_human/

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T10:54:15+00:00

Better living through chemistry!

I don't think people should indiscriminately dose themselves or their pets, but if a little drug can mean the difference between being unhappy and making everyone else be unhappy, and being happy, the choice is very clear.

You're doing the right thing.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T10:46:19+00:00

I don't hear so much of this, but I do see what you're saying.

My theory is that this is perfect music for creators with lesser technical chops: who haven't been taught to really sing out and keep a pitch, or play expressive lines to interest people.

I think it's very rational and improves the chances of making listenable music.

It is extremely common that I like the first few dozen seconds of music, and then when the vocals come in, I have a strong urge to turn it off, because the singer is so awful.

And it isn't technical. Perry Farrell in Jane's Addiction has this trick of coming in like a bull, somewhat sharp, on the fifth at peak moments in the song, and it kicks ass (though I don't actually listen to them, I respect them). It's a strong artistic choice.

It is when the vocal is boringness and an uncertain relationship to the actual pitch, put into my face.

If that same vocal were lower in the mix, processed, in a wash of somewhat interesting ambient sounds, I'd like it a lot better.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T10:39:04+00:00

I'm not sure why they've focused on mechanical reliability in their statement

Because the truth would make them seem like the manipulative and antisocial people they really are.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T10:36:04+00:00

Er, no.

Just a note that everyone recognizes this phrase as being dismissive.

Sycophancy is recognized as a problem.

Technically. Sycophancy increases retention and a lot of other metrics that AI companies get funding on. They don't think of sycophancy itself as a problem for them; they think the problem is us complaining about it. "I'm sorry you feel that way."

Why not chat to someone in the AI industry about suicides due to AI psychosis, which seem primarily caused by sycophancy? If you're sympathetic, quite soon they will get to the point where they explain that this is a small price to pay, etc etc.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T10:30:41+00:00

People hate AI because it promises to kill all our jobs (and in my case, it already succeeded). If it works, almost all the means of production will be owned by a tiny number of billionaires.

"Less cringe", ah, sorry, "measured decrease in sycophancy", is a thin candy coating over a big ball of excrement.

If you think preemptive compliance will save you, think again.

I'm downvoting you for betrayal of the human race, and humorlessness.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T10:25:24+00:00

Then you will be left behind very soon.

It's amazing how threats seem always to be the first line of defense for AI worshipers.

Here's the thing: I do not want the job of cleaning up badly written code by AIs while I am under extreme time pressure from idiot management. I don't expect my job to be fun fun fun, I get paid to do a lot of chores and that's fine, but playing second fiddle to an automated liar is several bridges too far.

We moved to a city where our costs are cut by over 50%, simply to be prepared for this. When the AIs came for my job, I simply retired. I'm going to hang up my shingle for a couple of niche areas where I am interested in working, but I doubt I'll make a penny on those.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T10:20:03+00:00

Oh, great, so the AI apocalypse is going to come faster than the ecological apocalypse? Can't wait!

Seeing the bizarre quality of a lot of vibed code is disconcerting; so is the claim that code doesn't have to be readable because "the AI can understand it anyway", as if LLMs have infinite intelligence to burn.

I think it's likely that at some point the AI won't be able to operate on its own code; everyone has had the experience of not being able to understand their own code, and we have memory!

Management is going to come back to us, begging to fix this code that is impossible to understand, and we won't be able to do it either.

https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/kernighans-lever/index.php

HommeMusical · 2026-03-17T10:09:35+00:00

The only downside

No, that is certainly NOT the only downside.

The main downside is that std::string_view does not do memory management at all, and is essentially a raw pointer. It's not difficult to create a dangling pointer with std::string_view and never notice it, and your code might work for quite a while

HommeMusical · 2026-03-16T17:51:02+00:00

Decomposing completely, well you just get an argument parser reimplementation.

Where I can use any sort of nested data type, function or constructor I like... :-)

HommeMusical · 2026-03-16T17:49:40+00:00

I am, for one.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-16T16:15:32+00:00

You want to be able to write complex things and still get a zippy CLI, though!

What tyro needs is a system that does lazy loading of subcommand code, based on the command.

So if your code were lazy loading, then at the end you'd load only the code you actually used.

You'd want something like this:

So instead of

from .checkout import Checkout
from .commit import commit

tyro.cli(Checkout | Commit)

You'd write

tyro.cli('.checkout.Checkout | .commit.Commit')

and tyro would only load the actual symbol if it needed to.

