x should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary. - R^nRS
Nothing is more important than good abstractions.
Haskell is practical; it pays my bills. (https://www.obsidian.systems/ is where I work.)
- I know the customer's couldn't care about the quality of the code they see. But the idea that they don't care about software being bad/laggy/bloated ever, because it "still solves problems", doesn't stand up to scrutiny as an immutable fact of the universe. Market conditions can change.
I'm banking on a future that if users feel they can (perhaps vibe) code their own solutions, they are far less likely to open their wallets for our bloatware solutions. Why pay exorbitant rents for shitty SaaS if you can make your own thing ad-free, exactly to your own mental spec?
I want the "computers are new, programmers are in short supply, customer is desperate" era we've had in my lifetime so far to come to a close.
- The author should try some more modern formal methods.
Tools like Lean and Rocq can do arbitrary math — the limit is your time and budget, not the tool.
These performance questions can be mathematically defined, so it is possible.
- Yeah and that's why it's way better than the likes of TLA+.
- The problem with famous people unretiring and doing something different is they are kind of the nepobaby children of their former career arc selves. I both feel bad for him but am glad he's happier now.
Would I would really like bored FIRE people to do is advocate for shortening the work-week. The world needs to chill the fuck out, and leisure should be more abundant. Bored retirees have a unique credibility in advocating for this, and the time to do both grassroots and grasstops advocacy. (Think tanking and lobbying are descendants of the original retirement project, if you think about aristocracry as the original governmance system.)
- I didn't mean to do some snide anticaptialism. Making new Postgreses and blenders is really hard. I don't think the startup ecosystem does a very good job, but I don't assume central planning would do a much better job either.
(The method I have the most confidence in is some sort of mixed system where there is non-profit, state-planned, and startup software development all at once.)
Markets are a tool, a means to the end. I think they're very good, I'm a big fan! But they are not an excuse not to think about the outcome we want.
I'm confident that the outcome I don't want is where most software developers are trying to find demand for their work, pivoting etc. it's very "pushing a string" or "cart before the horse". I want more "pull" where the users/benefiaries of software are better able to dictate or create themselves what they want, rather than being helpless until a pivoting engineer finds it for them.
Basically start-up culture has combined theories of exogenous growth from technology change, and a baseline assumption that most people are and will remain hopelessly computer illiterate, into an ideology that assumes the best software is always "surprising", a paradigm shift, etc.
Startups that make libraries/tools for other software developers are fortunately a good step in undermining these "the customer is an idiot and the product will be better than they expect" assumptions. That gives me hope we're reach a healthier mix of push and pull. Wild successes are always disruptive, but that shouldn't mean that the only success is wild, or trying to "act disruptive before wild success" ("manifest" paradigm shifts!) is always the best means to get there.
- Grothendieck ended up totally crazy too, unfortunately. Some people might be truthers that his final writings would be made sense of someday, but I don't think that is a responsible hope to carry.
The idea that Grothendieck both massively succeeded and failed in some sort of countercultural/neurodivergent knife edge is I think the ambiguous but correct morality tale.
- Every time I refactor a bunch and then the new feature just falls out for free, I solute Grothendieck. It's baby-mode, but it's still the rising sea method.
- I know what you are talking about, but there is more to life than just product-market fit.
Hardly any of us are working on Postgres, Photoshop, blender, etc. but it's not just cope to wish we were.
It's good to think about the needs to business and the needs of society separately. Yes, the thing needs users, or no one is benefiting. But it also needs to do good for those users, and ultimately, at the highest caliber, craftsmanship starts to matter again.
There are legitimate reasons for the startup ecosystem to focus firstly and primarily on getting the users/customers. I'm not arguing against that. What I am arguing is why does the industry need to be dominated by startups in terms of the bulk of the products (not bulk of the users). It begs the question of how much societally-meaningful programming waiting to be done.
I'm hoping for a world where more end users code (vibe or otherwise) and the solve their own problems with their own software. I think that will make more a smaller, more elite software industry that is more focused on infrastructure than last-mile value capture. The question is how to fund the infrastructure. I don't know except for the most elite projects, which is not good enough for the industry (even this hypothetical smaller one) on the whole.
- We don't know what Opus 5.0 will be able to refactor.
If argument is "humans and Opus 4.5 cannot maintain this, but if requirements change we can vibe-code a new one from scratch", that's a coherent thesis, but people need to be explicit about this.
(Instead this feels like the mott that is retreated to, and the bailey is essentially "who cares, we'll figure out what to do with our fresh slop later".)
Ironically, I've been Claude to be really good at refactors, but these are refactors I choose very explicitly. (Such as I start the thing manually, then let it finish.) (For an example of it, see me force-pushing to https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/14863 implementing my own code review.)
But I suspect this is not what people want. To actually fire devs and not rely on from-scratch vibe-coding, we need to figure out which refactors to attempt in order to implement a given feature well.
