kagevf
kagevf on Hacker News
> "helping people win"
That's a great way to put it!
From the Abstract Heresies blog: "Githack is a Lisp object store that uses Git as its backend."
Posted by
kagevf on Monday September 07, 2026 @08:40PM
from the funcall.blogspot.com dept.
For sure. Its code output is definitely not to be fully trusted. Oftentimes, you can point at where it made a mistake and it usually fixes it too.
> That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
True, and to my point, "popular" isn't necessarily "better".
> because they are so standard and are good enough, using them massively eases the burden of making, buying and selling powered appliances
Yes, but LLMs can do the heavy lifting when analyzing the "better programming languages" for productivity. There will be a bias toward popularity in their training sources, though.
> Next up is demonstrating the AI is more productive with better programming languages.
That actually would be pretty exciting!
But, wouldn't AI be biased toward more popular languages, since those will by nature of their popularity provide more sources for training material?
Even still, the AI could demonstrate which algorithms or maybe patterns and techniques are more productive, in the context of the popular languages.
Apparently, the Series library offers that. It didn't make it into the ANSI standard, but it's still maintained and covered in CLtL2.
edit SICP has examples on how to implement streaming (in Scheme).
From what I've seen, "AI" is typically written with the "Roman" (latin) letters, or translated as 人工知能 (AI) or as 生成AI (generative AI like LLMs).
Wikipedia is right; the romanization is just matching how it's rendered in kana.
I think your post pretty well illustrates how LLMs can and can't work. Favoriting this so I can point people to it in the future. I see so many extreme opinions on it like from how LLM is basically AGI to how it's "total garbage" but this is a good, balanced - and concise! - overview.
One approach would be to write code first, then run it by AI to get a critique. I think that strikes a good balance between avoiding atrophy and still getting the benefits of the tool.
If I create an executable with SBCL's save-lisp-and-die then run that executable, it presents a repl. Not really a development scenario, but more of a "running application" scenario. But, even then, if the executable creates a swank server, I can connect to that from SLIME.
When I saw the headline, I thought it referred to "Q" the array programming language (looks like your first link).
I didn't know about M-? ... I like how if there's only 1 match it automatically jumps to that single reference. :)
I liked the convention of putting the TLD in parentheses after each link.
Posted by
kagevf on Monday May 19, 2025 @02:19PM
from the european-lisp-symposium.org dept.
> "Anything with non-deterministic output will have this.
Anything with non-deterministic output that charges money ...
Edit
Added words to clarify what I meant.
> EDIT: It has been brought to my attention that these misclicks/mistaps are a source of ad revenue
haha ... looks like "follow the money" applies yet again to get to the root cause ...
Thank you, I'll check it out!
I like LoL alright too. I was only maybe a year or so into CL when I read it, so I didn't really notice a lot of what it's criticized for. On the one hand, I'm a little sad that I see it bagged on so much (that link from beach's site, IRC, reddit) since I felt I got decent enough value out of it, but OTOH it's good and healthy to point out problems.
The abstractions used in Calendrical Calculations sound good - and echo what I've seen elsewhere - so, based on your comment I'm now more likely to read it, so thank you for that.
My opinion of LOOP started to change when I read (the much maligned) "Land of Lisp" and went over that "periodic" diagram in TFA. Seeing the elements of LOOP broken down like that went a long way to get me to overcome my original aversion to it.
Sometimes harsh language is required to help the customers realize how ungrateful they truly are.
Care to share your .emacs? :)
> There is no such thing as an LLM 'session'.
This matches my understanding too, at least how it works with Open AI. To me, that would explain why there's a 20 or 30 question limit for a conversation, because the necessary context that needs to be sent with each request would necessarily grow larger and larger.
Maybe consider adding a highlight to the search term in the (filtered) text.
I do not.
These days I would reach for a shell script for general scripting, filling in the gaps with maybe a C# console app or something in Common Lisp if I want/need some interactivity.
Something that happens pretty frequently is I'll take information I've written into an emacs org doc and run it through a CL function, whose output could be an org mode table which I can from there export to a different document format if necessary.