Johz's recent activity

  1. Comment on JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action in ~comp

    Johz
    Link Parent
    I wrote elsewhere about my skepticism of the process, but I didn't feel up to reviewing the Python code in much detail. But JS is my jam! The code is kind of all over the place. The biggest flaw,...
    • Exemplary

    I wrote elsewhere about my skepticism of the process, but I didn't feel up to reviewing the Python code in much detail. But JS is my jam!

    The code is kind of all over the place. The biggest flaw, like you said, is a lack of type annotations. Simon said he wanted the code to run as an ES6 module when pulled into the browser, which is fair enough, but JSDoc is a good alternative in that case. Of course, there are no doc comments anywhere anyway, so guessing the public API, particular in terms of what options are available on which methods and what they do, seems to require reading the source code.

    The problem with the missing types is that it makes the rest of the code very difficult to follow. For example, there's a function attrListToDict that converts an array of attributes into object map. This function is written very defensively — it allows you to input essentially any JS value and it'll attempt to do the right thing. But it's not clear how defensive it really needs to be — if you look at the call sites, it's an internally-used function that, as far as I can tell, is always passed validated data. Most of that defensiveness is pointless.

    Even beyond the lack of types, there are lots of other oddities scattered around the codebase. Even in the attrListToDict function, the implementation is already kind of weird. Why is it using Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty? Almost certainly because Python requires things like key in dict or hasattr(obj, key) to avoid throwing exceptions. In JS, in cases like this, you can just do obj.key ?? default. Elsewhere, to pass optional parameters to functions and classes, sometimes you should pass object literals (fairly standard), sometimes different positional parameters (generally discouraged), and other times instances of specialised options classes. (This feels weird enough that I wonder if it's a quirk descended from porting the original codebase to Python, let alone porting the Python one to JS.)

    Then there's the project structure. Let's go back to attrListToDict and the file it's in — html5lib_serializer.js. This is a test utility — it formats the parsed tree so that it can be used in tests that use the html5lib test data. That's useful, but it's not really part of the source. It's also distinct from the toTestFormat function that exists in the serialize.js file, that does a similar thing but into an internal test format. Both of these are implemented within the src folder, so it's not clear that they're not part of the public API. (toTestFormat is even exported in index.js, which I don't really understand the logic behind — the comments imply that it is not meant to be part of the public API.)

    The test files are chaotic, each with their own style of writing tests, and none of them using anything useful like NodeJS's built-in test runner. The different output formats (including the test format) are written separately, and it's not clear how one could write their own output format if one wished. The is a chaotic mix of snake_case and camelCase, plus a bit of hyphen-case in some (but not all) file names. (The Node class explicitly has snake_case aliases of all the camelCase names, but no other class does.) There is a streaming parser that does not interact in any way with the rest of the library except for using the same underlying tokenizer, which means it's duplicating a whole bunch of the work from the main parser, and will be a pain to work with if you need streaming and want to generate some subset of nodes at the same time. There is an autogenerated entities-data.js file but no script to generate it. The whole thing has a low-level chaos to it, as if it's a five-year-old project maintained by a team of ten developers, as opposed to a couple of dozen relatively simple files worth of code.

    Like, this isn't the worst code I've ever seen, but it already feels like a legacy project, particularly with the disparate styles and how difficult it is to get much of an overview of what's going on. But I think they key part of that is that Simon doesn't really understand how the code works. In this case, he's been quite explicit about this being a one-shot prompt that ran for a few hours, where he then published the result. That's fair enough. But he also asks the question of whether it's responsible to publish this sort of stuff, presumably to NPM or similar, and I think the answer to that has to be no.

    15 votes

  2. Comment on Order of the Sinking Star | Official announcement trailer in ~games

    Johz
    Link Parent
    According to a post of Bluesky, it's taking a bunch of existing puzzle games with different mechanics, and then building on those with new puzzles that combine the different mechanics together....

    According to a post of Bluesky, it's taking a bunch of existing puzzle games with different mechanics, and then building on those with new puzzles that combine the different mechanics together.

    That said, I know very little about this, I'd just seen someone else repost that on Bluesky and then saw this thread.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Humble Book Bundle: Adrian Tchaikovsky's Epic Fantasy in ~books

    Johz
    Link Parent
    He's also quite well known as a Warhammer author as well, I believe, but I'm less familiar with that.

