schindlabua

Coding used to be a super creative and rewarding thing for me, and now I do 0 of it. Does this mean I produce less code, or hate my job because I can no longer "do the problem solving" that gave me so much joy? No -- it's the opposite on both accounts and I can actually tackle much larger problems now.

If anything, proof abundance should speed up discovery, and mathematics will be fine. What is happening now is just a massive shock to the system so understandably people are upset.

(It's also understandable why AI companies are strip mining open maths problems. "Solve P=NP" is crazy hard, but still a simple prompt, with a verifiable solution. You don't get that this often outside of maths.)

Thanks! I might just reword that section or leave it out to not spread half-truths then. I'm really not very solid on either CoC or ZFC.

Haha wow, thank you that's very kind. I didn't really expect to make it to the front page today, feels like people are entering my flat when I haven't cleaned up in a while haha.

Ooqui inspired me to start a series on Colour actually. As a dev you'll naturally know a thing or two about colour or perception but this guy goes deep and it's super fascinating content I agree. Super unique too, I've never heard about most of the stuff he researches before.

I'm working on a series about milk at the moment but I'll get back to colours eventually, there's a lot more to tell there :) Will make sure to give color spaces and gamut special treatment!

I used plain Opus. Will check out Claude Motion though, thanks for mentioning it!

Thanks for the feedback. The idea was to create something between a youtube video and a blog post and something you can consume in bite-sized pieces. I'd like the visuals to do most of the talking but I guess parser combinators came out with a lot of text anway. I'll try to tighten up the UI some and get a smaller phone for testing.

Thanks! The site is going through a redesign so some things aren't perfect yet, I'll keep it in mind next iteration :p

Parser combinators are stronger than pure regular expressions but I'm not sure how they compare to the non-regular regexes we use in programming (PCRE etc)

Good input. Since we're working in typescript a partial parser can always throw an exception (It's what the parsimmon library does aswell I believe). I decided not to get into those technicalities too much!

Nova Rock is mostly camping on and inhaling dry dirt, camping in and being covered in mud, not going to the toilet for 2-3 days, and eating canned food. But I hear you.

Austria is a small country but festival-wise it does host a couple superlatives -- Donauinselfest as the largest festival in the world, Novarock being the largest rock festival depending on how you count. And then theres so many great other festivals in austria and the surrounding countries, big and small.

People keep raving about burning man so I kind of want to go but I wonder whether I'd just be slightly disappointed. Or whether it's an american media influencing europeans thing where expectations become overinflated compared to what we have here.

parse json?

const x = await fetch(...); await x.json();

"intercept" code that runs before every request?

const withAuth = (res, options) => fetch(res, { ... do stuff here });

I've been using apt for 20 years too and was never a fan of it, canonical repos are never up-to-date and managing ppas is a pain. Yes I'm very hype about nixOS (and that's a rare thing for me), but it is just really really good.

I understand that "just check it out" is not the best advice because the setup cost to using nixOS is really high, and the learning curve is really steep, so it's not like you can give it a whirl for a few hours to experience the workflow. But believe me, once you are used to it, it just so so much more convenient. I'm currently managing my dev laptop, home PC, a WSL, and a hetzner server all in the same repository (allowing for a lot of code reuse). Everything is super orderly and split into modules, everything is declarative, I can roll back to a previous build of my system if I mess up installing nvidia drivers or iwd or bluetooth etc.

It's also not like installing software is harder than with apt (oftentimes it is easer, `programs.firefox.enable = true`) so after you've paid the setup cost there is just no downside. It's a bit like react vs jQuery, or Kubernetes vs hand-written deployment scripts.

Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!

Fair point but I've stopped trying to declaratively manage stuff in nix that has its own idiosyncratic state management. That way youre just using nix to run an installer.

After having done the switch to nixOS, I can confidently say that managing a system any other way (like with apt/brew + 20 handwritten bash scripts) really is neanderthal technology and nix is superior in every single way.

It's also great for the AI era, copilot is really good with that stuff.

I do leave PR commits separate. In my teams I don't set up pre-commit hooks altogether, unless others feel strongly otherwise. In projects where they are forced upon me I frequently --no-verify hooks if they are slow, as the linter runs on save and I run tests during development. CI failing unintentionally is usually not a problem for me.

I would reckon cleaning up your branch before opening a pull request is good practice. I also rebase a lot, aswell as git reset, and I use wip commits.

Slow hooks are also not a problem in projects I manage as I don't use them.

This might be a me problem but I extensively manipulate the git history all the time which makes me loathe git hooks. A commit should take milliseconds, not a minute.

I was thinking that he's describing implementing an initial algebra for a functor (≈AST) and an F-Algebra for evaluation. But I guess those are different words for the same things.

According to the wayback machine, the change happened somewhere between Oct 7 and Oct 10. Interestingly there are no recorded snapshots on Oct 8 and Oct 9, perhaps the redesign caused a couple days of outage.

Haha hey lyc! I didn't forget, you guys were second family! You taught me a lot about maths and code, not sure where I'd be without you :) Learnt more while messing around with fractals and gfx than in all my time at uni.

Honestly I try not doing much computer stuff in my free time because I'm doing so much in my day to day but I'll stop by some time! I've been in the Chaotica discord for years but never said hello.

Fractal flames is such a cool algorithm. They're what got me into programming many moons ago :)

Did the switch to NixOS a few months ago on my Thinkpad and ChatGPT worked wonders. I'm not very experienced with Linux distros and have been an Ubuntu user for a long time. I don't think I'll be switching away from NixOS anytime soon, it's great.

The learning curve is still extremely steep but after the initial 10 hours of googling it just all falls into place.

Also he's literally The Flashbulb of 2000s IDM fame. Some people are really just good at everything.

Except making employers do only easy things will make them stagnate. People who do nothing but simple CRUD apps over and over won't even be particularly good at making CRUD apps... whereas the guy who builds an Unicode font renderer in his free time always seems to write better code for some reason.

Getting better at your job is not just a "personal want" but very much something that the employer appreciates aswell.

Of course reinventing the wheel isn't good in corporate because the reinvented wheel is buggier than the ready made npm package but employers should go out of their way to find hard problems to solve that they can pass to their employees. It's called a growth opportunity.

I probably spend 30% of time on refactoring. Deduplicating common things different people have done, adding seperating layers between old shitty code and the fancy new abstractions, adding friction to some areas to discourage crossing module boundaries, that sort of thing.

For some reason new devs keep telling me how easy it is to implement features.

Really wonder why that is. The managers keep telling me that refactoring is a nice-to-have thing and not necessary and maybe we have time next sprint.

You just have to do it without telling anyone, it improves velocity for everyone. It's architecture work on the small scale.

Hilariously dumb

I totally just verbalize my inner monologue, swearing and everything. Sometimes I just type "weeeeeeeelllllll" and send it, to get more LLM output or to have it provide alternatives.

It might sound weird but I try to make the LLM comfortable. Because I find you get worse results when you point out mistake after mistake and it goes into apologetic mode. Also because being nice puts me in a better mood and it makes my own programming better.

vibe coding as it were :p

I think you're supposed to let the AI write the bad python code and then do the refactoring yourself. No way I'm letting the AI make changes to 150 files with tons of cross-concerns when I don't even fully understand it all myself unless I dig into the code.

That being said copilot and chatgpt have been a 40% productivity boost at least. I just write types that are as tightly fitting as possible, and segregate code based on what side effects are going to happen, stub a few function heads and let the LLM fill in the gaps. I'm so much faster at coding than I was 2-3 years ago. It's like I'm designing the codebase more than writing it.