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Cake day: August 7th, 2025

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  • They lucked into it. They made their cards for gamers, and various groups, AI researchers, bitcoin miners and others, discovered that they those gamer GPUs were really good for other tasks too. I think it took a while before Nvidia started making specialised cards for those purposes.

    I can’t really blame them for serving that market that they just lucked into. I can and will blame them for their terrible Linux support.



  • This does sound very interesting. I should have said the debuggers I’m familiar with don’t do it. Or if they do, I have no idea how.

    Certainly setting breakpoints on certain conditions instead of just a line, would help a lot. Being able to step backwards through the execution even more so.


  • I can also see the variables change by logging them.

    Debuggers are great if you want to see in detail what’s going on in a specific loop or something, but across a big application with a framework that handles lots of things in unreadable code, multiple components modifying your state, async code, etc.; debuggers are a terrible way to track what’s going on.

    And often when I’ve found where it goes wrong, I want to check what was happening in a previous bit of code, a previous iteration or call. Debuggers don’t go back; you have to restart and run through the whole thing, again finding exactly where it went wrong, but now just a bit before that, which is often impossible.

    With logging, you just log everything, print a big warning where the thing has gone wrong, and scroll back a bit.

    Debuggers are a fantastic bit of technology, but in practice, simple logging has helped me far more often. That said, there are issues where debuggers do beat logging, but they’re a small minority in my experience. Still useful to know both tools.











  • I’ve found it’s pretty good at refactoring existing code to use a different but well-supported and well documented library. It’s absolutely terrible for a new and poorly documented library.

    I recently tried using Copilot with Claude to implement something in a fairly young library, and did get the basics working, including a long repetitive string of “that doesn’t work, I’m getting error msg [error]”. Seven times of that, and suddenly it worked! I was quite amazed, though it failed me in many other ways with that library (imagining functions and options that don’t exist). But then redoing the same thing in the older, better supported library, it got it right on the first try.

    But maybe the biggest advantage of AI coding is that it allows me to code when my brain isn’t fully engaged. Of course the risk there is that my brain might not fully engage because of the AI.





  • Are you sure about that 3000? I thought at the time it was mostly the 6th year of the rule of some king, emperor or governor (Herod, Augustus or Quirinius, most likely), although the Bible doesn’t even provide those kind of dates.

    As far as I’m aware, having a single universal reckoning is something that Christianity invented in the middle ages. But still based on the rule of Jesus as king, of course.


  • I’m a Christian in the Calvinist tradition, but I try to follow Jesus more than Paul. Paul was in my opinion very much a pragmatic who tried to spread Christianity in Greece, and was willing to compromise a bit with Greek sensibilities (which included slavery and misogyny). When in doubt, I look to Jesus instead.

    Also, I think Calvin went a bit too far overboard on some things. The reformation was a good thing, but that doesn’t make him right about everything.