skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action in ~comp
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Comment on JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentWillison coined "vibe engineering" to contrast it with "vibe coding." I don't know if it's going to stick. Maybe a better term for it will win?Willison coined "vibe engineering" to contrast it with "vibe coding." I don't know if it's going to stick. Maybe a better term for it will win?
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Comment on South Korea’s president wants to reduce tensions with the North in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/TTeiY From the article:From the article:
Mr Lee, a left-winger who became president in June, is trying to be more conciliatory. Silencing the loudspeakers was one of his first acts as president. The leafleting has mostly stopped, too. Within a few days of this decision the North turned off its own noisemakers, perhaps because there was no longer any need to drown out the din from the South.
Not many people will miss the cacophony in the borderlands. Yet this is only one of the ways that Mr Lee has sought to pause activities that rile the north—and some of his other reforms are producing rather more disquiet. For years South Korea’s spy agency has broadcast radio into North Korea in the hope of giving ordinary citizens access to uncensored news. This year its stations fell silent for the first time since 2010. This switch-off came not long after Donald Trump dismantled America’s state-funded news services, which had also broadcast into North Korea. As a result, the number of hours of programming entering the country from outside has fallen by roughly 80% since May, according to the Stimson Centre, an American think-tank.
The remaining broadcasters, a smattering of activist-run outfits, have transmitted in shortwave from countries including Taiwan, the Philippines and Uzbekistan. Transmitting from South Korea would make it more difficult for censors in the North to jam their signals—but the South Korean government will not allow it, laments one person involved. So now activists are scratching their heads for new ways of reaching North Koreans. One defector from the north who lives in Seoul recently launched an internet-based radio station targeting North Koreans who reside outside the Korean peninsula, such as overseas students or labourers, in the hope that listeners will relay information they pick up from it to friends and family back home.
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South Korea’s president wants to reduce tensions with the North
6 votes -
Comment on The populist revolt against cognitive elites in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/ognrV This is another essay by Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath. We've discussed his articles previously. Like some of the others it seems provocative but a bit short on...This is another essay by Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath. We've discussed his articles previously. Like some of the others it seems provocative but a bit short on specific evidence backing up his claims. Still, maybe worth discussing?
From the article:
Populism is popular because it speaks to voters in concrete terms and tells them that their first instincts—about economics and more—are correct. This year, at least one person solved the puzzle of creating a successful left-wing populist message: New York Mayor–Elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who rose from 1 percent in early primary polls to more than 50 percent of the general-election vote, explicitly promised to make groceries cheaper and freeze rents. Many Democrats would love to know how to bottle the Mamdani lightning.
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[...] Populist politicians focus on primary representations of the world, such as the price of groceries, rather than abstract concepts, such as affordability. Everyone can picture the price of orange juice or bread on the supermarket shelf. During his presidential campaign last year, President Donald Trump spent a great deal of time summoning such mental images. “Groceries, such a simple word,” he has repeatedly said by way of explaining his victory. Many liberals made fun of his rhetoric.
Mamdani was apparently one of the few to draw the obvious conclusion from Trump’s remarks, which was that instead of mocking him, perhaps the left should also be talking about groceries. So one of the major promises Mamdani made was to lower the price of groceries in New York by creating publicly owned, city-run grocery stores. Experts objected that grocery stores typically operate on slim margins and that the major costs occur further up the supply chain. Like most educated people, Mamdani probably knows this. The problem is that a supply chain is an entirely abstract concept, and so might as well not exist for the average person. Nobody gets worked up about a supply chain.
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To do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about; by and large, they must also accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, left-wing politicians struggle to find issues on which they can be authentically populist. Many of the problems that they hope to resolve, such as climate change, housing scarcity, and surging health-care costs, are complicated. This means that the policies needed to fix them are also complicated, and cannot be explained without ascending to the realm of abstraction. Slogans that resonate with the public seldom translate literally into successful policy.
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The populist revolt against cognitive elites
12 votes -
Comment on How NVIDIA turned 'gaming GPUs go brrr' into 'actually we can read the language of life now' (part 1 of 2) in ~science
skybrian LinkThis post covers the scientific background and what Google did. Apparently what NVidia did will be covered in part 2.This post covers the scientific background and what Google did. Apparently what NVidia did will be covered in part 2.
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Comment on Gift recommendations in ~life
skybrian Link ParentNit: the “kitchen tools in the shape of animals” link is a copy of one of the other links.Nit: the “kitchen tools in the shape of animals” link is a copy of one of the other links.
