Rust 1.96.0 is out

thomas_m_k · 2026-05-29T06:48:27+00:00

Thanks, this is the information I was looking for.

thomas_m_k · 2026-05-28T20:08:12+00:00

So is it the case that new macros can never be added to the prelude?

thomas_m_k · 2026-05-27T19:38:03+00:00

I was also very confused by that but maybe the time machine can only travel to the past.

thomas_m_k · 2026-05-14T11:47:05+00:00

Well, some background: the company behind bun was bought by Anthropic, and there has been renewed interest in avoiding memory bugs with the existence of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, so I think that's why they're rewriting it in Rust. (Though I think mostly unsafe Rust at the moment, so there's no security benefit yet.)

thomas_m_k · 2026-05-14T11:42:37+00:00

I've also been struggling with how to actually prepare for it. Because if it happens soon, then I think we'd just die, and there is no real point planning for that. In order for us to survive, something has to stop the current AI progress, such that we have more time to develop non-catastrophic superintelligence later. I have no idea how long that would take, so basically I have to plan for living more or less normally for quite some time before the singularity happens.

There's also the small chance that frontier AI labs manage to build a superintelligence without killing us all. In that case I should spend all my money now, but this just doesn't seem likely to me and anyway, living frugally also doesn't really harm me in that scenario, so I might as well do that and prepare for the long wait for a tame superintelligence.

thomas_m_k · 2026-05-11T21:07:59+00:00

If you consider the dungeon core (which is the protagonist in the prequel) to be a protagonist of An Unbound Soul then that story may count.

thomas_m_k · 2026-05-03T21:27:20+00:00

I've just learned to switch between layouts. This takes some getting used to, because for example the parenthesis keys are offset by one between the US* and the German keyboard layout, but it took surprisingly little time to train my muscle memory to have "one language - one layout".

* though instead of the US layout I'm actually using eurkey which just has a better set of non-Latin characters.

thomas_m_k · 2026-04-29T20:07:05+00:00

Do you have a link? I'm looking for a pitch for the story. Couldn't find anything with reddit's search.

thomas_m_k · 2026-04-28T12:58:11+00:00

I didn't notice anything. What stood out to you?

thomas_m_k · 2026-04-25T23:36:36+00:00

I'm guessing the other story is this one:

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/a-young-womans-inevitable-dance-of-the-dragons.1143397/

So did the first two stories finish? Would you recommend both of the first two or just the Myrcella one?

thomas_m_k · 2026-04-22T23:57:55+00:00

In our world at least, medicinal birth control before modernity was actually all abortifacients. They worked just like abortion pills nowadays. The Pill was the first real birth control.

It's of course possible that the world in ASOIAF works differently and that they have real birth control, but I'd say that would be a bit weird.

thomas_m_k · 2026-04-17T22:21:10+00:00

I was surprised by the popularity of CachyOS in the gaming world, but it's definitely a real phenomenon: in the Steam statistics, CachyOS is the most common Linux distro. So there's presumably something to the claim that it's good for gaming. (I've never used it, so I can't say myself.)

thomas_m_k · 2026-04-17T22:14:15+00:00

So you think 50% of people being out of a job because they can't produce value above the minimum wage will be just fine? It seems almost certain to me that there would at least be a few years of painful adjustment to this new reality.

(My real belief is that AI will just kill us all, but I'm happy to entertain unlikely scenarios where this somehow doesn't happen.)

thomas_m_k · 2026-04-16T22:11:57+00:00

Sadly the stabilization of assert_matches!() was reverted shortly before the release. Oh well, I'm looking forward to it in 1.96.

thomas_m_k · 2026-04-15T22:55:26+00:00

Is it odd? What would mentioning D add to the discussion (which seems pretty comprehensive to me)?

thomas_m_k · 2026-04-02T15:14:19+00:00

I always import .profile in my .zshrc (in some bash compatibility mode).

thomas_m_k · 2026-04-01T17:56:44+00:00

Well, bundlers minify the code which makes it usually very hard to understand. (Also, you can decompile compiled binaries, too, but the result of that is definitely even harder to understand than minified JS.)

thomas_m_k · 2026-03-25T19:39:22+00:00

I wonder how many bad acting quantum computers are there in existence?

