I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

That is, going to town halls, writing senators, and running for office are all standard parts of the system people are complaining about. And they are offering the complaints, largely, as stand in complaints for whole hosts of problems that they actually think are there.

So, agreed, few are willing to ignore their general nebulous complaints and get into the system to work with it. They dream that there will be some magic shift of everything away from their complaints.

My only twist is I think this is ok, as long as people stay grounded in the rest of their life. It is perfectly fine to dream. Is mostly fine to complain. No need to dirty the water where people are getting things done, though.

I think of git as the same. The git cli is not intuitive at all (unless that lightbulb goes off) but the utility is so good, that people just kind of suck it up and use it.

(DX is developer experience, tarpit is used idiomatically to mean “slow/difficult thing”)

Tarpit is often used as an analogy for anything that suddenly slows you down.

You are. Decide for yourself what it means to be a positive influence in the world and do that. This isn’t that hard, it’s not a gotcha. If you are capable of empathy, you are capable of understanding what it means to be good for others, learn from mistakes, and do better.

Also, I provided examples:

> Help your neighbour when they are in need and fight for the rights of those less fortunate than yourself.

Seems unambiguous to me.

What I should have written is that the "hard" part, which is generally left unspecified, is the part that removes redundancy. An MPEG encoder removes redundancy whilst its decoder adds redundancy. An FEC/communications encoder adds redundancy whilst its decoder removes redundancy.

there is A LOT OF ROOM to develop the algorithms. it seems that you are confused about what an algorithm is, since you seemingly think that there can be only 1 algorithm that can decode a given media file.

I see a lot of “Ready, Fire, Aim” behavior, hereabouts, and can’t help but imagine that it extends into our basic workflows.

It’s entirely possible to create a huge ball o’ mud, that works, but is unmaintainable, and damn near impossible to adapt to changing circumstances.

I just went through that, with my LLM. Really easy to simply say “Screw it. Let’s ship.”

Excellent choice of phrase. Succinct and to the point.

ffmpeg, facebook, claude, twitter etc might not have existed if the authors focused on quality over shipping.

Wow the quality of online discourse is really in the gutter.

Chronological or Alphabetical sorting would make more sense than importance.

Why?

They are not. The only reason one might think the solution is novel is because they never saw it before, but what they are actually receiving is an excerpt from someone elses blog post or stack overflow answer. [1]

A bit terrifying thought experiment is to accept for a moment that programming is dead and all its left prompt engineering. Fast forward 5-10-15 years and whos left to actually produce new code and ideas to feed LLMs?

[1] one thing I like to do from time to time - especially when I'm asking for something I know little about - is to copy and paste the answer back to google and look where did that answer originated from.

One time I asked a very specific linux shell command and the answer didn't sit right with me. I googled it and it pointed me to a stackoverflow question. It was the first answer with ~1000 upvotes. But it also had a comment with ~700 upvotes explaining why you never ever should do that. :)

what was particularly interesting about that experiment was the fact that you could pack quite a few images in a very small network.

Perhaps it was trying to stretch it to “unknown figure”, saying this programmer is mysterious, even though it was not by choice but circumstance: fame has eluded him. (Not implying it’s desired).

But on that reading, I would still say the metaphor fails: it’s not effective at conveying this meaning and reads more like an unnecessary Satoshi name drop.

Then you have the other end of the spectrum where people are too focused on hacking stuff together that the end result is unmaintainable.

The reality is there needs to be a bit of both to be a good developer.

For example, if you’re building a proof of concept (POC), then it’s more important to prove the idea than it is to define the architecture. And the reason for that is because you don’t always understand how the final product (whether it’s commercial software or a FOSS library) is best architected until you’ve gone through a few drafts of the idea. So spaghetti code isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But then when you know your idea works and you need to flesh it out into something more durable, you start to refactor the spaghetti into something more maintainable.

Fabrice mainly releases POCs while Carmack mainly releases finished products. So it’s unsurprising you’ll see a difference in the style of architecting in their code.

I used to be someone who focused on beautiful code for my POCs too. And used to fail to release any personal projects. Then one day I learned to embrace the chaos of POCs and realised that you can getting something built and tarting it up afterwards was better than failing to build anything at all.

If I had to describe it in aesthetic terms I would maybe say brutalism?

Pedantic much? It's not about him writing elegant code like someone would write elegant music. It's a comparison about the skill level achieved, Mozart-level vs Salieri-level (and in the sense of their Amadeus movie rivalry, not real world).

His code tackles very complex subjects, succesfully, with huge technical skill, and has been reliable and relied upon by millions...

There’s few things I find more pathetic than trying really hard to show who’s best and ranking things that have no business being ranked.

You will find humans are n-dimensional and elude these simplistic categories.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you find beautiful, I would find grotesque, and vice versa. What you think of as well-organized, I think of as spaghetti.

I think it's great that we can have such a diversity of viewpoints on beauty, but I wouldn't advise making universal proclamations on beauty standards.

Now, what is outstanding in Fabrice's work is that his curiousity projects often end up being breakthroughs.

I mean, i have like hundreds of these. Can emacs do that? I make a compiler to do that? How fast can i make this bytrcode to run?

And it is cute at best.

Really? I find his code elegant and concise.

OTOH it's fun to see people comparing programmers (better/worse) as if that actually mattered.

As the internet says, post physique bro.

I have nothing against it. The fact that I explained a mechanism (mythologizing diminishes one's real work) offends people who like to do it, but that's outside of my control. It's not meant to offend or deny their right to do it. It is just what it is and I'm naming it. I understand it's uncomfortable, and pulling the "everyone does it" card makes things easier.

I love mythology by the way, stories, etc. Fascinating stuff.

No matter how elevated they are in your mind, they’re still just people. One pants leg at a time and all.

For all we know, it could be a temporary fluke and we'll snap back to something else. We could be beings with no default to snap back to, ever changing, destined to dissolve the prevalence of cult figures into something else in the following eras.

In a few thousand years we could totally see this practice as some distant-past thing like making clay pots or carrying Roman dodecahedrons.

The new cultural trend could become jumping off cliffs, and someone would be arguing that it's inevitable human nature.

By the way, no rush to de-mythologize. I'm not fighting any dragon here, you do you.

Apple is a super late stage company, why would a clever person join them just to work under some middle manager.

For most of the internet users- very likely no. Social media and video streaming IS the internet for the majority

I appreciated the art at the time, but can't really enjoy it anymore knowing what I know. My life would be better if I never found out.

Specifically way too many authors whose books I've loved have turned out to be not very good human beings. David Eddings and Neil Gaiman are pretty good examples of this.

I'd _love_ to meet Notch or DHH live and have a chat, both would have some pretty good stories. Hell I'd even have a beer or two with Neil Gaiman.

It's mean to convey "don't look up the personal details of artists, just enjoy the art as-is". Similarly I don't interact with the fandoms of any of the media I follow. There are a few good ones, but the majority are insufferable (to me).

https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...

But that was also very Start-up and America focussed. So if you did web dev in some other country and didn't have colleagues who were into that culture you still might've missed the name.

(Also, I specifically chose DHH as somebody who's highly unlikely to show up in the same discussion as Fabrice Bellard, not because I'm a fan of his. Judging from the replies, I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations!)

A schlub like me probably wouldn't, and I recognize the advantages I've had, but your quote was about Einsteins.