Nate Cook

Get the hell out of Evanston.

As someone who pad thai’d himself into a food coma all through the 90s, I don’t think that year is accurate

"I have a decent fluency in LLMs, and they have utility, but the absurd degree of over-hype, the way they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value."

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson:

"Private establishments can partner with us to make it clear that private property is private property and ICE cannot enter establishments without a valid warrant ... If Congress will not check this administration, then Chicago will."

They ruined Google search for nothing

WOW. The lead plaintiff is a Latino man who's been here legally for 24 years. He was grabbed off the street by plainclothes federal agents who didn't even ASK about his status.

He was detained overnight and only released once a supervisor realized he had been illegally arrested.

Why should I write better when a machine can do it for me? Because actually no one can do it for you, because your voice is unique among all the people on earth. Siri never petted a horse's neck. Alexa has never been ghosted by the captain of the football team. But you have lived, your heart is beating, you have suffered, and you have something important to say. It's a human's job, to use words, and whatever job you give to a machine, that part of your brain goes dark. Maybe it's worth it when it comes to remembering phone numbers and directions, but when that part of your brain that uses words goes dark, that's a vast area that's very close to your soul. Don't let some internet platform convince you that what you have to say and create isn't worthwhile. Words are the echo of your soul. Honing that echo matters.

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

The Lens Behind the Look of Superman 2025: Leica Tri-Elmar - Y.M.Cinema Magazine A major contributor to Superman 2025 look is the Leica Tri-Elmar lens, utilised by Cinematographer Henry Braham.

Apparently they used a very particular lens that creates that effect ymcinema.com/2025/01/13/t...

I don’t care if he doesn’t back this up with further action, in a normal time, this is a major scandal, showing the president of the United States has nothing but contempt for the first amendment, basic rights, and his fellow citizens and will act accordingly in various ways.

Not again lol

"No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.
Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a
different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from
gathering to worship... I dissent. " - Sotomayor

Trump 2024

“oh They got this all screwed up”

Right! A buffer needs a way to track its lifetime, which is often implemented via a class. A noncopyable struct can do that same lifetime management without the possibility of multiple references, which means exclusivity checking should be done statically

Some of those sound hard to do without classes! But maybe noncopyable types can help in those cases. I think eliminating the access tracking can end up helping both in the cost of the checks _and_ unlocking more ways for the optimizer to do its job
in opening

Just a casual 2.6x boost in performance

Performance · Issue #373 · migueldeicaza/SwiftTerm Currently about 12% of our performance when outputting characters is being consumed by swift_beginAccess when the insertCharacter accesses the buffer properties, and then when the buffer itself acc...

Inspired by the talk, and a few spare hours to kill, a nice 2.6x boost in SwiftTerm performance: github.com/migueldeicaz...

Learn how to optimize your Swift code with new language ehnancements from @nnnnnnnn.bsky.social in Improve memory usage and performance with Swift

developer.apple.com/videos/play/...

#swift #swiftlang #wwdc

nice

In comparison with the previous Java service, the updated backend delivers a 40% increase in performance, along with improved scalability, security, and availability.

The story behind the Apple Password Monitoring service, handling multiple billions of requests per day from devices all over the world, which was recently rewritten in Swift: www.swift.org/blog/swift-a...

A screenshot of an old computer science paper. It has been OCRd but is clearly a high quality scan of a printout. There is no doubt that the grail of effi- ciency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficieney actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: pre- mature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportuni- ties in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts of a program are really critical, since the universal experience of programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their intuitive guesses fail. After work- ing with such tools for seven years, I've be- come convinced that all compilers written from now on should be designed to provide all programmers with feedback indicating what parts of their programs are costing the most; indeed, this feedback should be supplied automatically unless it has been specifically turned off.

Here's the quote in context. It's good advice! But it's clear about how you absolutely need to spend time on that 3%.

Key is to get your project into a state where you can continuously identify the 3% whenever you add new code.