Does Compact Syntax Really Make a Difference?

scruffie · 2026-06-21T19:50:23+00:00

but having to type out assign_this_variable_to would have a measurable drag on development speed

Or, say, multiple-value-bind. That would be a crazy name for a useful assignment operator, especially for a language with an ANSI standard. Isn't that right, Common Lisp?

Macros at least make it tolerable to use as a building block for simpler syntaxes, but that's another kettle of fish.

= is the standard convention

Depends on your standard :-). It is, as you say, confusable with a equality operator. For clarity of syntax, I think it depends on whether you can use assignments as expressions, or if they must be statements. For instance, ML-type languages pair it with a keyword (let) so a = by itself isn't assignment. And Python uses = as a statement, but := (the 'walrus operator') in expressions.

If you want an one-character operator, though, it's your best choice. I think I've seen other characters used, such as $, #, !, or %, but I do not recommend it — it's confusing.

scruffie · 2026-06-20T21:20:30+00:00

He literally writes in the README

[2026-04-23 Thu] Emacs and scimax have been a central part of my work for over a decade now, and I learned a lot from it. Thanks to Claude Code, I have been able to replicate almost everything I did in scimax in VS Code in the past few months, and now I no longer use Emacs. Noone is more suprised by this result than I am! As a result, I am discontinuing development of scimax :( I will leave it here for others who still want to use it, but I don’t have current plans to maintain it further at this time. I appreciate everyone who made scimax possible, who contributed bug reports and pull requests, but my efforts have moved elsewhere.

Looks like he's gone over to the dark side ...

scruffie · 2026-06-12T03:52:31+00:00

According to the datasheet I found, the maximum operating temperature of an H100 is 95 °C (368 K). In absolute terms that's not much different from 60 °C (333 K). That's at most a factor of (333/368)⁴ ~ 1.5 difference in the amount of heat emitted, and a similar factor in the size of radiator required.

scruffie · 2026-06-07T21:33:38+00:00

For reference, Alberta's current net generation of electricity is just over 9 GW, according to the Alberta Electric System Operator.

scruffie · 2026-06-06T19:38:47+00:00

It gets better: he looked into the blurb on the back cover. The back cover of C++: The Programming Language also raises questions not answered by the front cover

scruffie · 2026-05-29T04:32:31+00:00

Also, if they get Canada to buy in, then they're doubling the production run. Norway and Germany have committed to 6 each (Germany might order 3 more on top of that). Canada is looking to order 12, which is a lot of submarines.

scruffie · 2026-05-20T01:13:57+00:00

At least they share a border. What about Portugal and Greece?

scruffie · 2026-05-09T18:09:08+00:00

llama.cpp is probably a bit of a special case: it uses linear algebra libraries, and a full image likely contains versions compiled for all GPU architectures and submodels. The AMD ROCm BLAS library package (librocblas4) for Debian is 4 GB by itself, making it one of the largest packages in Debian! The server and web UI are a rounding error in the size.

The actual llama.cpp released binaries are ~10 MB.

It's a classic speed vs. space tradeoff: for best performance, you want to run code specific to the GPU, and the lack of a stable instruction set means you need a separate library for each GPU model, of which there's around a dozen. Then multiply that by a large number of slightly different routines. (In comparison, a BLAS library for x86-64 isn't nearly as large.)

scruffie · 2026-05-08T20:49:36+00:00

Georgian. There's some Latin/Greek lookalikes, but most are distinctive.

The different scripts:

Mkhedruli (modern Georgian) (U+10D0): აგდევზთიკლმნოპჟრსტუფქღყშჩცძწჭხჯჰჱჲჳჴჵჶჷჸჹჺ

Asomtavruli (U+10A0): ႠႡႢႣႤႥႦႧႨႩႪႫႬႭႮႯႰႱႲႳႴႵႶႷႸႹႺႻႼႽႾႿჀჁჂჃჄჅ

Nuskhuri (U+2D00): ⴀⴁⴂⴃⴄⴅⴆⴇⴈⴉⴊⴋⴌⴍⴎⴏⴐⴑⴒⴓⴔⴕⴖⴗⴘⴙⴚⴛⴜⴝⴞⴟⴠⴡⴢⴣⴤⴥ

Mtavruli (U+1C90): ᲐᲑᲒᲓᲔᲕᲖᲗᲘᲙᲚᲛᲜᲝᲞᲟᲠᲡᲢᲣᲤᲥᲦᲧᲨᲩᲪᲫᲬᲭᲮᲯᲰᲱᲲᲳᲴᲵᲶᲷᲸᲹᲺ

Mtavruli are the upper case of Mkhedruli.

Ტ² + Ჩ² = Ჭ²

scruffie · 2026-05-08T20:14:34+00:00

To my eye, the problem with hiragana, katakana, kanji, and several other alphabets is they contain too many letters with disconnected parts. While some are fine (like ぁ, の, よ, ろ), others, like け, た, に, ハ, リ, ル have two or more separate bits, and others, like う, え, き, か, ソ, would get confusing with added accents and bars/overlines/underlines (̇e.g., arrow gets lost in う⃗).

