To be fair it is really, really mentally taxing to be a young person who cares. You’re surrounded by a world that doesn’t. Everything is constructed to reward you if you simply stop. The effort to care is immense and the rewards are meager. The impact you can have on the world is so, so limited by your wealth, and wealth comes so, so easy if you just stop caring.

But you can’t. I mean, you can’t. If you stopped you wouldn’t be you anymore, it would destroy your soul. But it is gnawing. You could do the grift just for a bit. Save up $10k, maybe $20k. That’s life-changing money. How much good would it do to your family? Maybe you can forget that there are other families, ones you can’t see, that would be hurt. Well no. You can’t. You are better than that. And for that you will suffer.

Building a compiler that parses C correctly is one thing. Building one that produces fast and efficient machine code is a completely different challenge.

Ye, the former can be done in a month of non-full-time work by an undergrad who took Compilers 101 this semester or in literally a single day by a professional, and the latter is an actual useful product.

So of course AI will excel at doing the first one worse (vibecc doesn’t even reject invalid C) and at an insane resource cost.

I checked yesterday and it was there, can confirm

and people keep telling me this shit is good

I mean, this one is really good, I got like half an hour of jokes with my friend off it

Oh for fuck’s sake

why does engineer have to commute in the first place

What, do you expect our serfs to be unsupervised at home? Preposterous.

But unlike those that have fallen to hubris I am built different and should be immune to disinformation!

Thank you.

Edited the post after it came to my attention I got duped, I got had, I got bamboozled by a liar

EDIT:

I’m removing the image (keeping the original text for posterity), but I just completely got had by someone straight up lying.

It’s quite embarrasing, I should’ve been way more skeptical of someone posting an image without sourcing the original paper. Turns out not only is it not a recent paper at all (published June 2025), not only is that table not saying what he claims it’s saying, but the authors have since removed that table altogether from revised versions of the paper!

That’s what you get from reposting someone who has “The Finance Newsletter” in his fucking username, couldn’t have gone well for me.

The moment I’ve learnt chuds like Musk and Sammy Boi treat the speed of light as just a thing that they can solve with sufficient computational power I started treating all their claims like a 5yo talking shit. It’s really all you need to know about them.

He outside tho

Given it’s the Moon a better comparison would be a Greenland colony in EU5 where it costs gold initially and then costs your precious sanity, as you are doomed to ship tonnes and tonnes of food and materials there for centuries because there is nothing fucking there and the whole endeavour was a huge mistake.

Wow, I also now found the migrating to codeberg post. I should revisit Zig.

Wait so they figured how to use renewable energy to create something that still generates emissions? Is this a ploy to get Trump on board with renewables?

It’s one topological sort, implemented here. What could it cost? Ten lines?

This one idk, some of it could be more concise but it also has to build the graph first using that weird seemingly custom hashmap as the source. This function, however, is immensely funny

There’s a standard algorithm for new backends, NOLTIS

I think this makes it sound more cutting-edge and thus less scathing than it should, it’s an algorithm from 2008 and is used by LLVM. Claude not only trained on the paper but on all of LLVM as well.

We’re Still Early never dies

I wonder what actual experts in compilers think of this.

Anthropic doesn’t pay me and I’m not going to look over their pile of garbage for free, but just looking at the structure and READMEs it looks like a reasonable submission for an advanced student in a compiler’s course: lowering to IR, SSA representation, dominators, phi elimination, some passes like strength reduction. The register allocator is very bad though, I’d expect at least something based on colouring.

The READMEs are also really annoying to read. They are overlong and they don’t really explain what is going on in the module. There’s no high-level overview of the architecture of the compiler. A lot of it is just redundant. Like, what is this:

Ye dude, of course it doesn’t depend on the IR, because this is before IR is constructed. Are you just pretending to know how a compiler works? Wait, right, you are, you’re a bot. The last sentence is also hilarious, my brother in christ, what, why is this in the README.

Now this evaluation only makes sense if the compiler actually works - which it doesn’t. Looking at the filed issues there are glaring disqualifying problems (#177, #172, #171, #167, etc. etc. etc.). Like, those are not “oops, forgot something”, those are “the code responsible for this is broken”. Some of them look truly baffling, like how do you manage to get so many issues of the type “silently does something unexpected on error” when the code is IN RUST, which is explicitly designed to make those errors as hard as possible? Like I’m sorry, but the ones below? These are just “you did not even attempt to fulfill the assignment”.

It’s also not tested, it has no integration tests (even though the README says it does), which is plain unacceptable. And the unit tests that are there fail so lol, lmao.

It’s worse than existing industry compilers and it doesn’t offer anything interesting in terms of the implementation. If you’re introducing your own IR and passes you have to have a good enough reason to not just target LLVM. Cranelift is… not great, but they at least have interesting design choices and offer quick unoptimized compilation. This? The only reason you’d write this is you were indeed a student learning compilers, in which case it’d be a very good experience. You’d probably learn why testing is important for the rest of your life at least.

This could be regarded as a neat fun hack, if it wasn’t built by appropriating the entire world of open source software

This shouldn’t be left merely implied, the autoplag trained on GCC, clang, and every single poor undergrad who had to slap together a working C compiler for their compilers course and uploaded it to github, and “learnt” fuckall