salutis

"I was interviewed for a job as a software developer last week and they asked me to draw a picture of a pelican riding a bicycle. Aced it, got the job as a senior software engineer."

That is the best joke I have heard this year. Ready for a stand-up comedy special. Or a song. Superb!

Not sure about "nonsensical calculation", but our brains perform computation (read: they transform information). In fact, that is what the brains are for (see: biology 101). As for mathematics, I am with Galileo: it is the language of the universe. Of course, we "invented" its silly glyphs and the like, but those are secondary. My 2 cents.

+1 I loved Seductive Poison and have it on my list to re-read.

> I've never really understood the obsession with heavily processed "glop" like Huel and stuff [...]

I've never really understood the obsession with one particular kind of food being "the true food".

> Why not just eat food?

Wait, what? Huel is food, by definition.

I am going through the same struggle but with software development.

Check out Luanti. My son pulled off his own multiplayer game, by mixing some existing mods and writing a pinch of Lua. He is not into programming, and he did not even use LLM, do it was probably not all that hard. And the result was impressive, and I say that as a professional programmer.

This is incorrect. An undecidable problem is one for which no algorithm can compute the correct result for every given instance. Probabilistic classical computation is irrelevant here.

Thank you! That was a (bad) typo. You are right, of course.

That is not how averages work. By definition of mean, perhaps.

Please do not spread lies.

"obsolete dinosaur who hasn't written a line of code in decades"

The most recent code change in Emacs by RMS was on 2026-04-22 (0fb9d096e38), so ~3 months ago. He can write complex code (without AI), such as the `cond*` macro (707 LOC, all macro code), authored and pushed to Emacs on 2024-08-02 (18491f48d97).

I left Apple Music over this. My albums would keep quietly disappearing. I spent hours on the phone with their support, and despite their promises, nothing ever changed. I left Apple Music, and then all of their cloud services as well. Today, I'm 100% Apple-free, happily playing MP3s from Bandcamp in my Emacs. :)

But there is no dichotomy, is there? Good code is code that solves the problem well. Today and sustainably into the future. What else would "good code" even mean in general context?

The "other side" of the AI craze.

This is incorrect reasoning. Science is advancing. It is like saying we should not listen to physicists because "Didn't those physicists gave us the original heliocentric system?"

No, that is plain old recursion. Dynamic programming is recursive programming with a twist. The twist is that identical sub-problems are short-circuited with memoization.

> Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, [...]

Nonsense. Coding is creative the same way mathematics is.

> Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them [...]

Nonsense. Best practices exist to make the code perform well. As a result, every user cares about them, albeit indirectly.

> That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not.

Nonsense. Intellectual passion is admirable and sexy for many. This is subjective.

For me, Emacs on Mac OS is not all that stable. I see a freeze about twice a month, which is not "very rarely" in my book. It also leaks memory, albeit now (in the upcoming version) less so. (Disclaimer: I am a heavy user and contributor.)

Fennel (Lisp):

    (table.concat [:highlighted :primary (if discount :on-sale)] " ")

Psychology is stuck in pre-Galilean era. Even if it studies "properties of thought", as you put it, it does so without formal basis, let alone understanding from first principles. As Chomsky said, about psychology and the like, "You want to move from behavioral science to authentic science." [1]

[1] Chomsky & Krauss (2015) An Origins Project Dialogue at https://youtu.be/Ml1G919Bts0

Also Fennel, both implicitly and explicitly with `tail!`.

Source: https://fennel-lang.org/reference#tail

Yes. An artificial neuron, as a mathematical function f, is defined by f(x) = g(wx + b) where x is the input, w is the weight, b is the bias, and g is some non-linear activation function. Is that "good old linear regression followed by an activation function to make it non linear"? Yes, it is exactly that.