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Comment on Jeffrey Epstein emails show close connection with MIT's Noam Chomsky in ~society
skybrian Link ParentThanks, that article has a lot more detail.Thanks, that article has a lot more detail.
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Comment on Jeffrey Epstein emails show close connection with MIT's Noam Chomsky in ~society
skybrian Link ParentIt certainly looks bad in retrospect, but how much anyone knew about Epstein at the time probably depends a lot on circumstances that aren’t revealed in the article.It certainly looks bad in retrospect, but how much anyone knew about Epstein at the time probably depends a lot on circumstances that aren’t revealed in the article.
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Comment on Why Canada really lost its measles elimination status in ~health
skybrian Link ParentI don’t think engaging in that sort of hyperbole is at all helpful in understanding what’s going on. From the article: Maybe there’s better information somewhere else, though.I don’t think engaging in that sort of hyperbole is at all helpful in understanding what’s going on.
From the article:
To be clear, I think the PHUs are doing this, or at least the Ontario ones are. It's just the media industry that is kind of cluelessly fearmongering.
Maybe there’s better information somewhere else, though.
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Comment on Why Canada really lost its measles elimination status in ~health
skybrian LinkFrom the blog posts: ... ....From the blog posts:
None of the above texts seemed to me to be focused on the actual thing that caused Canada to lose its measles elimination status, which is the rampant spread of measles among old-order religious communities, particularly the Mennonites. (Mennonites are basically, like, Amish-lite. Amish people can marry into Mennonite communities if they want a more laid-back lifestyle, but the reverse is not allowed. Similarly, old-order Mennonites can marry into less traditionally-minded Mennonite communities, but the reverse is not allowed.)
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When the Mennonites are brought up as a cause for the outbreak, it really puts a damper on the mood. The general sentiment both in the reddit comments and in the papers seems to be something like "oh, they're weird religious people, and therefore immune to logic about vaccines", but also "well you can't say mean things about religious people", so your only choice is to like, seethe in a corner?
But in reality, Mennonite parents do not want their children to die of measles, and they do not want to contract measles themselves. It seems to me like the largest barrier for them getting medical care and vaccination is that they are not fluent in English, they speak Low German.
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If your measles outbreak comes from this sort of community, the solution isn't to fearmonger about anti-vaxxers. It is to train up and hire health care workers who can speak Low German. (To be clear, I think the PHUs are doing this, or at least the Ontario ones are. It's just the media industry that is kind of cluelessly fearmongering.)
In Alberta (another Mennonite population centre, and not coincidentally the other large site of the outbreak), there has been a 25% increase in demand for medical care in Low-German, and service has expanded from five to seven days a week.
In Ontario, three quarters(!!!!!!) of the 700 Mennonite community clients helped by a Low German-speaking personal support worker have agreed to be vaccinated.
And, like, yeah, to be clear, there are loads of Mennonites who are actually anti-vaccine. I am not disputing the obvious fact that, in religious communities, many people are against vaccinations. And 75% falls short of the 92-94% vaccination rate needed for herd immunity. But a 75% vaccination rate is much, much higher than I'd have hoped for?
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Why Canada really lost its measles elimination status
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Comment on JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentIt changes my priors a bit on what a capable engineer can accomplish using these tools. Are we going to see more libraries built this way? How about entire compilers? In some sense this is a port...It changes my priors a bit on what a capable engineer can accomplish using these tools. Are we going to see more libraries built this way? How about entire compilers?
In some sense this is a port from a Rust library to a pure Python library. Maybe we will see more libraries ported that way?
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Comment on JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentWhatever you call it, it was almost entirely written by the LLM. This part seems sort of vibe-ish:Whatever you call it, it was almost entirely written by the LLM. This part seems sort of vibe-ish:
After writing the parser, I still don't know HTML5 properly. The agent wrote it for me. I guided it when it came to API design and corrected bad decisions at the high level, but it did ALL of the gruntwork and wrote all of the code.
I handled all git commits myself, reviewing code as it went in. I didn't understand all the algorithmic choices, but I understood when it didn't do the right thing.
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Comment on JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action in ~comp
skybrian (edited )LinkThe start of the blog post: Here is Emil’s blog post about how it was written and Willison's summary:The start of the blog post:
I recently came across JustHTML, a new Python library for parsing HTML released by Emil Stenström. It’s a very interesting piece of software, both as a useful library and as a case study in sophisticated AI-assisted programming.