    He's also quite well known as a Warhammer author as well, I believe, but I'm less familiar with that.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Humble Book Bundle: Adrian Tchaikovsky's Epic Fantasy in ~books

    Johz
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    @kfwyre, let's see how widely accessible this bundle is... 😅 A bundle of Adrian Tchaikovsky's fantasy epic fantasy books (specifically the Shadows of the Apt series, the Echoes of the Fall series,...

    @kfwyre, let's see how widely accessible this bundle is... 😅

    A bundle of Adrian Tchaikovsky's fantasy epic fantasy books (specifically the Shadows of the Apt series, the Echoes of the Fall series, and Guns of the Dawn). Amazingly, I don't think I've read any of these, despite having already picked up a couple of Tchaikovsky collections before, because the guy is a literal writing machine.

    The money goes to Cancer Research UK, and remember to adjust the sliders at the bottom of the page to make sure the money is going where you want it to!

    Also feel free to have a look at some of the other bundles - there's the Murderbot series again (I think this is the same deal posted here a few months ago), and a Doctor Who comics bundle that caught my eye when looking over the list.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Modern Christmas carol renditions that aren't mediocre CCM? in ~music

    Johz
    Link Parent
    Ah yeah, sorry, I realised afterwards that that probably wasn't a very clear abbreviation unless you were familiar with the genre.

    Ah yeah, sorry, I realised afterwards that that probably wasn't a very clear abbreviation unless you were familiar with the genre.

  7. Comment on Modern Christmas carol renditions that aren't mediocre CCM? in ~music

    Johz
    Link Parent
    Looking into folk music is a great idea, you're right that there's a good amount of overlap and those are some great recommendations. And that O Holy Night is fantastic — just a completely...

    Looking into folk music is a great idea, you're right that there's a good amount of overlap and those are some great recommendations. And that O Holy Night is fantastic — just a completely different approach to the carol than you'd usually hear, but it works so well.

    1 vote

  8. Comment on Modern Christmas carol renditions that aren't mediocre CCM? in ~music

    Johz
    Link Parent
    Not really, I want to hear something different. But a lot of the stuff out there seems to come from the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) scene, which has this really bland ultra-commercial...

    Not really, I want to hear something different. But a lot of the stuff out there seems to come from the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) scene, which has this really bland ultra-commercial quality to it that makes everything it touches turn incredibly trite and dull. It's like listening to that cover of Hallelujah by Pentatonix, but if that was literally their entire range and everything they ever did sounded mostly like their cover of a song that someone else sang better.

    2 votes

  9. Modern Christmas carol renditions that aren't mediocre CCM?

    ~music Ask (recommendations)
    'Tis the season, and it's nice to sit down and listen to some traditional Christmas carols in a cozy candle-lit room with plenty of biscuits. And sometimes it's nice to hear more modern takes on...

    'Tis the season, and it's nice to sit down and listen to some traditional Christmas carols in a cozy candle-lit room with plenty of biscuits. And sometimes it's nice to hear more modern takes on these ancient (and not so ancient) classics.

    Unfortunately, whenever I look for this sort of thing, what I usually find is really bland CCM — some woman breathily singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" so slowly I can feel my life draining from me with every beat, a completely unnecessary modern bridge replete with painful key change, and so on. I know this stuff can be done right — Annie Lennox's Christmas album is a great example of taking classic carols and setting them to new music in such a way that it can completely change how you hear them. But finding more stuff in that vein is surprisingly hard.

    So does anyone here have any suggestions or ideas for modern takes on classic carols that actually try and do something interesting?

    21 votes

  10. Comment on Looking for a non-smart watch recommendation in ~tech

    Johz
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    I will always recommend the concept of hybrid smart watches. These typically have much longer battery lives than conventional smart watches (~month typically), do the time thing really well...

    I will always recommend the concept of hybrid smart watches. These typically have much longer battery lives than conventional smart watches (~month typically), do the time thing really well (because it's just a normal clock face), and are usually a lot simpler in terms of functionality. It's the perfect combination where you'll get steps counts and the time, but it remains simple and looks elegant - it looks just like a real watch because it is just a real watch.

