Oh for sure. To be fair, that excerpt I posted is probably the worst in the entire book since Sammann is explaining something using a bunch of ITA ~~jargon~~ bulshytt and it’s meant to be incomprehensible to even the POV character Erasmas.
5,617 karma · joined August 30, 2017
Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/ashton314
GitHub: https://github.com/ashton314
Blog: https://lambdaland.org
Good reason to be careful. Maybe there's a bit of an upside to: if you vouch for someone who does good work, then you get a little boost too. It's how personal relationships work anyway.
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I'm pretty skeptical of all things cryptocurrency, but I've wondered if something like this would be an actually good use case of blockchain tech…
“After we left Samble I began trying to obtain access to certain reticules,” Sammann explained. “Normally these would have been closed to me, but I thought I might be able to get in if I explained what I was doing. It took a little while for my request to be considered. The people who control these were probably searching the Reticulum to obtain corroboration for my story.”
“How would that work?” I asked.
Sammann was not happy that I’d inquired. Maybe he was tired of explaining such things to me; or maybe he still wished to preserve a little bit of respect for the Discipline that we had so flagrantly been violating. “Let’s suppose there’s a speelycaptor at the mess hall in that hellhole town where we bought snow tires.”
“Norslof,” I said.
“Whatever. This speelycaptor is there as a security measure. It sees us walking to the till to pay for our terrible food. That information goes on some reticule or other. Someone who studies the images can see that I was there on such-and-such a date with three other people. Then they can use other such techniques to figure out who those people are. One turns out to be Fraa Erasmas from Saunt Edhar. Thus the story I’m telling is corroborated.”
“Okay, but how—”
“Never mind.” Then, as if he’d grown weary of using that phrase, he caught himself short, closed his eyes for a moment, and tried again. “If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.”
“Asamocra?”
“Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction. Don’t even bother trying to parse that. The acronym is pre-Reconstitution. There hasn’t been a true asamocra for 3600 years. Instead we do other things that serve the same purpose and we call them by the old name. In most cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase transition to occur in the reputon glass—never mind—and another day after that to make sure you aren’t just being spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation. The point being, I was not granted the access I wanted until recently.” He smiled and a hunk of ice fell off his whiskers and landed on the control panel of his jeejah. “I was going to say ‘until today’ but this damned day never ends.”
“Fine. I don’t really understand anything you said but maybe we can save that for later.”
“That would be good. The point is that I was trying to get information about that rocket launch you glimpsed on the speely.”*
(EDIT: Thanks sparky_z for the correction of my spelling!)
Location: Salt Lake/Utah Valley, Utah
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Possibly
Technologies: Elixir, Ruby, Julia, Haskell, Rust
Résumé: https://lambdaland.org/resume.pdf
Email: mail@wiersdorf.dev
(This is a Strong Bad reference for the younger kids here.)
I've been a paying member for a few years now. Part of it is for the storage (PDF packrat here) but mostly because I want to support development. Please consider supporting them if they help you in your work—they're worth it. https://www.zotero.org/storage
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Real quick: I'm a PhD student and I'm looking for an internship this summer. I've done a little work with gradual typing—working with TypeScript would be super cool! I don't see a good way to contact you on your profile, hence this reply; if you've got an opening for an intern on your team, I would be very interested in applying. My email is on my blog.
Thanks again for reading my post!
Anyway, I wrote a little more about that here: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2025-08-04_artifical_inanity/
Intent matters a ton when reading or writing something.
Wow! That is an incredibly good reason. Thank you very much for telling me something I didn’t know. :)
UPDATE: I've added a paragraph talking about the ability of rust-analyzer. Thank you again!
This is significant because UNIX V4 was the first version to be written using this newfangled language called C. So exciting!
(Any experts on formal verification please correct any inaccuracies in what I say here.)
The upshot of it is that C, C++, and Rust permit too much behavior that isn’t capturable in the type system. Thus, the properties that you’re interested in are semantic (as opposed to syntactic; type systems turn semantic properties into syntactic ones) so Rice’s theorem applies and there’s no computable way to do the analysis right.
Good question. This is the holy grail. This is what everyone in PL research would love. This is where we want to get to.
Turns out a language as “simple” as C has sufficiently complicated semantics as to limit rigorous analysis to the basics. One example is loop analysis: it’s very useful to know that a loop will terminate eventually; if a loop is modifying some state and—worse—if the iteration variable gets modified—kiss your analysis goodbye because mechanically synthesizing strong pre- and post-conditions becomes insurmountable. It’s not an engineering challenge. It’s a math/pure CS theory challenge.
The site is really fun: at the bottom you can change the body text from Valkyrie to Equity, Concourse, etc. (these are all fonts that he made).
His books are made with a Racket-based publishing system called Pollen. I've used it a little bit and it's nice: it's incredibly flexible, so you have to do a lot of work to get what you want out of it, but it also doesn't confine you.
He's made some gorgeous typefaces: https://mbtype.com/ His license is far and away the most permissive non-OFL license I've encountered: buy the font once for the lowest price I've seen in a professional font, and then you can use it pretty much everywhere indefinitely. So nice.
I use two of his typefaces (Valkyrie, similar to Palatino, and Hermes Maia, a sans-serif based off of a German typeface) on my blog so you can see it in action: https://lambdaland.org/
You can probably get the proportions you want if you find a way to tweak the line spacing (also possible by adjusting the `leading` option in `private-build-plans.toml` and rebuilding).
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/174310#discuss...
I had the same issue too, and this was the only thing that fixed it for me.
Everyone who’s produced something good, beautiful, or valuable has had to struggle. That’s just the way work works.
It’s not just the end product that matters. The process and intent behind its genesis matters too.