French government is desperately in need of cash, so the tech illiterate politicians ask Cat, I Farted® for help and it gives them this.

How about an advertising tax? Every company serving ads through the internet (aka platforms, particularly the exploitive ones) need to pay up. That's Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

Conan and vcpkg are the two big ones I'm familiar with, but some projects use CMake FetchContent (with github acting as the CDN/registry), and depending on your requirements you can also just use system package managers on Linux, maybe Homebrew or Nix/Guix, or more niche ones like Spack. I've seen projects packaged using self hosted Pacman registries, and that works surprisingly well.

So you're saying PhotoCraft is okay because it counts as a clean room reimplementation of Photoshop, yet you're not commenting on whether LLM-generated code is tainted by the training data, and thus can never be considered "clean" for the purposes of clean rooming?

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of clean rooming has always been that the engineer can't have specific knowledge of the thing he's reimplementing. For example, those lawyers in that room can't describe a Microsoft product to an ex-Microsoft engineer, because that engineer has seen Microsoft's code base and may use that knowledge to inform their design. Likewise, you can't give the engineer a copy of, say, Microsoft Office's source code to use as a reference.

Yet an LLM trained on Microsoft Office's code base being used to reimplement Microsoft Office counts as a clean room reimplementation? It seems to me like the benefit of the doubt in that situation should go to Microsoft, and the engineer is the one responsible for proving they didn't use the part of the LLM trained on Microsoft code...which is impossible.

...although tbf Photoshop isn't open source, so its not obvious how much of its code exists in Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. Maybe the code leaked in the past, or maybe Adobe engineers who use Claude inadvertently shared company code, and that ended up in the training data.

(Also, for the record, fuck Microsoft and Adobe)

AI clean rooming

The only way "AI clean rooming" is possible is if the model was trained with verifiably clean room code. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc only exist because they took our work without paying or asking for permission. Anthropic has a profitable business because they're reselling the thing they built with our work. They built X with Y, but they didn't pay for Y. It's as clear an example of copyright infringement as possible.

So is your article about "clean rooming" specifically, or is that just a term you're misuing here informally to refer to LLM-powered reverse engineering in general?

I was never convinced by Meson's value proposition. From what I remember, it was always just meant to reinvent CMake with a different DSL. Like, literally just CMake but slightly different.

I understand CMake's DSL isn't the prettiest, but as far as improving ergonomics of a build system, minimizing the amount of build scripts you write is far more effective than changing the syntax. If you find yourself writing too much CMake in a project, then switching to a build system with a different design (eg Bazel, Scons, Waf, ...) is probably the better choice.

And of course, since Meson is just a CMake clone, it's always going to be compared to it, and its always going to have to compete on features. On that front, CMake has always been ahead, and I don't see that changing. So in the end, Meson is just another example of that one XKCD meme about standards.

It's not so much an LLM thing as it is a data/curation thing. Idk the specifics, but I do remember back when I used it, chatgpt occasionally presented me with multiple responses, and asked me to pick the one that I liked best. It's like how Facebook/tiktok/whatever curate your feed by examining how much time you spend eg looking at one post vs another. There's nothing inherent about LLMs that cause them to prioritize emdashes, thats all the result of extra massaging the operator has applied to the model.

This is also why I feel it's important to not focus on perceived "LLMisms" as a way to detect slop. It's extremely trivial to hide that, and the ones that don't are low hanging fruit.

This is all I can find: https://www.resetera.com/threads/psa-about-goodbye-volcano-high-and-its-writer.226357/

I wasn't sure if I hallucinated that, but good to see I was at least in the ballpark lol

There are already plenty of package manager options in the C++ world. Having an "official" one arguably only helps improve the onboarding experience, but overall it's a chokepoint for the entire ecosystem. There are rarely "one size fits all" solutions to a problem, and there certainly isn't one for a problem as complex as software builds and packaging.

Yes, CMake is crazy. And ugly. And inconvenient

How many years has it been since you last used CMake?

CMake suffers from some of the same perception issues as C++. A lot of the criticism usually boils down to the designers prioritizing backwards compatibility, a thing even critics would agree is a good thing. As an example, the OP shows a CMake and Meson snippet. The CMake one is 3 lines, the Meson one is 2. The extra line in the CMake sample is a version declaration for backwards compatibility, but the rest are identical.

If you look past your preconceived notions, you'll find that CMake is a good build system and very easy to use. It's also one of the few that fully supports C++20 modules today.

It's by no means a silver bullet, and the generator-based design isn't always the best choice, but its undoubtedly the best choice for the vast majority of C or C++ projects.

Aren't these the people that made a weird furry VN with dinosaurs that had something to do with Harry Potter rule34 fanfic featuring underage characters?

Good == you like it.

I don't like Kate personally. I use (and am addicted to) Sublime Text, but for an open source/free alternative I recommend Gram, or LiteXL. There's also one called Lapce that I thought was interesting, but I haven't looked into it in many years so idk if it's good yet.

For something more sublime-like, there's Cuda Text, but it's written in Pascal, an old/dying language, so it's at higher risk of abandonment because of a lack of contributors.