That's a very creative open-ended question that I haven't even tried to let the LLMs take a crack at it, because why I would I? I'm plenty fast being the "ideas guy". If the LLM had better ideas than me, how would I even know? I'm either very arrogant or very good because I cannot recall regretting one of my refactors, at least not one I didn't back out of immediately.
- Mercatus Center...Free Press...dropping Scott Alexander amid early modern English bible translations...I get the sense that some nostalgic conservative donors want to bankroll the second coming of William Safire, with just the smallest of updates to hat-tip the modern tech right.
I did enjoy reading this, but "right branching" / "left branching" aside, this is still more soft cultural commentary than hard linguistics. Even on that level, what seemed glaringly missing was more prose/poetry distinction --- did writing change overall? is prose a new category? or did the boundary between prose and poetry shift? (e.g. maybe before rhyme distinguished poetry, and rhythm was every, and then later rhythm distinguished poetry and rhyme was optional. I'm just guessing.) "Speechified" is a funny term when poetry traditionally was meant to spoken. (Maybe a good left-coded cultural reference to balance all the right-coded ones would be the e're-helpful reminder that spoken, non-melodic poetry thus remains very much part of our vernacular culture.)
Also, if you want to make a JKV vs Coverdale distinction, please don't also skip between psalms and regular story-telling passages. Those are in a very different style regardless of translator! Better to show different translations of the same passage to prove the point, but of course that would not work so well.
For example, yes for most of the couple psalms I glanced at, Coverdale is definitely better poetry than King James, but for the most famous Psalm 23 https://biblehub.com/coverdale/psalms/23.htm https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2023&vers..., KJV blows Coverdale out of the water.
My kingdom for a linguist credentialed enough to write in, say, Quanta Magazine, with an art/literature passion on the side, to write on this topic with more precision and proof.
- Yes people want to mentally rotate, but that's not correct. This is not a "geometric" coordinate system independent operation.
IMO this is a basic risk to graphs. It is great to use imagery to engage the spatial reasoning parts of our brain. But sometimes, it is deceiving — like this case —because we impute geometric structure which isn't true about the mathematical construct being visualized.
- Nothing you write here is not compatible with regular version control systems
- Ah OK, there are workday/weekend and vacation/no-vacation cycles. Gotcha.
Well, to the extent the rich country laggards are institutional, then regulation should be more effective!
- https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html it's still going up (we are in some sort of cyclic downturn right now that I don't understand).
Next year that chart will finally cross 50%. It was a mere 30% in 2030. Developing country mobile phone networks will continue to push it higher.
All we need to do is start having rich governments mandate IPv6, and also mandate IPv4 downtime as a punishment for those that don't comply / chaos engineering for the system as a whole. Then we can quickly finish the job.
- Yes it is context dependent, but the parent comment was acting as if it was just better. I wanted to correct that.
- If you use it and stop using it, the OS cannot reclaim the pages, because it doesn't know that you've stopped. At best, it can offload the memory to disk, but this waste disk space, and also time for pointless writes.
- Morally, I think the US should be involved, but practically, we have shown ourselves to be baffoons, and Europe really needs:
1. A common enemy
2. Reason for further integration (EU-level federation is woefully incomplete)
3. Reason for heavy deficit spending, to heat up their sluggish economies
So practically, I do hope Europe does it themselves
- Desalination will be a West Coast thing. The East Coast has abundant fresh water.
- The writing style here is so belittling, and frankly stupid.
E.g. "billion is so big!", uh, I've heard of a billion before, and then comparing the value of a company to a single person's salary, as if that was very relevant.
- IMO Go itself encourages slop — whether human- or machine-written, so this guy really has no leg to stand on.
- That one is good too, yes indeed.
- If you read the lord of the rings faster, you run out of lord or the rings sooner — there's no away around this. But if you eat faster, you can just eat more food. You can eat just as long, and end up feeling just as full. There is no need to eat slower to prolong the enjoyment of flavor.
- I love em dashes — they are just so pretty. But the en dash also needs more love. 1 out of every, say, 7–15 of the hyphens I see should be en dashes instead.
- That's an intentional overcorrection for humor
- I've long wondered about this ratio! Does anyone know? I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is "no".
- The Nixpkgs example is not like the others, because it is source code.
I don't get what is so bad about shallow clones either. Why should they be so performance sensative?
- yeah, the story felt fishy without mentioning those.
- > The answer was as unhelpful as possible
Uh I think I think that's way too mean to the email. From a random web form they got some technical information, a useful CC, and offer to have a call. Not bad at all!
Also, my basic theory about hardware problems is that the problem is less that they won't share the docs, and more that even the internal docs suck. When you essentially co-evolve devices and software through many revisions of each over many years, it's easy to get a complete mess that nobody understands.
(Of course, in this specific case, DisplayLink was new, so it's maybe less of a problem.)
- I'm sympathetic to the general point, but with food, you can always just eat more! Best of both worlds!
(Of course, they were not buying it all.)