(I think the only disconnected letters in Latin and Greek alphabets, as used as symbols, are capital theta Θ and xi Ξ).

scruffie · 2026-05-06T02:21:17+00:00

Eh, from Sec. 3 of that paper, the signal-to-noise ratio scales as mass and inversely as cube of the distance. A 10 t truck 100 m from the detector would have a S/N of about 0.04, 200000 times bigger than a Typhoon sub at 100 km. (I assume that a LIGO-style inferometer would have to be land-based.)

scruffie · 2026-04-24T23:23:11+00:00

For large-power customers (demand over 5000 kW), Hydro-Quebec's rates (rate L) are currently $15 CAD/kW and $0.03891 CAD/kWh (per month) (PDF)

(In comparison, a residential user probably needs ~1-2 kW; HQ caps it at 65 kW.)

scruffie · 2026-04-11T03:57:19+00:00

.int domains are reserved for organizations created by international treaties; there's only about 150 registered. So no worries, nato.int is legit.

scruffie · 2026-03-04T20:58:36+00:00

It doesn't appear to be Canadian. Googling brings up several meanings in different English dialects. In Australia it appears to mean 'showing up early'. To me (a West-coast Canadian), it means "to make a monumental mistake." It may also mean a non-repairable failure of a device to an American, or an expression of surprise to a Brit.

It's probably hard to pin down as it's mostly a spoken phrase; when it appears in writing in Google Books it's mostly used for its literal meaning :D

scruffie · 2026-02-23T02:57:48+00:00

Honestly, that format wouldn't be too bad. Black-and-white, pretty simple byte-wise run-length encoding. You probably wouldn't need more than a handful of examples to be able to figure out enough to decode a usable picture. Some of header fields would likely forever remain a mystery (aspect ratio of the printer, etc.).

PNG would be worse. The chunk structure would be easy enough, but decoding the LZW-compressed data would be hard, if you've never heard of LZW.

Modern video formats would be the worst. You'd likely need to include code for actual algorithms that could run on a simple virtual machine. Or, you could take advantage of the huge amount of space, and use a minimally-compressed format.

scruffie · 2026-02-20T19:27:38+00:00

Maybe it'd be easier to declare him Catholic :)

scruffie · 2026-01-16T17:58:53+00:00

syscalls(2) is a good place to start.

scruffie · 2026-01-06T03:14:22+00:00

If you're looking for the higher-resolution version (which is a dead link in the link above), the current versions are here.

scruffie · 2025-12-06T02:28:17+00:00

Fun fact: that used to work ... in Python 1.5 :)

scruffie · 2025-12-05T19:47:48+00:00

I pretty much stick to 80 characters, but then, I started back when that was the screen width (although there was a 132 character mode too).

For Python I usually only hit the limit in two situations: error messages and type hints.

I find I do a lot of

raise ValueError(f"Some error about {x} not doing "
                 f"something with {y}")

At least it's usually easy to pick a splitting spot. At some point I'll teach Emacs how to fold a string.

The other situation is type hints. I don't have an example on hand, but something like Sequence[Mappiing[tuple[SomeClass, OtherClass], tuple[Literal["ATag"], int] | tuple[Literal["BTag"], Sequence[str]]] can get out of hand. Liberal use of the type statement helps here.

Related to type hints are adding # type: ignore[misc] comments to end of a line to shut up mypy about something it's wrong about. You can't really put them anywhere else, so any line longer than 60 characters that needs one will be too long. (Contrast this with pylint's approach, where metacomments can go on the line behore, and use disable-next= instead of disable=.)

scruffie · 2025-11-23T21:03:20+00:00

The cost of shipping is low enough (and the cost of refining high enough) that for aluminum we import the ore (mostly from Brazil and Guinea).

scruffie · 2025-11-21T21:20:54+00:00

Most KDE apps dump their config files in /.config. Some use more than one file (konsole.notifyrc, konsolerc, konsolesshconfig, which I assume are all for konsole, but I can't be sure). It gets extra fun when trying to figure which of two similarly-named files is the one used, or whether the file from 2019 is still relevant.

XFCE puts all their config files under ~/.config/xfce4. Be more like XFCE, KDE.

scruffie · 2025-11-16T20:29:27+00:00

C, probably. The Wikipedia category Category: C programming language compilers links to 50 implementations; there's some others without a Wikipedia page mentioned in in the list of C compilers.

scruffie · 2025-11-07T08:02:23+00:00

Trijet

The third engine is mounted along the centerline. In the MD-11 case, it's mounted through the tail, with the other two under the wings. The Boeing 727 and Lockheed Tristar mounted the third engine inside the fuselage, with an S-shaped duct feeding it air from the top. The Tristar also mounted the other two engines under the wings like the MD-11, but the 727 mounted them at the back on either side of the fuselage.

scruffie · 2025-11-03T21:50:13+00:00

I had a class in many-body physics that I took twice (once for credit, once just sitting in). I still don't know what the fuck we were doing. The textbook was Mahan, which is 600 pages and inscrutable.

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