    Unfortunately, hybrid smart watches never really took off, so there's not really many companies to recommend. I have a Withings watch, and it's okay. It usually undercounts the step count, but you can mentally adjust for that and set lower goals and it's fine. The watch face gets quite scratched, but it's still readable. There's an app that's okay, and you can configure notifications if you want them, or set up alarms. It's fine, but it's not necessarily great. There used to be Fossil, but they've just given up on their hybrid line, so those are out. Garmin do a line of hybrid watches that are better if you're interested in sports tracking, but they also look like Garmin watches. Then there are a handful of small boutique companies that are typically more expensive and look nicer, but are typically more limited.

    I'll probably get the latest Withings watch when this one breaks, if the company is still making them. But it's not necessarily a great market for these kinds of watches right now, which is a shame because they're great and really underrated.

    TL; DR - if I convince enough people to buy the current range of okay hybrid watches, maybe they'll finally start making some good ones.

    8 votes

  11. Comment on Part of me wishes it wasn't true but: AI coding is legit in ~tech

    Johz
    Link Parent
    I agree that a lot of companies selling AI are overselling their capabilities. But that's always been true of people trying to sell you things. If you'd listened to MongoDB selling their database...

    I agree that a lot of companies selling AI are overselling their capabilities. But that's always been true of people trying to sell you things. If you'd listened to MongoDB selling their database software when they first started out, you'd be amazed that anyone would use anything else at all, because it could apparently do everything you wanted, and bring about world peace as a side-hustle. Obviously that was just sales nonsense, but it doesn't necessarily mean that MongoDB can't be useful for specific use-cases.

    I agree that claims that AI can generate an entire PR for you are mostly puffery, but I also don't think there's many people who seriously believe that, at least not without clear caveats about the nature and quality of those PRs.

    2 votes

  12. Comment on Part of me wishes it wasn't true but: AI coding is legit in ~tech

    Johz
    Link Parent
    I think that's a bit like saying "if your compiler is so good at pointing out the errors in my code, why doesn't it just correct them?". AI is not some magical monolithic tool that can do...

    I think that's a bit like saying "if your compiler is so good at pointing out the errors in my code, why doesn't it just correct them?". AI is not some magical monolithic tool that can do everything all at once. Some people might try and claim that, but some people are idiots - it's the same with microservices and NoSQL and serverless and all the rest, in that some people will promise you the world and be completely wrong, but that doesn't make the underlying tool useless.

    In this case, Google specifically trained a model to detect security bugs. I don't believe their system includes a general LLM, at least based on how old the project is. My impression is that it's classical ML stuff with a huge amount of training data. That system cannot fix bugs, but it can make finding them a lot easier. That is a useful task! You can't fix bugs without knowing where they are, and a lot of these old tools have a huge amount of very subtle code that is very difficult to analyse through conventional means.

    Beyond that, I think Google's approach here seems fairly fair. They are not demanding that work be done for them - they're just creating CVEs, which let people know about issues but don't necessarily mean that something needs to be fixed immediately. They're also sponsoring ffmpeg's development, as well as contributing to the project themselves. And the tools they're using here can be used (and I believe have been used) to find more serious issues as well that have been useful and important to fix.

    10 votes

  13. Comment on Humble Bundle: Modern Sci-Fi Classics (Charles Soule, Joseph Fink, Hugh Howey, and Neal Stephenson) in ~books

    Johz
    Link Parent
    As the person who originally complained about the region locking, my complaint was certainly directed towards the publishers, and not in any way at you! I made use of the last bundle you posted,...

    As the person who originally complained about the region locking, my complaint was certainly directed towards the publishers, and not in any way at you! I made use of the last bundle you posted, and I appreciate you posting when new things appear. I am still interested in this one as well, and if I get to a computer and remember in time, I'll have a go at bypassing the restrictions, although it doesn't sound like others have been so successful there.

    I think to me, it's a question of how often this happens. If it's the sort of thing where every so often, they restrict sales to just the US or something, then fair enough. I'm sure sometimes I'll vent about it, but I think it's still cool to know what offers are out there. OTOH, if this is the new HB policy, then it's probably not worth it because plenty of people just won't be able to access the books at all. That said, I don't think that's particularly likely, I think it's just that this publisher is probably more restrictive than the publishers they've worked with for other bundles. So from my perspective, please keep on posting, because I think our opinions about what makes an interesting book bundle are similar enough that I look forward to the next time you post one of these!

