The best way to get your point across is by starting with ad-hominem attacks to assert your superior intelligence.

Yeah, let's pretend that type algebra doesn't exist, and even if it does exist then it's not useful and definitely isn't practical in data protocols. Let's believe that the authors of protobuf considered everything, and since they aren't amateurs (by the virtue of having worked on protobuf at Google, presumably), every elaborated opinion that draws them as amateurs at applying type algebra in data protocol designs is a personal ad-hominem attack.

They're not amateurs by virtue of being some of the most senior engineers ever to work at Google. You don't get to play the "ad hominem" card while calling them names. This whole thread is embarrassing.

Ok, "some of the most senior engineers ever to work at Google" don't seem to know that static bounds checking don't require dependent types: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45150008

> You don't get to play the "ad hominem" card while calling them names

The entire article explains it at length why there's the impression, it's not ad-hominem.

Previous threads on this story have spelled out specifically which Googlers were behind this design, and, again, it's embarrassing that anybody is trying to defend the hill of "protobuf's designers were amateurs". You can keep digging in if you want.

IMO it's a pretty reasonable claim about experience level, not intelligence, and isn't at all an ad hominem attack because it's referring directly to the fundamental design choices of protocol buffers and thus is not at all a fallacy of irrelevance.

Whatever else Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are, and whatever mistakes they made in designing protobufs, they are not amateurs.

Not long after they designed and implemented protobuffers, they shared the ACM prize in computing, as well as many other similar honors. And the honors keep stacking up.

None of this means that protobufs are perfect (or even good), but it does mean they weren't amateurs when they did it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjay_Ghemawat

I disagree, unless you are in the majority.

I fed the same prompt to Deepseek:

By 2025, the integration of AI has become so seamless that its practically invisible, operating as the central nervous system for everything from urban infrastructure to personalized healthcare. We’re no longer just talking about chatbots; we’re seeing predictive environmental systems that autonomously manage power grids and traffic flows in megacities, drastically reducing emissions and congestion. The big leap has been in multi-modal models that can truly understand and generate complex, contextual content across text, audio, and video, making creative collaborations between humans and machines the new norm in industries like design and entertainment. Its a shift from tools to partners.

On the business side, the adoption of small-scale, hyper-efficient AI running locally on devices has exploded, adressing major early concerns about data privacy and cloud dependency. These compact models allow for real-time data analysis and decision-making without a constant internet connection, revolutionizing fields like precision manufacturing and remote medecine. This democratization means even small startups have access to powerful AI capabilites, leveling the playing field in unexpected ways and fostering a huge wave of innovation that was previously concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants.

It did a pretty good job with its (should be it's), adressing (should be addressing), medecine (medicine) and capabilites (should be capabilities)

This is really well written. Great read.

I didn’t know this was a Django application. Love that. Totally understand the author’s point of view, too.

I enjoy looking at my blogs analytics. It does make my day better knowing that people find my writing useful and read my posts. Do I need it? Probably not. But I don’t “need” a blog either. I just like it.

* led status: on, off, non-responsive * button status: idle, pressing, pressed

I'm with you by the way, but you can often think of a way to use enums instead (not saying you should).

  enum Bool 
  { 
      True, 
      False, 
      FileNotFound 
  };

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_

edit: The 24th of October will be the 20th anniversary of that post.

well yes. every boolean is iso to 2, and every 2 can be embedded in 3. and every N can be embedded in N+1

It very much is a brainer

There might be some other factors in that situation that prevent one from having a restful night.

Might be! And some people might not deserve sleep! But

    "every half hour with pipe-like electronic devices that cause loud clanging noises"

seems to be the specific relevant factor.

"Stanford University sleep medicine professor who says in a court-filed declaration that Lipsey “is exposed to unrelenting noise that is out of his control that can further (fuel) his insomnia and potentially worsens his health.”

Anyone else think it's interesting all these CLIs are written in TypeScript? I'd expect Google to use Go.

It's similar for writing code. Suddenly people are articulating their problems to the LLM and breaking it down in smaller sub-problems to solve....

In other words, people are discovering the value of standard software engineering practices. Which, I think is a good thing.

It has changed how I structure my code. Out of laziness, if I can write the code in such a way that each step follows naturally from what came before, "the code just writes itself!" Except now it's literally true :D

Maybe everyone already discovered this but I find that if I include a lot of detail in my variables names, it's much more likely to autocomplete something useful. If whatever I typed was too verbose for my liking long term, I can always clean it up later with a rename.