geek of programming languages, operating systems, and hypermedia platforms
Joined April 2008
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"Why is formal verification exploding NOW?"
1. Nobody understands the code LLMs write
2. Everybody hopes for some deus ex machina
Really weird seeing lots of people you thought were level-headed lose it completely due to the AI apocalypse
I love minimalistic websites, but _not_ having a link from a single page back to your site's root takes things too far.
You are a hopeless moron if you do that.
You are really making me edit the URL to go to your site's root?
Manuel Simoni retweeted
Carmack on Goose:
That looks really neat! The automatic analysis and use of multiple data stacks and resizable fields takes it from "lots of work can be done this way" to "basically everything can be".
The relative references and built in binary structure validation also enable direct memory mapping of data structures and immediate use of network data. "Parsing" file and network data is often 100x slower than it needs to be.
``George Crow, our recently hired analog engineer, interrupted Steve. "Who cares what the PC board looks like? The only thing that's important is how well that it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board."
``Steve responded strongly. "I'm gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it."
TIL that there was a "NeXTcube Turbo" and an even more powerful "NeXTcube Nitro".
Absolutely fantastic naming.
Naming is so important, and Steve and his buddies really nailed it. Apple (great), NeXT (even greater), JLG's Be (great).
LLMs are incredible at producing something that appears to work, but if you look at in detail, it's a series of Rube Goldberg machines.
I don't believe it's a skill issue on my part. They will invariably do something incredibly stupid for the tiniest challenges. I still love them, but they certainly can't program.
Thanks, building a cool humane internet is 1,000,000x more interesting than agent shit.
Yes, the internet if it was true hypertext would look like Obsidian if it was networked knowledge graph, not a personal one. The internet with a complete interest graph would look like Goodreads if it covered all canonical work, not just books. The internet with a universal typed ontology would look like Wikidata if it was self-governing, not editorial. The internet with a complete content graph would look like Pinterest if it let you curate all kinds of content—articles, websites, etc.; even users, other boards, chats, video— not just images. The internet with a complete graph would look like Twitter if sharing something was deduping it to discover it's existing commentary and connections, of anything online, and join that discourse; discover chats that engage it, and let discovery be colored by your own personal relations, not a general search but one relative to the shared taste of your peers.
Lisp syntax in particular and syntactic metaprogramming in general come with various trade-offs. It's perfectly understandable if people don't find them applicable to their use cases.
That said, Lisp's procedural macro system is an absolute pearl of PLT.
The way you can immediately use a macro once it's defined, the way macros can generate new macros, the way you can load arbitrary utility code at compile time for use by macros - all of those make this a dream environment for metaprogramming.
(It is tricky to implement though. You either need to be able to dynamically link macro code, or an additional interpreter. This is why we see stuff like non-procedural macro systems (syntax-rules).)
I fully endorse browser maximalism.
This year, millions of people who never wrote code before have begun building their own apps. In the coming years, millions more will!
I believe the majority of new apps will be web apps. Native is great, but there's way too much friction for casual developers.
For this reason, I am ultra bullish on browsers. The web will be the distribution platform of a billion empowered casuals 🤓
"Procedural metaprogramming where you can use the full language has nothing over simple textual substitution."
What are we even doing here?
Manuel Simoni retweeted
The "rewrite it in Goose" movement is already gaining steam, see here some early results of rewriting expertly written ninja/json/yaml/jq parsing in Goose and getting large speedups: github.com/calpeyser/goose-e…
Manuel Simoni retweeted
TIL that global spending on alcohol is still larger than AI infrastructure spending this year ($1.7T vs $1.5T)
One of the weirdest effects of LLMs is that people act as if writing extremely complex programs is somehow solved now.
Recently, I was talking about writing a compiler on here, and one of you suggested to "simply" write a verified compiler. As if writing a verified compiler is something that doesn't require you to be a top scientist AND crack programmer at the same time.
Somehow LLMs will do that for you, apparently. Despite there being like 1 verified compiler (CompCert) in existence at the moment. But somehow it's something that one simply does now.
Manuel Simoni retweeted
Invent type system
Make it unsound so that it’s very hard to be sure how edge cases are handled
Keep hallucinating new implementations back and forth
Make wild claims about performance
Can’t actually tell me if it type checks the same things
Mfw
