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LLMs aren't world models

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The author asserts that language models (LLMs) do not possess a true understanding of the world, specifically using a chess example to illustrate their point. While a friend who is skilled in chess believes an LLM can perform at his level, the author tests this claim by playing against the LLM and finds that it fails to track the state of the chessboard after several moves. The author clarifies that their claim does not suggest LLMs lack exposure to chess or physical representations of the game,

I built my blog with C preprocessor macros

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The author discusses their unconventional approach to running a tech blog using C preprocessor macros instead of traditional methods like Jekyll. Frustrated by frequent issues with their Ruby installation, they sought a simpler solution for adding headers and footers to their blog posts. Being a C++ developer, they decided to apply their knowledge of the C preprocessor, despite its intended use for C source code, which posed some challenges, such as dealing with conflicting predefined macros. They found a way to manage these issues

Requiem for a 10x Engineer Dream

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The author reflects on their experiences with AI coding tools, expressing skepticism about claims of significant productivity boosts. They liken the enthusiastic discussions about these tools to teenage chatter about sex, suggesting that there's often more talk than actionable results. After experimenting with Claude Code, the author notes that many users seem to rely on simple commands like copying and pasting or basic interactions with coding assistants. They believe that AI tools could be most beneficial for automating tedious, repetitive tasks, thus potentially increasing productivity for solopren

I Built a Ballistic Missile Defense Simulator in a Browser

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The author reflects on the complexities of understanding and intercepting Russian aerial attacks on Ukraine, particularly the challenges posed by various drones and missiles traveling at different speeds and altitudes. To bridge the gap between theoretical maps and real-world dynamics, the author developed a simulation tool called airdefense.dev. This tool employs spherical geometry, specifically the Haversine formula, for accurate calculations over long distances. The simulation runs at a fixed frame rate, avoiding overshooting bugs by capping movement distances per frame. The

Git Rebase - Explained Like You’re New to Git

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: /r/programming

Stackademic is an educational platform aimed at providing free coding education to programmers, developers, coders, and engineers. The content discusses the use of Git, specifically the concept of "rebase," which helps to update a branch with the latest changes from the main branch. Rebase effectively moves your commits to start from the most recent version of another branch, allowing you to integrate new changes easily while developing features or fixing bugs.

Binary search—think positive

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The content describes a tutorial on program verification in Agda, specifically focusing on the binary search algorithm. The discussion is set in a medieval college room, led by a tutor who aims to clarify misconceptions about binary search being solely about searching ordered tables. A student, Harry, references a common understanding of the algorithm, which involves searching through a sorted sequence of keys to find a specific key by making comparisons. The tutor outlines the process of binary search, explaining that it operates in logarithmic time through a systematic

Going Faster Than Memcpy

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: Hacker News

The author, while profiling Shadesmar, discovered that large binary unserialized messages (over 512kB) spend a significant amount of execution time on memory copying using `memcpy`. In an attempt to improve the performance of memory copies, the author explored the `__memmove_avx_unaligned_erms` function, which uses AVX instructions to copy 32 bytes at a time, thereby enhancing efficiency. The distinction between `memcpy` and `memmove` is highlighted:

Graham: Synchronizing Clocks by Leveraging Local Clock Properties (2022) [pdf]

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: Hacker News

The provided text appears to be a fragment of a PDF file, containing raw binary data that doesn't convey any coherent information or meaningful content. The snippet includes special characters, symbols, and encoding that is typical of file headers rather than human-readable text. As a result, there is no summary or content to distill from this text. If you have a specific document or topic in mind, please share more details or a different section.

Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors (2003) [pdf]

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: Hacker News

The provided content appears to be a portion of a PDF file encoded in a binary format. It begins with the header for a PDF file (specifically version 1.3) and contains a compressed data stream. The actual content is not directly readable as text because it is encoded in a manner suitable for processing by PDF readers. To summarize it meaningfully, one would need to interpret the binary data as a whole PDF document, which may contain text, images, or other graphical elements. Without additional

Vanishing from Hyundai’s data network

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: Hacker News

The author initially declined to let the dealer sign them up for BlueLink, intending to manage the signup independently later. They recognized that the vehicle still had a telematics unit capable of making cellular connections, prompting them to seek a way to disable this feature. One potential solution considered was to install an oscillator to produce a loud noise, thwarting any attempts to eavesdrop through the car's microphone. The author utilized non-marring plastic pry tools to assist in the process. Ultimately, after disabling cellular

I made a vector DB where you can hot-swap the index type

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback and indicates that all input is carefully considered. It references documentation for additional qualifiers and describes the VectorDB system's layered architecture, which has distinct responsibilities and interfaces for communication. Additionally, it mentions the use of a custom Reader-Writer lock implementation and provides information about the system's performance in terms of average and worst-case scenarios for KD-Tree operations. There are also references to errors encountered while loading the page, suggesting a need to refresh.