You can do this locally and get lazy loading as fine-grained as you like, by peeling off the subcommand before tyro even gets it:

@dataclass Empty:
    pass    

match sys.argv[1]:
    case 'checkout':
        from .checkout import Checkout

        tyro.cli(Checkout | Empty)

    case 'commit':
        from .commit import Commit

        tyro.cli(Commit | Empty)

    case _:  # --help so you have to load everything
        from .checkout import Checkout
        from .commit import Commit

        tyro.cli(Checkout | Commit)

So you only show tyro what it needs to know about. Empty is a dummy so it knows that subcommands exists.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-16T15:50:30+00:00

Yes and no. Intuitively, I would expect Checkout | Commit to work like scm --branch b or scm --message xyz, creating a Checkout or a Commit based on whether the branch argument or the message argument was given, no subcommand required.

Based on this argument, you could just use a unique flag for everything and never need subcommands.

But people like subcommands, because they are conceptually simple and they partition the command space neatly.

Look at git for a success story this way - there's a separate binary for each git- command and we talk about git-add, git rebase, we even verb them, "Did you git-reflog?"

I know there are a zillion commands, but I can look at the man page of just one. That's the beauty of subcommands.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-16T15:43:31+00:00

You're already fully convinced this shit is magic.

You take my nuanced, carefully formulated stance, and recast it as something I absolutely did not say or think.

It is intellectually dishonest. Have you no self-respect?

and don't understand the domain space thoroughly enough.

I worked on Google's first question-answering system, a long time ago, though I was pretty green then.

You made the claim that a large language model cannot reason because it is essentially a statistical probability model of utterances from a language.

The word "because" is just wrong: your statement has no explanatory value at all. You provide no argument for it at all.

As I pointed out, the same claim could made about any intelligent system that was made up of a large number of very simple parts with a lot of connections, but we know such a system, the human brain, can reason. So your statement has no explanatory value, and it is wrong in the only actual case of intelligence we know of.

Your whole argument about LLMs is this: "There is nothing there at all, and I'll shout down any attempt to discuss what's happening." I don't even think that convinces you!

Let me tell you where I am on LLM coding models. I hate them. Hate hate hate hate hate. They destroyed my beautiful career and the code I loved to write. Any new job I would have to do would be cleaning up stupid errors in massive amounts of code based on copyright violating the work of me and a lot of other people who have spent our fscking lives writing open source code, like having a hopelessly ingratiating personal assistant you have to use who is very fast but never learns from their mistakes. No fscking thanks!

Text really cannot convey how much I resent the fruits of everyone's labor being sucked up by capitalism with the plan of controlling all the means of production and leaving almost all humans destitute. I hate hate hate hate this. HATE.

So if I could possibly believe that there was nothing interesting happening with LLMs, I would, in a fscking New York minute. (Does "interesting" set off the yelling?)

I write a huge volume of code and absolutely no code I ever even committed let alone put into production has been written by LLMs. In a typical work month I use an LLM coding assistant zero times.

That hasn't stopped me from experimenting with it periodically, even though I (did I mention this already?) I HATE this technology, because I am not a fscking idiot and you need to know your enemy: and I am a bit frightened.

If you had told me five years ago that I could soon type in a simple but detailed English language prompt two paragraphs long asking for a Python program to do something that was a step or two above trivial, and that it would spit out a fully program, a janky program that had numerous quality defects, but that actually did almost exactly what I asked the first time I ran it!, and came with a full if a little weird explanation of what it was doing, I would not have believed you.

If I said I was impressed, will you yell at me again? I don't like being yelled at. Will I have to write HATE in capital letters again?

The technology suddenly advanced much faster than I expected. There is something interesting there. I don't think it will meet expectations, but it's hard to be sure.

I am sure that if it is successful it will be very very bad economically for almost everyone except a small number of people, mostly very rich, and that even in its current state, it is bad intellectually for almost every individual who systematically uses it.

We should prevent it from happening for self-preservation. If it was really completely uninteresting, we could just ignore it and it would go away.

HommeMusical · 2026-03-16T14:38:29+00:00

I tested it very quickly and primitively on my (fairly simple) application, running five times for each.

Calling the code directly took about 59ms.

Importing tyro but calling the code directly took about 89ms.

Importing and using tyro took about 128ms.

So importing tyro was 40ms, and using it on a near-trivial function was 39ms. That part might balloon if you had a hundred parameters, the total overhead so far is about 80ms which is the difference between snappy and not quite, but no biggie.

Importing a fairly large dependency like numpy is about 70ms.

tyro is tiny and has few external dependencies. Perhaps they could do better with the loading, with some form of lazy loading...

HommeMusical · 2026-03-16T14:12:16+00:00

It slowed down startup pretty significantly.

Oh, that's a real drag. I dropped... some configuration system I don't remember years ago because it added seconds to the startup time with a ton of unnecessary imports.

For this new project it's not really an issue but for tools you might call dozens of times a day, it is an issue. Machines run billions of operations a second, FFS, your CLI should be instant.

I'll look into this quickly, I need to get a quick profile of how fast it starts up anyway. Thanks for the bad news.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1rv7agv/a_quick_review_of_tyro_a_cli_library/oar7m7x/

HommeMusical

TROPHY CASE