jasory

bc can handle extended-precision integers, unlike bash which maps them to floats.

These might be of interest to software developers but it's all just style nothing here actually effects the computation. The problem I encounter with LLMs is that they are incapable of doing anything but rehearsing the same algorithms you get off of blogs. I can't even successfully force them to implement a novel algorithm they will simply deny that it is valid and revert back to citing their training data.

I don't see LLMs actually furthering the field in any real way ( even if by accident, since they can't actually perform deductive reasoning).

I think that there are certain attitudes that mainly occur to people outside the domain. Like how people endlessly shit on open-source projects, but few of those people are ever actually at the wheel of one.

Not hentai but "Anubis", the webscraper deterrent has an anime girl and it looks quite unprofessional, and what's worse is something like balancing Anubis' scales would be a much better image than a girl with a magnifying glass.

If what the original commenter said is true about simply replacing keywords with another string, then it's questionable if they are actually learning anything about language design or demonstrating skill.

"Take them at their word"

Who? Has there been a survey of contributors?

"Genuinely think that coreutils would be better if it were written in Rust"

I feel like the skill-level of the contributors is high enough that they would not be so naive.

Programs in different languages can compile to the same machine code. Any advantage would be in language constructs. But if you already have an existing C implementation what advantage do you do from a Rust implementation?

I personally write in 3 languages: Rust, C++, and Fortran ( or rarely SPARK). I don't port my code across languages, because there is no advantage. If I wanted it better, I would work on my existing codebase.

Porting really only helps if the original language was hindering development, deployment or runtime. These arguments don't really hold with C, a fast, low-dependency language that is more widely used than Rust.

Being written in Rust has mixed effects. Rust is still less mainstream than C, so fewer people can contribute. However, it does attract more interest because it's different.

However, the reasons why you create/contribute to new-but-similar projects is to add functionality that the original project doesn't have. By nature a coreutils replacement has to behave like coreutils or else it will break many configurations. This severely limits the functionality you can provide. So why are people (and Canonical) contributing so much labor to something that still doesn't function as intended?

I say it's the licensing. I say this as someone who regularly gets requests to change the licensing of my software (more than any feature request). I think licensing is a big deal, and most software devs recognize that.

You are fixating on the incorrect premise. I noted that it was started a decade ago as a analogy for how labor intensive the project is. A project that by design has to mirror the behaviour of coreutils.So why are people investing the time in this? What makes it worthwhile? It's the permissive license. If uutils used GPL individuals would instead try to contribute to the much more utilised coreutils, where their contributions would be guaranteed to have an impact.

Edit: Some of the earlier issues date from 2013, so it has been a decade, although it probably was very obscure at the time.

I'm fairly certain that people who advocate for teaching ethics, only do it under the assumption that people are being taught to do what the proponent wants. In reality learning ethics is just learning different theories of ethics.

The only code generation assistance I use is in the form of compilers. For fun I tried to use the free version of Chatgpt to replicate an algorithm I recently designed and after about half-hr I could only get it to produce the same trivial algorithms you find on blog posts even with feeding it much more sophisticated approaches.