    1 vote

  14. Comment on Humble Bundle: Modern Sci-Fi Classics (Charles Soule, Joseph Fink, Hugh Howey, and Neal Stephenson) in ~books

    Johz
    Link Parent
    At least for me, I commented because I find it unusual that this was region-locked - a lot of the bundles have been DRM-free and haven't been region-locked, or at least have been more widely...

    At least for me, I commented because I find it unusual that this was region-locked - a lot of the bundles have been DRM-free and haven't been region-locked, or at least have been more widely accessible. This seems like a much more limited offer, which is a shame, and it sounds like a choice by this publisher to sell the books like this. (Other publishers seem more open to selling ebooks without DRM and region restrictions.)

    That said, I agree that it makes sense to post these still, as long as they're typically widely accessible and it's just a few exceptions that are problematic. OTOH, if they consistently switch to region-locked offers, maybe this isn't the best place to post them - it would be like me posting news in German or offers only accessible in Germany or something. Maybe a regional forum would be a better place for them in the case.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on Humble Bundle: Modern Sci-Fi Classics (Charles Soule, Joseph Fink, Hugh Howey, and Neal Stephenson) in ~books

    Johz
    Link Parent
    I've (Germany) bought the DRM-free bundles before, I also assumed that this is a Kobo thing.

    I've (Germany) bought the DRM-free bundles before, I also assumed that this is a Kobo thing.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Humble Bundle: Modern Sci-Fi Classics (Charles Soule, Joseph Fink, Hugh Howey, and Neal Stephenson) in ~books

    Johz
    Link
    "Sorry, this promotion is unavailable in your area"... :( No books for the Germans apparently. Is it available in the US?

    "Sorry, this promotion is unavailable in your area"... :( No books for the Germans apparently. Is it available in the US?

    3 votes

  17. Comment on Pluribus S01E01 - “We is Us” in ~tv

    Johz
    Link Parent
    I've not seen that, but I'm getting more of a Mrs Davis kind of vibe, where the main character isn't directly in danger from the hivemind, but both sides are trying to convince the other to give...

    I've not seen that, but I'm getting more of a Mrs Davis kind of vibe, where the main character isn't directly in danger from the hivemind, but both sides are trying to convince the other to give in and join them.

    Except without sexy Jesus, the Holy Grail, that whole shoe plot, and AI making stage magicians obsolete. That was a weird show.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on Pluribus S01E01 - “We is Us” in ~tv

    Johz
    Link Parent
    Basically humans receive an extraterrestrial transmission, and it turns out to be the recipe for a virus, which inevitably gets synthesised and escapes. The virus turns the entirety of humanity...

    Basically humans receive an extraterrestrial transmission, and it turns out to be the recipe for a virus, which inevitably gets synthesised and escapes. The virus turns the entirety of humanity into a single hivemind, and the main character is one of twelve people who is immune to the virus, and the show, I believe, follows her as she tries to figure out what's going on.

    Right now on Wikipedia, there's only synopses for the first two episodes, which is probably enough to get a mostly spoiler-free idea of what's going on. I watched maybe half of the first episode before my baby woke up (this seems to be how I watch most of my TV right now...), and it seems good, although I keep on thinking the main character looks like Faye Marsay, and it makes me want to watch more stuff with Faye Marsay in it.

    7 votes

  19. Comment on Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’ in ~society

    Johz
    Link Parent
    It's about that here in my European country, and I'd see that as fairly reasonable. That's somewhere between a day's wages for someone on minimum wage, to about half a day's wages for someone on a...

    It's about that here in my European country, and I'd see that as fairly reasonable. That's somewhere between a day's wages for someone on minimum wage, to about half a day's wages for someone on a relatively good/comfortable salary. It's also reduced significantly if you can prove that you had a travel card but you didn't have it with you, say.

    I think the difficulty is always scaling fines well - I'd love to see more fines tied to income, but that's hard for on-the-spot offences like this.

    3 votes

  20. Comment on What the hell are we doing with hierarchical tags? in ~tildes

    Johz
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    I'm intrigued how people actually use these tags. For me, they're mostly just noise that I blend out, and if I needed to do some sort of filtering, I'd probably just filter by group rather than...

    I'm intrigued how people actually use these tags. For me, they're mostly just noise that I blend out, and if I needed to do some sort of filtering, I'd probably just filter by group rather than think about tags. But presumably there are people using them - what sort of tagging structure works best for you guys? Or is this just a write-only feature?

    5 votes