Grad student here. The paper-reading experience on an iPad is vastly superior to a laptop, and I've got an aging iPad Gen 8 that doesn't have enough storage to upgrade. I run the Zotero iOS app and it's absolutely perfect for annotating papers and keeping my bibliography organized.
In undergrad my iPad was far and away my favorite note-taking device. Digital pen-and-"paper" beats laptop for 99% of note taking.
Ghostty is extremely performant. I had a bug in some concurrent software; when I added logging the bug would disappear because the threads acquiring the lock on STDERR was sufficient to make the bug go away. On Ghostty this happened fast enough that I was able to reproduce the bug.
Maybe I should have been writing everything to a file. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, I didn’t think of it at the time and Ghostty saved me.
It was running BC. I had high hopes for switching to CS because I'd heard the same thing you had, but when I tried it, HN slowed to a crawl. This stuff is so unpredictable.
Arc uses mutable cons, but Racket has immutable cons. So it's a problem.
In Racket BC mutable and immutable cons use the same struct at the C level, so both are quite fast and almost interchangeable, if you cross your fingers that the optimization passes don't notice the mess and get annoyed (somewhat like UB in C).
In Racket CS immutable cons are implemented as cons in Chez Scheme, but mutable cons are implemented as records in Chez Scheme, so they are not interchangeable at all.
Arc used a magic unsafe trick to mutate immutable(at the Racket level) cons that are actually mutable(at the Chez Scheme level) cons. The trick is slow because the Racket to Chez Scheme "transpiler" doesn't understand it and does not generate nice fast code.
One solution is to rewrite Arc to use mutable cons in Racket, but they are slow too because they are records in Chez Scheme that have less magic than cons in Chez Scheme. So my guess it that it will be a lot of work and little speed gain.
[Also, ¿kogir? asked a long time ago in the email list about how to use more memory in Racket BC, or how to use it better or something like that. I think he made a small patch for HN because it has some unusual requirements. Anyway, I'm not sure if it was still in use.]
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The takeaway is that mutable cons are slow in Racket.
I mean… GitHub's uptime story has been getting worse…
I hear you and you're right that Codeberg has some struggles. If anyone needs to host critical infra, you're better off self-hosting a Forgejo instance. For personal stuff? Codeberg is more than good enough.
For the doubters replying here, Codeberg really is on average faster than GitHub. It's great. Objective measurements here: https://forgeperf.org/
Codeberg does suffer from the occasional DDOS attack—it doesn't have the resources that GH has to mitigate these sorts of things. Also, if you're across the pond, then latency can be a bit of an issue. That said, the pages are lighter weight, and on stable but low-bandwith connections, Codeberg loads really quickly and all the regular operations are supper zippy.
What I think after looking at these numbers is that we need to take the nuclear option - a native (no web stack at all) code review client. Seconds (times 100 or so for one larger review) are not in any way an acceptable order of magnitude to discuss performance of a front-end for editing tens of kilobytes of text. And the slow, annoying click orgy to fold out more common code, a misfeature needed just to work around loading syntax-highlighted text being insanely slow. Git is very fast, text editing is very fast, bullshit frameworks are slow.
I don't think that it would take great contortions to implement a HTML + JS frontend that's an order of magnitude faster than the current crapola, but in practice it... just doesn't seem to happen.
> “All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because gen AI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,” Joe Liemandt, Alpha School’s “principal” and the founder of Trilogy, the company that owns many of the apps used by Alpha School, said in a podcast interview published last year.
I wonder if this fellow has ever read a serious book. I'm skeptical.
I'm highly skeptical of someone bragging about barely reading a book year to then say AI is going to disrupt education as an authoritative voice. Do you honestly know any teachers or have children in public education? These takes are truly baffling. It's right up there with believing InfoWars as sound politics.
edit: to try and sound "nicer," would anyone seriously take any advice about software engineering from someone who uses a WYSIWYG editor? That's how the above comment reads.
>and it is infinitely better than a book or a teacher.
why do you think that?
>The student could move at his/her own pace and can ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.
You're assuming there's a driven student who already knows what they wish to pursue. Even in college I wasn't entirely sure what domain in tech I wanted to explore.
You're also assuming or dismissing the other factors a teacher offers. Networks, parental guidance, wisdom of how to navigate through college or a job market, or simply as emotional pillar in ways parents can't always be.
Most of all, teachers teach you to understand bias and expand your viewpoints past any one given source. That's why I read the parental review of this school on top of this piece. It seems against current coporate interests to offer that. There's no one clear answer to everything out there, but AI wants it to appear as so.
> Around 20 non-fiction and technical books in about 15 years
That's not lot, mate. Maybe more than the average American unfortunately, but I consider a year where I get through 2–3 books a slow one. And that's just reading I do outside of my job. What matters, of course, is both the quality and quantity of what you read. The short of it is, your attempt at building your ethos has fallen pretty flat here.
> AI is going to disrupt the whole academia [sic]
Yes, it has and it continues to. I'm not arguing against that. Joe Liemandt said that "all educational content is obsolete", which presumably includes not only textbooks like SICP or Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation (just listing some CS textbooks because I'm in CS) but also great works of literature and philosophy that are important texts like The Odyssey or A Tale of Two Cities. If he meant to exclude such texts from the umbrella of "all educational content", well, then that's telling too. :)
> …it is infinitely better than a book or a teacher.
Maybe for someone who struggles with literacy or who hasn't had the pleasure of a good teacher. If you really believe this I'd like to see you try to substantiate your claim.
> The student could move at his/her own pace…
The article is about a grade school kids who, most of the time, need a little pushing to reach their full potential.
> …ask questions if stuck which no book or teacher could deliver.
… you're saying that LLMs are better than teachers because you can ask LLMs questions and not teachers?! Also, asking questions isn't the only component of learning. A good teacher will know when to not answer a question (or ask one!) and let the student stew and think about it.
I'm not saying AI can help with education. It can—it helps me!—but no hallucinating stochastic machine will have the human insight that a good teacher has. It's not a replacement.
I did. You just don’t read enough to be able to understand. Up the count a little this year since there’s still a lot of time and you might reach comprehension.
I still find books valuable because they give you a structure and physical location to anchor learning. They give you an overview of the whole topic you're interested in.
Whenever I need to learn a new topic I always try to buy a book on the subject because it so much faster to have someone do the scaffolding for you than trying to be 'self-directed' about it. It also give some confidence that you aren't leaving big holes in your understanding.
What? The textbook+teacher combo literally provides exactly that.
The textbook allows you to move at your own pace, acting as a structured reference and practice tool that you can review endlessly outside of class.
And the teacher can answer any questions you've confirmed you're not able to resolve on your own with the textbook. Some in class, some during office hours/before or after class, and some via email.
I have long conversation threads on highly specialized topics and I’ve never found learning about something so easy. He’s right but it has to not be self directed in some way because that takes motivation and you cant expect that from every student.
> I need to know there was intention behind it. That someone wanted to get their thoughts out and did so, deliberately, rather than chucking a bullet list at an AI to expand.
In undergrad my iPad was far and away my favorite note-taking device. Digital pen-and-"paper" beats laptop for 99% of note taking.
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