Cost can be much greater than either foldl or foldr
5,611 karma · joined August 30, 2017
Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/ashton314
GitHub: https://github.com/ashton314
Blog: https://lambdaland.org
> If you ask a professor what qualifies them do they say their research or their pedagogical skills?
The majority will say “both”, unless they’re teaching faculty in which case they’ll say pedagogy. Source: I spend a lot of time around professors.
I don’t know any students personally who think they’d be better off with an AI professor. I know a lot of current college students.
> I’ve probably thought about this much longer than you have.
All I can say is that that is a strange argument to attempt.
> Students can and will learn better with ai “professors” than they do now.
No, that’s not true. You have no evidence to suggest that.
> The problem is that higher education is not about learning ultimately.
It is, actually, and many institutions do a good job of this. Some don’t, but they’re not all just degree mills.
Even though this programming language is absolutely nowhere in any large language model’s training set, they have so far done extremely well at extrapolating from the small set of examples I’ve given it when I need an agent to generate some tests or whatever for me.
We use floats as a trade-off between speed and accuracy. IEEE 754 is a very reasonable trade-off for a wide range of applications, but if you can figure out where you need to trade speed to get more accuracy with e.g. one of the methods mentioned here, Herbie's gotcha covered.
I remember seeing some research about switching between formats, but I don't have anything to cite right now.
Step two: close the LLM
Step three: pick up a pen and write
Writing with LLMs is a great way to make yourself stupid: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2026-08-07-ai-writing-stupid/
I'm glad the OP acknowledges that you have to have to do the writing yourself—though they say this more as a means to avoid getting pegged as having used an LLM, whereas I see the problem as being cognitive surrender.
CeTZ is a really good package, but I still reach for a tool like Omnigraffle if I need to make a really complicated diagram.
Some concrete suggestions from me:
- Fira Sans [2] is a lovely, legible sans-serif font that's free and incredibly easy-to-read. This would make a fine body font.
- Source Sans [3] is another good sans-serif that might be closer to your current font. It's about as readable as Fira, but it's a little less warm imo.
- Make your line length a little narrower and your line spacing (i.e. leading) just a hair wider—that will do wonders for readability.
Definitely check out Practical Typography for more tips from a real professional.
Thanks for the blog post!
[1]: https://practicaltypography.com/
But if the built-in is working for you, no need to change it. Now that use-package supports the :vc keyword, there’s imo much less of a compelling reason to use Elpaca and the like.
No shade on wgrep, mind you—I used that for a long time and it's been one of my favorite tools. But now I just… don't need it. It's so nice being able to do consult-ripgrep -> export results to a buffer -> change to edit mode -> search-and-replace project-wide.
I kept Elpaca out of Bedrock because I wanted a strictly built-ins-first experience, but if anyone asks what I use when they outgrow package.el, Elpaca is my first and only recommendation.
I hope Bedrock is useful to some people. :)
Here’s a better link for Fira Sans: https://carrois.com/fira/
Also, if you have Fira Sans installed on your computer, you can use it in Slack with `/slackfont Fira Sans’
With the Artificial Inanity systems and the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies (ROBE) beginning to spew tremendous amounts of crap (a technical term) onto the Ret, things are getting tricky for us ITA.
We need subject experts, not McKinsey consultants.
Turnstile relies on the fact that in Racket, you can have identifier macros [1] which can be expanded in pretty much any location (except binding, naturally). Racket is unique in this regard. Clojure has a mechanism to get roughly the same thing, but it's complicated. [2]
1: https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/pattern-macros.html#%28pa...
2: https://lambdaland.org/files/2024_ecoop_type_tailoring.pdf
This is the gotcha: in stateful environments you'll have state-space explosion so big you'll have to come up with some compromising measure of "equivalent". You're right that that would constitute a proof by exhaustion of correctness. Unfortunately in practice it's entirely impractical.
For those curious, there are a lot of neat ways to implement choreographic programming! Choral uses a custom compiler which gives it very powerful analysis techniques. Some are libraries and have to rely more strongly on host language features to work. My library uses macros to embed the language directly into Elixir which gets you a bit of the advantages of both: https://github.com/utahplt/chorex
Quote:
You might say, “Well, if AI gets good enough and the product is the same, what’s the difference?” The difference is that the books aren’t the product. They aren’t the art--not completely. And this is the point. The most important thing to understand is that the process of creating art makes art of you.
My friends, let me repeat that. The book, the painting, the film script is not the only art. It’s important, but in a way it’s a receipt. It’s a diploma. The book you write, the painting you create, the music you compose is important and artistic, but it’s also a mark of proof that you have done the work to learn.
Because in the end of it all, you are the art.