This week I learned 3

This week I learned 3

February 14, 2025

Addiction, using LLMs to migrate old codebases and locales

Addiction

Addiction? Yeah, I know - not what you’d expect on a technical blog. Though, anecdotally, if you look around, there are some high caliber programmers who struggled with addiction at one point or another - so there is some connection (grasping at straws here). Also, there is a lesson on the meta level.

A friend suggested I watch a TED talk from Johann Hari about addiction (sincere thanks and all credit to Nat!). To get the gist, you only need the first five minutes - go on! That’s more important, than the ramblings of some random internet dude. If you haven’t given addiction much thought, this talk will change the way you think about it. Pinky promise.

For the people who don’t have time (why are you still reading?), here’s my one-sentence summary: While genetics and familial predispositions play a role, a severe contributing factor to addiction is a (perceived) lack of (social/worldly) connection.

I haven’t researched deeply - just a quick glance - and while there seems to be some criticsm of Johann Hari’s methods (especially of his later books), there does not seem to be a disagreement that a lack of connection does have an effect. Most critics seem to debate, how strong that effect is and caution against dismissing genetic and familial factors, but the point still stands.

For me, the idea that loneliness/a social disconnect might be a contributing factor wasn’t even on my radar before. That changed my perspective tremendously and allows me to consider whether an addicted person feels lonely, which deepens my empathy - that is seldomly bad.

Now, on the meta level: My favorite pieces of knowledge are those, where you only need to remember a few basic facts and can derive the rest logically on the spot. To me, this is a good example. Remembering the summary from above, I can derive, that building or strengthening a community is probably a good idea. I might also derive, that a contributing factor on why AA works, might be building a community. Additionally, I might derive, that legalizing all drugs without reinvesting the resulting financial gains into community building or supporting addicts is probably a bad idea.

What are those facts for you?

Roc goes Zig

The Roc language will switch from Rust to Zig as its implementation language. There was also a Zig Showtime about this with Richard Feldman.

For me, the most interesting three observations about this are:

Richard hoped, that LLMs could prove quite useful in rewriting from one language to another, because they are inherently very good at it.
A reminder about how a quick feedback loop is invaluable and a 300k LOC codebase is comparatively slow to compile with Rust.
In the past, I said, that you should have really good reasons, to rewrite an entire project from scratch. However, in the Zig Showtime episode, Richard rightly pointed out, that compilers almost always get rewritten from scratch at least once.

I found the first point to be particularly enlightning, because maybe LLMs could be helpful in migrating old codebases, that only work on that one laptop in the office. Of course you need to review and do prompt engineering and all the other shenaningans, however, if that works in at least 80% of the cases, it could be quite powerful.

Locale issues

I have been using sed in a script for some time now to auto generate branch names, based on issue titles. However a co-worker mentioned, that my script struggled with German umlauts. He then found out, that you need to set LC_ALL=C sed -r 'do stuff' for [^a-zA-Z0-9] to work correctly.

So now this works (thanks Max!):

$ echo "fäeoö" | LC_ALL=C sed -r 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9]+/ /g'