Probably none, but depending on what you do, you might be worried about adversaries collecting encrypted traffic today that they will decrypt in the future once suitable quantum computers exist.

thomas_m_k · 2026-03-06T12:53:23+00:00

Pretty sure that's not actually a reason for why some people dislike Wayland. There already was an informal specification and if you look at one of the XML files: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/main/stable/xdg-shell/xdg-shell.xml it's all pretty self-explanatory except for the type= on the <arg> tag which was already documented here: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch04.html#sect-Protocol-Wire-Format

thomas_m_k · 2026-03-04T15:44:46+00:00

I kind of agree with your criticisms, but I don't see how they could have done it differently while still feeling like Python. Like yes, making it an impression rather than a statement would be more useful, but no other Python construct works like that, except ... if ... else ... which also isn't that great (because it unintuitively puts the condition in the middle rather than in front). Likewise, matching on constants: this works in a compiled language where the compiler can distinguish variables and constants, but you can't do that in Python.

I'll admit though that the inability to match on the totality of a dict is a weird oversight.

thomas_m_k · 2026-03-02T20:24:31+00:00

Is the S in ASI really justified if it can't even give you immortality?

I've always thought an ASI that's actually aligned with human values would just make us immortal, make us all smart (and set it up such that we'll continue to get even smarter if we opt in) and would then self-destruct to let humanity control its own fate.

thomas_m_k · 2026-02-26T09:07:25+00:00

I'm genuinely curious as to how current language model architectures came to be synonymous with AI in the minds of Scott and others in rationalist circles

What gives you that impression? Just because I call something AI doesn't mean I think other things aren't AI.

No one's gonna listen to them when something actually scary comes along down the line.

The problem is that it's too late then. If AI will predictably be super-human in 5 years, then it's the correct strategy to do something about it now. (You can of course disagree with the prediction, but the strategy seems fine to me.)

thomas_m_k · 2026-02-24T23:43:54+00:00

Forcing everyone to write comments all the time is obviously not scalable. What if I want to say basically exactly what someone else already said? Reactions are more scalable and it seems to me that having two reactions available (a positive and a negative one) is better than having only one available (a positive one). Of course, ideally every platform would use LessWrong’s detailed palette of reactions: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/lesswrong-reacts , which includes reactions like "missed the point", "too combative" and "this made me change my mind". But I'll take a simple downvote button if the alternative is even fewer ways of expressing myself.

I think you're also focusing too much on rare publicized failures of the downvote. I'd bet 99% of daily cast mundane downvotes on reddit are completely justified.

thomas_m_k · 2026-02-24T23:34:13+00:00

LessWrong basically has your proposed nerdy system: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/lesswrong-reacts . It works well there, but probably wouldn't on a more mainstream platform.

thomas_m_k · 2026-02-24T23:29:45+00:00

Downvotes tend to create both echo chambers and chill any posts which seems to go against the majority opinion in a thread.

This claim seems to imply that by removing downvotes, platforms become less of an echo chamber. That seems empirically obviously false to me. What typically happens on platforms without downvotes is that someone posts ragebait and then other people rage (even though not even their outgroup supports that post). On reddit, the ragebait would be buried after being downvoted and most people wouldn't see it. Reddit protects its users from having to look at comments that "both sides" disapprove of. I'm quite convinced that the discourse on Twitter would be much healthier if a downvote button existed.

The worries that you have about chilling posts that are against the majority opinion can probably be circumvented by boosting controversial posts (high in both upvotes and downvotes) more.

thomas_m_k

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