This is exactly how I write code. I never engineer anything until I have to. I don't try to get rid of code duplication until it works. And I try to be as "least clever" as possible.
I've worked on a playout system for broadcast television. The software has to run for years at a time and not have any leaks, We need to send out one frame of television exactly on time, every time.
It is "C++", but we also follow the same standards. Static memory allocation, no exceptions, no recursion. We don't use templates. We barely use inheritance. It's more like C with classes.
I worked on the same for many years; same deal - playout system for broadcast, years of uptime, never miss a frame.
The C++ was atrocious. Home-made reference counting that was thread-dangerous, but depending on what kind of object the multi-multi-multi diamond inheritance would use, sometimes it would increment, sometimes it wouldn't. Entire objects made out of weird inheritance chains. Even the naming system was crazy; "pencilFactory" wasn't a factory for making pencils, it was anything that was made by the factory for pencils. Inheritance rather than composition was very clearly the model; if some other object had function you needed, you would inherit from that also. Which led to some object inheriting from the same class a half-dozen times in all.
The multi-inheritance system given weird control by objects on creation defining what kind of objects (from the set of all kinds that they actually were) they could be cast to via a special function, but any time someone wanted one that wasn't on that list they'd just cast to it using C++ anyway. You had to cast, because the functions were all deliberately private - to force you to cast. But not how C++ would expect you to cast, oh no!
Crazy, home made containers that were like Win32 opaque objects; you'd just get a void pointer to the object you wanted, and to get the next one pass that void pointer back in. Obviously trying to copy MS COM with IUnknown and other such home made QueryInterface nonsense, in effect creating their own inheritance system on top of C++.
What I really learned is that it's possible to create systems that maintain years of uptime and keep their frame accuracy even with the most atrocious, utterly insane architecture decisions that make it so clear the original architect was thinking in C the whole time and using C++ to build his own terrible implementation of C++, and THAT'S what he wrote it all in.
I worked on a pure C system early in my career. They implemented multiple inheritance (a bit like Perl/Python MRO style) in pure C. It was nuts, but they didn't abuse it, so it worked OK.
Also, serious question: Are they any GUI toolkits that do not use multiple inheritance? Even Java Swing uses multiple inheritance through interfaces. (I guess DotNet does something similar.) Qt has it all over the place.
The best example I can think of is the Win32 controls UI (user32/Create window/RegisterClass) in C. You likely can't read the source code for this but you can see how Wine did it or Wine alternatives (like NetBSD's PEACE runtime, now abandoned).
Actually the only toolkit that I know that sort of copied this style is Nakst's Luigi toolkit (also in C).
Neither really used inheritance and use composition with "message passing" sent to different controls.
I take this back ;-) People come up with crazy things. Still I would not call this "C thinking". Building object-oriented code in C is common though and works nicely.
This is a good point. It would be better for me to say pure abstract base classes... that simulate interfaces in C++. That said, I can say from experience that Qt does more than multi-inheritance with pure abstract base classes. I think the QPainter class is mixed into a few places, and that class is fuckin' major -- it is responsible to paint every (cross platform) pixel in the whole framework.
it is also interesting that places where you would expect to have quite 'switched-on' software development practices tend to be the opposite - and the much-maligned 'codemonkeys' at 'big tech' infact tend to be pretty damn good.
it was painful for me to accept that the most elite programmers i have ever encountered were the ones working in high frequency trading, finance, and mass-producers of 'slop' (adtech, etc.)
i still ache to work in embedded fields, in 8kB constrained environment to write perfectly correct code without a cycle wasted, but i know from (others) experience that embedded software tends to have the worst software developers and software development practices of them all.
"Generate a Pac-Man game in a single HTML page." -- I've never had a model been able to have a complete working game until a couple weeks ago.
Sonnet Opus 4.5 in Cursor was able to make a fully working game (I'll admit letting cursor be an agent on this is a little bit cheating). Gemini 3 Pro also succeeded, but it's not quite as good because the ghosts seem to be stuck in their jail. Otherwise, it does appear complete.
As a serial DIYer, I respect the engineering depth here, especially the custom vector index, but I disagree on the self-hosted ML approach. The innovation in embeddings is just too fast to keep up with locally without constant refactoring. You can actually see the trade-off in the "girl drinking water" example where one result is a clear hallucination.
Currently (Semantic) ML model is the weakest (minorly fine-tuned) ViT B/32 variant, and more like acting as a placeholder i.e very easy to swap with a desired model. (DINO models have been pretty great, being trained on much cleaner and larger Dataset, CLIP was one of first of Image-text type models !).