Nyxt: The Emacs-like web browser

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the web browser Nyxt, which is designed to cater to developers with a keyboard-driven and customizable experience. Created by John Mercouris in 2017, Nyxt is not an Emacs package but a standalone browser written in Common Lisp and licensed under the BSD three-clause license. Its development prioritizes Linux and encourages user freedom through extensive customization options. The project is sponsored by Atlas, a business focusing on Common Lisp. The creator chose to build Nyxt as a separate entity

Show HN: A Sinclair ZX81 retro web assembler+simulator

Published: 2025-08-11 | Origin: Hacker News

The linked content discusses a simulator for the Sinclaude, a retro computing platform. Similar to a previous project for the Apple II that involved compiling Merlin assembly into an emulator, the Sinclaude simulator allows users to run and interact with software from that era. Additionally, the mention of the "Z-80 Reference Guide" highlights its significant impact on the author's life, suggesting it played a crucial role in their journey into computing.

Compiling a Lisp: Lambda lifting

Published: 2025-08-10 | Origin: Hacker News

The author has made progress in a tutorial about closure conversion, initially thought to involve lambda lifting. They have rewritten the implementation in Python, reducing the code from 1200 lines in C to just over 300 lines in Python, including tests. However, the Python version lacks an S-expression reader and uses text assembly instead of instruction encoding. The process of conversion involves recognizing variable bindings from "let" and "lambda" expressions using a LambdaConverter class. The tutorial focuses on managing variable metadata rather than

GitHub - isene/VcalView: VCAL viewer for MUTT

Published: 2025-08-10 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content discusses a VCAL/iCalendar viewer designed for the terminal and the MUTT email client, which offers various output formats. Users are encouraged to add a specific line to their .mailcap file to enable automatic display of calendar invites via calview. The documentation contains details about available qualifiers. In case of issues, users are invited to submit feedback or open issues in the repository, and contributions via pull requests are welcome. The tool is released into the public domain under the Unlicense. There are

Zig's Lovely Syntax

Published: 2025-08-10 | Origin: /r/programming

The author discusses the syntax of the Zig programming language, noting its similarities to Rust but highlighting how it improves upon Rust's syntax through simpler semantics and thoughtful syntactical choices. Zig simplifies the handling of integer literals by using a single type, `comptime_int`, which eliminates the need for suffixes and allows for implicit type coercion during assignment. This approach contrasts with the typical use of various integer types in statically-typed languages. Additionally, the author praises Zig's handling of raw or multiline strings

Image Editing in Rails

Published: 2025-08-10 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content appears to be a corrupted or non-readable binary file rather than a coherent text to summarize. It contains a series of characters, symbols, and likely represents image or encoded data rather than any written material that can be summarized. If you have a specific request or a different text, please provide it!

Sneaky git commits

Published: 2025-08-10 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the intricacies of merge commits in Git, highlighting how they can include changes not visible in the standard commit log. This can lead to "sneaky" changes being introduced without detection, as merge commits can resolve conflicts and add arbitrary updates. The text warns against abusing this feature but acknowledges that it can be misused. It presents a hypothetical supply chain attack where an attacker, Eve, convinces a user, Alice, to pull changes that may contain hidden backdoors. Alice,

Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

Published: 2025-08-10 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses Bolt, a high-performance, lightweight, and statically typed embedded programming language designed for real-time applications, implemented in C. It relies on the C standard library and provides standard library modules, which can be disabled if needed. Bolt allows easy configuration regarding memory management and includes additional capabilities through its integration with the library picomatch for regex parsing. The bolt-cli program serves as a concise example of how to embed Bolt in applications, with further details available in the embedding guide. The

Load Balancing at Scale: Hidden Challenges and Lessons Learned

Published: 2025-08-10 | Origin: /r/programming

The excerpt discusses the challenges and complexities involved in load balancing requests through a reverse proxy, which is crucial for managing incoming traffic across multiple upstream servers. While simple methods like round-robin help distribute requests evenly, they often fail under larger, more complex systems due to the diversity in request types (e.g., heavy uploads vs. light reads), leading to inefficiencies such as server overloads and underutilization. It also highlights the necessity for "stickiness" for specific requests and the importance of