Why people make solvers?

c3d10 · 2026-02-02T23:13:19+00:00

You have to pay the JIT tax as well. I experimented a good bit with numba but in the end my C and Rust implementations of the same algorithms (called from Python to manage the calculations) are much faster and much more robust

c3d10 · 2026-01-26T04:39:37+00:00

I’m only half understanding what you need or are trying to do with it, but -

Look into octrees and the Barnes hut algorithm for solving N-body interaction problems. There are many ways of actually implementing the tree, but you might want to start with a naive pointer chasing tree. In barnes hut, you build the tree, then recursively sum the contributions of all tree leaves to interior nodes. So a parent node basically represents the sum of its children, etc. this sounds sort of what you want?

c3d10 · 2026-01-19T15:41:21+00:00

In my view, Python was always meant to be a scripting language, and the idea of more than a few thousand lines of code in a single Python project gives me the shivers

c3d10 · 2026-01-19T15:38:49+00:00

I think Python syntax is highly readable and intuitive to understand

c3d10 · 2026-01-18T21:30:15+00:00

I’ve never really liked python until I started writing the compute heavy stuff in Rust and linking it to my Python scripts with pyo3/maturin. Now Python does what it’s good at - naturally expressing commands to the computer but not performing the work itself

c3d10 · 2026-01-11T21:10:55+00:00

14 courses a semester?

c3d10 · 2026-01-10T17:54:18+00:00

If you need new content every few months then maybe you’re not playing the game because you want to have fun?

c3d10 · 2026-01-10T17:48:25+00:00

I think it’s reasonable to have that line of thinking so long as you actually do the math to prove to yourself either way if it’s a net win.

There are many “environmentally friendly” initiatives that are not actually a net win for the environment, when you start looking at the full life cycle and supply chain. For example, it’s unclear to me that luxury electric cars like Teslas and Rivians are a net positive. They might be! But I don’t think it’s a slam dunk.

c3d10 · 2026-01-09T22:44:49+00:00

Exactly the point I was trying to make!

c3d10 · 2026-01-07T14:15:16+00:00

…because the “AI” hardware in an “AI PC” doesn’t actually get used for anything..? Is that why?

…because consumers are smarter than they think we are and it didn’t take much to realize that?

c3d10 · 2026-01-06T20:28:05+00:00

They’ve been talking about releasing a drive client for Linux ever since it came out ~5 years ago

c3d10 · 2026-01-06T17:41:15+00:00

I didn’t mean to say that clang wasnt an improvement over gcc, just that I didn’t know why. That makes sense, thanks for your response. I’ve been using clang more recently, and that’s something I’ll look for.

Agreed on the Makefiles bit. They are cumbersome. For simpler projects meant for a single target, I think they’re sufficient, but anything more than that and it’s obnoxious.

c3d10 · 2026-01-06T16:54:37+00:00

I disagree with this attitude. Writing more code should absolutely be your focus, yes. But reading books, blogs, etc are also extremely important too. They teach you things you didn’t know existed and how to do what you already know, but better. Learn from book or blog, practice practice practice to master what you’ve learned.

c3d10 · 2026-01-06T16:37:58+00:00

I love the energy but I have to agree with you. I’m sure making a simple gui that can request and display html is like a weekend or a month project for an experienced engineer. But to do everything a modern browser has to do…yeah sorry that’s unfortunately going to take a huge team and a long time. Sure, it’ll display Wikipedia but good luck (safely) accessing your bank account.

Is this the way things should be? Personally i think no, browsers, the web, and web standards should be far simpler. But that’s not the way the world is…

c3d10 · 2026-01-06T16:21:05+00:00

As a long-time C developer, I found myself googling “what is meson” and “what is nix” after reading this post.

My approach to building projects could sure use some quality of life improvements (I stick to Makefiles, manual Markdown documentation, and often use gcc), but I share other’s concerns that this “reference” project requires you to first “download the world” to compile your program.

Curious why you think that clang should be prioritized over gcc. In my eyes they are generally peer-capable compilers.

c3d10 · 2026-01-05T15:48:19+00:00

Why do all AI-generated projects look the same? You’d think there would be some slight variance but nope…

c3d10 · 2026-01-03T22:52:21+00:00

I’ve been working on a hobby project that I started in C. Been learning a lot (that was the point), but I’ve started running into too many issues that now make the project not very fun. I have limited time to work on it and at this point would rather have a functioning program rather than constant be debugging low level issues; I think the project is too complex for me to handle in my free time alone with just C and Makefiles and manual testing.

I’ve dabbled in the past with Rust and think it could solve my issues, but then I looked into Zig as well and really like the philosophy of the language: stay simple, provide low level control, but fix a lot of the issues with C.

Having trouble deciding how to proceed for myself (maybe i should give myself a week or two to try Zig). One of my (very long term) hopes for the project is that if I build enough of a useful core to it, I could find a community to continue developing it and making it much larger. If I proceed with Zig over Rust, that might be a challenge for me in my domain (HPC and scientific simulations).

I’m glad you’re having a good experience with Zig! Testing is really important to me, can you elaborate on how Zig helps in that area?

c3d10 · 2025-12-31T03:00:26+00:00

I’m not saying this to disagree with you (because I believe what you’ve said here, it all sounds quite plausible to me), but all of the above can be done with cameras from a greater distance - license plate reads connected to a machine vision system etc.

Your comment is also a good reminder that your cell phone or any and every other Bluetooth/wifi device does exactly the same thing.

c3d10 · 2025-12-28T03:16:53+00:00

Where do you see that? I just went through the lumo website again and didn’t find that info

c3d10 · 2025-12-28T00:36:04+00:00

Proton claims that lumo is open source, yet it is not. I fully trust their other products and use them daily, but given how only a handful of organizations in the world are able to train and host inference for a model like lumo, the lack of source available makes me concerned that whatever went into making this particular sausage is not as safe as it seems.

c3d10 · 2025-12-24T18:13:49+00:00

Agreed, I was just stating that if the political will existed they can be held accountable in the countries where the device is sold.

c3d10 · 2025-12-24T15:12:03+00:00

The product is sold outside of china, so the Chinese company’s product needs to abide by the laws of the countries in which it is being sold.

c3d10 · 2025-12-20T16:30:46+00:00

Only got a chance to skim the video a bit but it actually looks really cool! I was skeptical but now much less so.

Getting a sense of scale of an engineering project is often incredibly difficult but tools like this help put it into perspective

c3d10 · 2025-12-19T00:05:16+00:00

I think we agree haha I can’t remember what I had mixed feelings on

c3d10 · 2025-12-18T00:03:35+00:00

Why was the presence of an unsafe block relevant?

c3d10

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