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Cake day: October 2nd, 2025

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  • If you’re directly interacting with any sort of binary protocol, i.e. file formats, network protocols etc., you definitely want your variable types to be unambiguous. For future-proofing, yes, but also because because I don’t want to go confirm whether I remember correctly that long is the same size as int.

    There’s also clarity of meaning; unsigned long long is a noisy monstrosity, uint64_t conveys what it is much more cleanly. char is great if it’s representing text characters, but if you have a byte array of binary data, using a type alias helps convey that.

    And then there are type aliases that are useful because they have different sizes on different platforms like size_t.

    I’d say that generally speaking, if it’s not an int or a char, that probably means the exact size of the type is important, in which case it makes sense to convey that using a type alias. It conveys your intentions more clearly and tersely (in a good way), it makes your code more robust when compiled for different platforms, and it’s not actually more work; that extra #include <cstdint> you may need to add pays for itself pretty quickly.




  • Here’s a thought: instead of fighting this, make it a requirement to publish the prompts before making a speech. Speeches by politicians being low in information density is nothing new, and the usage of LLMs will undoubtedly make that worse, but it also means that they had to have written a terse description of the information they want to convey. If that were public, people could just read that and not waste time listening to speeches.

    It would be ironic if the first use-case for LLMs that creates positive value for society involves ignoring its output, though.


  • I will hate the game and the player, thank you very much. Even under this system, other choices could have been made that are neither illegal or financially nonviable, so Monsanto is very much responsible for the choices they did make. They’re not victims of the systems, they’re gleefully pursuing everything the system lets them get away with.

    Of course, if you want things to change, it is indeed changes to law and government incentives that need to be pursued. But in order for that to happen, you need enough people to get upset about the current state of things, and for that you need concrete examples. And it doesn’t get more concrete than this.