For point about "girl drinking water", "girl" is the person/tagged name , "drinking water" is just re-ranking all of "girl"s photos ! (Rather than finding all photos of a (generic) girl drinking water) .
I have been more focussed on making indexing pipeline more peformant by reducing copies, speeding up bottleneck portions by writing in Nim. Fusion of semantic features with meta-data is more interesting and challenging part, in comparison to choosing an embedding model !
The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate. Manufacturers can stick with tempered glass if they beef up the side curtain airbags enough to prevent ejection, which is exactly what happens on a lot of base models and rear windows to keep BOM costs down. The list of brands using laminated glass is accurate, but it applies mostly to their premium trims or front rows only.
There is also the issue of fleet turnover. With the average age of US vehicles pushing 13 years, the install base is still overwhelmingly tempered glass. Writing off the tool entirely because new luxury cars have moved on ignores the reality of what people are actually driving. You are statistically much more likely to be trapped in a 2012 Civic than a 2025 S-Class.
The smartest thing to do would be to check your car’s windows for any indication (the AAA report, page 19, cited in the article has examples) of whether they’re laminated or tempered. AFAICT, whether my new-ish Subaru Ascent’s windows are laminated depends on location (front or rear) and installation differs between the Ascent trims. Best to check for your specific car and where you’re likeliest to be sitting.
If you can afford an 2025 S-class you can afford to fly for medium distance travel, you probably aren't slogging out a long commute because you live in one of those rich inner suburbs. You leave the house at reasonable hours and get home at reasonable hours, etc, etc.
There's all sorts of stuff that's just a proxy for generalized correlation with wealth and wealthy lifestyles.
> The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate.
Nope. The article states the following just after the table:
> It's true that not all automakers have switched over to laminated glass for the side windows; the FMVSS 226 law stipulates that you can get around it if you install elaborate side airbags that also prevent ejection.
As the grandparent points out, although the article says that, the actual regulation does not. The regulation says you have to prevent side ejections, it doesn’t say how. You can read it yourself:
> Ejection mitigation countermeasure means a device or devices, except seat belts, integrated into the vehicle that reduce the likelihood of occupant ejection through a side window opening, and that requires no action by the occupant for activation.
Lamination and side airbags seem to be the way it’s usually done today, but nothing prevents a better way.
I like to ask "Make a pacman game in a single html page". No model has ever gotten a decent game in one shot. My attempt with Gemini3 was no better than 2.5.
Something else to consider. I often have much better success with something like: Create a prompt that creates a specification for a pacman game in a single html page. Consider edge cases and key implementation details that result in bugs. <take prompt>, execute prompt. It will often yield a much better result than one generic prompt. Now that models are trained on how to generate prompts for themselves this is quite productive. You can also ask it to implement everything in stages and implement tests, and even evaluate its tests! I know that isn't quite the same as "Implement pacman on an HTML page" but still, with very minimal human effort you can get the intended result.
It can be, but the more specific context you can give the better, especially on your initial prompting. If it is opaque to you who knows what it is doing. Dialing in the initial spec/prompt for 5 minutes is still important. Different LLMs and models will do better or worse on this and by being a human in the loop on this initial stuff my experience is much higher quality, which indicates to me, the LLM tries, but just doesn't always have enough info to implement your intentions in many cases yet.
It made a working game for me (with a slightly expanded prompt), but the ghosts got trapped in the box after coming back from getting killed. A second prompt fixed it. The art and animation however was really impressive.
The only intellectual property here would be trademark. No copyright, no patent, no trade secret. Unless someone wants to market the test results as a genuine Pac-Man-branded product, or otherwise dilute that brand, there's nothing should-y about it.
That's a valid point, though an average LLM would certainly understand the difference between trademark and other forms of IP. I was responding to the earlier comment, whose author later clarified that it represented an ethical stance ("stealing the hard work of some honest, human souls").
In a sense, they already do, since they're heavily invested in CoreWeave. For those unfamiliar, CoreWeave was a crypto company that pivoted to building out data centers.
It's interesting to se the market try to do anything to rally. The problem is you guys are rallying on the thought that you've scared the Fed into cutting rates, but actually by rallying you short circuit it. You ensure they won't cut. And that's how the market's lillypad hopping thinking is actually just stupidity. You rallied, so now there are no rate cuts so the crash will be even more brutal.
I wonder if the senior dev actually said LLM, or at least meant LLM. If he said that, most of this checks out. The only thing is that they don't have to be stochastic, but in practice they almost always are.
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