Comment by mattstir
6 hours ago
> But the difference in memory is fundamental. The JVM can now store the values themselves in the array, laid out densely one after another: 8 bytes per point (plus a possible null flag), in a contiguous block. No headers per element. No pointers. No jumping around the heap.
How much was this article proof-read? Didn't they just get finished talking about how heap flattening won't work for objects with > 64-bit representations? Their `Point` is at least 65 bits (two 32-bit ints plus the null flag). The "plus a possible null flag" and oddly short following statements seem to suggest this was some AI that got sidetracked by trying to make emphatic statements... oh and also the "[IMAGE: the same Point[] array in two variants..." block halfway down the page is unfortunate.
> No headers per element. No pointers. No jumping around the heap.
that smells of AI [1], and thus lazy writing. I'm all in for using AI to help you write, but if you don't put your voice to it then there's no reason to read it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...
Also, the images were ruinously far off from what they intended to convey. Dude, just draw a picture by hand & take a picture of it.
You see this in all the AI generated Tik Toks. What causes AI to use such a weird construction.
I learned that exact style of writing in a marketing workshop, pre-AI. It's effective, satisfying, and a random third thing I can't be bothered to come up with right now.
As a proportion of all easily crawled text on the internet, a lot of it will be random marketing copy. That influenced the writing style of early AIs, and since then everyone has trained at least partially on transcripts from every other AI chatbot
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Wait until in 5 year's time all kids speak in rule of 3
> I'm all in for using AI to help you write
Don't be all-in. It's important for humans to be able to write for themselves, and also to stand by what's been written in their name, which is much less likely if someone/something else has done the writing.
(proofreading is another matter though.)
That particular section is indeed AI, though other parts of the article aren't: https://www.pangram.com/history/89b28cd1-58e6-4065-9f1d-111a...
I had that until I used Opus 4.8.
It stopped being infuriatingly sloppy and took time to ensure the article had integrity.
It did having said that I did burn through a lot of tokens trying to do a deep analysis cross data pipeline debug.
Exactly! But AI is here to stay. Sooner or later, even comments on HN will be 100% AI generated. And we won't be here to read them - our AI agents will. /s
18446744073709551616 possible values and you can't spare 1 for null? :)
TIL that Rust has NonZeroU64 which you can combine with Optional to get the required behaviour with only 64 bits per entry. [1]
[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/num/type.NonZeroU64.html
Especially because signed integers aren't symmetrical. Reserve INT_MIN and you get 8 billion NaN values and multiplying by -1 always gives you a valid location.
Java has always had this juxtaposition in language design where they don't want you to think hard about value types (hence no unsigned types), but the types themselves are precisely defined down to the specific bit pattern representation in bytecode. This is essentially hardcoded into the JVM and its bytecode specification and is too hard to change for compatibility concerns.
Luckily we have Valhalla, which is an admission that Gosling was partially wrong, and programmers who want to have an unsigned nullable non-zero 64-bit integral value type can just make one, and not have to pay outsized memory costs to do so.
If we're done paying homage to Gosling, can we get operator overloading for our fancy value types please? I have no idea if this is on the radar for Valhalla.
I really wanted to read this, it seems like a really interested subject. I can even forgive the AI generated images. But after a few paragraphs it became clear this was either fed through an LLM or worse.
Please, if you write a technical blog, or anything really: Stop. Stop letting the AI write for you. Nobody wants to read this.
> Didn't they just get finished talking about how heap flattening won't work for objects with > 64-bit representations
In this initial commit. As was made clear in the JEP, this is just the first deliverable of a huge feature that, like all Java features in recent years, is being delivered piecemeal. Obviously, the point is to flatten larger values (the mechanism is already in the JVM; what remains is exposing the intent of "I allow tearing" in the language).
The obviously used too much AI, I stopped after 2 paragraphs
The first two paragraphs are
> On June 15, Oracle engineer Lois Foltan confirmed what a good chunk of the industry had stopped believing: JEP 401: Value Classes and Objects will be integrated into the main OpenJDK repository and is targeting JDK 28.
> The change is so large that the remaining committers were asked to hold off on bigger commits during the integration. The pull request alone adds over 197 thousand lines of code across 1,816 files.
What in those paragraphs is obviously AI?
These days I'm having second thoughts about pictures that I am pretty certain can't be AI but just have that look. It's strange but I've noticed it happening more and more.
I mean I’m only answering that because you’re asking, nothing set me off personally there, but now that you ask:
« The pull request alone adds over 197 thousand lines of code across 1,816 files. »
I noticed that both Claude and GPT are fond of those kind of stupid accounting statements that don’t mean a lot in and of themselves, but look impressive in a « wow numbers » way. Which is kind of ironic since counting remains one of their weak points
I'm tired of people jumping in to point out "AI, AI". The article is very good and informative. That is the only important thing. Geez.
No, it’s not the only important thing. The complaints about it should tell you that.
People care about provenance a lot.
Whether it’s a drawing my daughter did of her mother, a Picasso napkin sketch, a worn 1960s Stratocaster, or an blog essay, the provenance is value on top of the correctness of the item.
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> This is exactly the moment where non-nullability stops being cosmetics and becomes a lever for performance.
Looks like they just missed the `!`. It should be `Point![]`.
I'm confused about the 2008 Bloomberg article image in the first slot... right after implying the effort started in 2014. With nothing mentioning anything in there.
Is there a way we can request a "flag as AI garbage" downvote for articles? Or should we just flag them?
I thought this was an ad bugging out. I use an adblocker. Very confusing.