Here is Emil’s blog post about how it was written and Willison's summary:
[…] A few highlights:
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He hooked in the 9,200 test html5lib-tests conformance suite almost from the start. There’s no better way to construct a new HTML5 parser than using the test suite that the browsers themselves use.
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He picked the core API design himself—a TagHandler base class with handle_start() etc. methods—and told the model to implement that.
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He added a comparative benchmark to track performance compared to existing libraries like html5lib, then experimented with a Rust optimization based on those initial numbers.
He threw the original code away and started from scratch as a rough port of Servo’s excellent html5ever Rust library. -
He built a custom profiler and new benchmark and let Gemini 3 Pro loose on it, finally achieving micro-optimizations to beat the existing Pure Python libraries.
He used coverage to identify and remove unnecessary code. -
He had his agent build a custom fuzzer to generate vast numbers of invalid HTML documents and harden the parser against them.
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JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action
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Comment on Montreal’s new rail line is the future in ~transport
skybrian LinkFrom the article: …From the article:
The REM has taken best practices from around the world and gives them a made-in-Canada twist. As in Shanghai and Taipei, you board the trains through safety-enhancing platform doors. Like most modern European networks, the trains draw power from overhead wires; this being Montreal, the rooftop pantographs that connect to the wires are reinforced to break up ice on the lines. As on Japanese commuter trains, the seats are heated for winter riding comfort. And because it’s automated, it can run trains at greater frequencies—they can arrive as often as every two and a half minutes.
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Maybe most importantly, given Canada’s cash-strapped municipal budgets, the REM is being built for a fraction of the cost of comparable projects in North America. In Toronto, the Eglinton Crosstown has swollen to $13 billion, or $684 million a kilometre. The second phase of New York’s long-overdue Second Avenue Subway may cost $3.7 billion a kilometre, and current rail expansions in San Francisco and Los Angeles have gone north of $1 billion a kilometre. The construction of a five-station extension to the all-underground Blue Line, which has just begun in Montreal’s east end, has a similar price tag. The REM is being built for $140 million a kilometre—an astonishing bargain.
How is Quebec getting so much bang for its transportation buck? Typically, governments finance existing transit agencies, giving them the licence to build and operate new lines for 30 years or so. The city of Montreal ponied up $100 million to fund the stations that connect to its metro, but this isn’t a municipal project. The REM is being built by CDPQ Infra, the construction arm of the Caisse de dépôt et placement, the manager of Quebec’s massive public pension fund, which has undertaken other infrastructure projects: Eurostar’s high-speed trains, the terminals at Heathrow airport and Vancouver’s Canada Line. CDPQ Infra has a 78 per cent equity stake in the REM and will reap revenue from the service, paid out at the rate of 75 cents per kilometre per passenger, for 99 years. From the start, it was in CDPQ’s interests to keep costs down.
It did that in part by building an elevated system, which is much cheaper than tunnelling. But it also standardized design. Historically, Canadian cities seem to reinvent the wheel every time they embark on a new transit project. That’s fun for someone like me, who enjoys a little local colour when he travels, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense if your goal is to get a lot of transit built quickly. China has constructed 11,000 kilometres of urban rail transit in the last two decades in four dozen cities. It’s done this quickly and cheaply by standardizing station and network design and mass-producing metro trains. Whether you’re in Chengdu or Guangzhou, you ride one of five standard train designs. And because lines are nationally planned and engineered, a Chinese city contemplating a new transit system doesn’t need to start from scratch—they just choose from existing templates that match their particular needs.
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Montreal’s new rail line is the future
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Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentMaking a backup isn’t enough. You also need to restore it. It’s my impression that restoring data from Time Machine should mostly just work, allowing you to use the same devices and software as...Making a backup isn’t enough. You also need to restore it. It’s my impression that restoring data from Time Machine should mostly just work, allowing you to use the same devices and software as before. With Google Takeout, can you even restore back to a Google account at all? It seems like you’re stuck doing a clumsy migration to something else.
Just for fun, Simon Willison ported it to JavaScript. It took less than five hours, while he was doing other things.
The parser's output seems to be plain JavaScript objects. The AST could probably be serialized to JSON? Not sure how useful that is. Someone who uses JavaScript more could perhaps talk about whether that's a good API and compare it to alternatives. For myself, I'd want Typescript declarations, but they probably wouldn't be hard to add.
Willison writes about the implications:
The US copyright office holds that human authorship is required for copyright. More discussion here. Maybe we'll end up with a situation where an open source license can't be enforced on code that's generated this way?