deterministic

Learning how to program from tutorials is like learning how to ride a bike from watching YouTube videos.

You kinda feel that you are learning something but you only truly learn when you have to do it from scratch.

The vast majority of people using UI's want predictability. Not "guess how this UI works!" games where you have to click on things at random to figure out how the UI works.

If you are an UI designer and want to create art then fine do that in your spare time. But at work be a professional and make the UI predictable and functional above all else.

Whatever you do don't waste your time on the "Dragon" book.

Google "recursive descent parsing" and it will tell you everything you need to know about the front-end of a compiler.

Google "My First Language Frontend with LLVM" and it will teach you the other half.

"The two bugs that were found both sat outside the boundary of what the proofs cover. The denial-of-service was a missing specification. The heap overflow was a deeper issue in the trusted computing base, the C++ runtime that the entire proof edifice assumes is correct (and now has a PR addressing)."

In other words, the code was proven correct according to spec by LEAN. Which is exactly what LEAN claims to do.

Recognise that waiting for motivation to strike is a bad idea.

Instead just get started with the smallest possible step you can just about manage to do. And then do another smallest step. A lot of times you almost automatically keep going and the motivation then arrives.

Maybe the first step is to create a basic "Hello World" application. And then a few empty functions/methods that flesh out what the app needs to do. Then maybe a few of those methods/functions are really easy to do (or AI can write them for you) so you quickly do those. Etc.

Beyond Meat might be the most ultra-processed “food” I’ve ever come across.

It's actually really simple to eat healthily: Cook yourself using real (non-processed) food. The kind of food that doesn't need a label.

You can't create and enrich nuclear materials inside a datacenter.

Hmmm I would personally pick nuclear weapons as the #1 scary tech.

And a close (non-tech) second is the ruthlessness of sociopaths seeking power.

What an excellent read. Balanced and full of real insight. How rare that is nowadays.

Different strokes for different fokes.

In 2026 I don't want to use a slow interpreted non-typed language like Python.

C++ (for example) has excellent super fast matrix libraries where you can do AxB.

Asking that kind of minutia detailed question in an interview is seriously bad practice.

It is easy to come up with questions that the author would fail in an interview. Simply because there are thousands of minutia details that most senior developers wouldn't know about.

What the interviewer should focus on is the ability to solve real world problems. For example by walking the interviewee through a real world business scenario and letting the interviewee describe how he/she would solve the problem.

What's the name of the youtube channel?

In my experience (30+ years) writing good code (and good automatic tests) makes me way more productive.

Both when initially writing the code and later when maintaining it.

Good code dramatically reduce bugs and makes the remaining bugs more visible.

I spend almost zero time fixing bugs. Because there aren't many. Not a brag. Just the truth.

Professional compiler writer here. All you really need to use is a recursive descent parser. Very easy to understand. Very easy to implement. While also being very powerful.

> that the world is fundamentally analog

Whether the world is discrete or analog is still an open problem in science. And it looks as if there is more and more evidence that the world is actually discrete at the quantum level.

> someone wins a Fields using a proof-assistant in an essential way.

Terence Tao is actively using LEAN and working with the LEAN community to prove leading edge mathematics.

When you take responsibility for your own life, and learn how to control your reactions to your emotions.

I am an avid gamer. However Factorio is the only game I have been playing for years. It is truly unique.

Just make a simple CLI adventure game:

1. Print "You are in a dark dungeon. There is a door ..." 2. Print "Your options are: 1. Open the door 2. Exit 3. Turn on ..." 3. Read a number as input 4. Goto (yes goto) similar code depending on choice.

> You may even struggle to stay married if you don't learn to confirm your wife's perspectives

Nope. You picked the wrong wife if that is the situation you are finding yourself in. My partner and I accept each others perspectives even if we disagree. I would never date a woman who can't accept that different opinions exist and that we both will sometimes be wrong.

If you can't design and implement a clean, well-structured monolith using proper modularization and libraries, you will almost certainly fail to build a clean and maintainable microservices system.

The most unmaintainable system I've ever encountered in my long career was a 30+ year-old microservices architecture consisting of over 100 processes. Even the simplest use cases had devolved into a nightmare of timing issues, fragile dependencies, and unnecessary complexity.

Yes let me repeat that it was a 30+ years old microservices architecture. There is nothing new about microservices.

Great website! It would be even more great if it compared total wind generation with total UK power usage for the same time period (with a % for wind power usage).

Another gold standard of optimization: Factorio

I use C++ instead of so called 'scripting' languages all the time. I have zero problems doing that and it is lightning fast.

Nope. The world runs on code written in C and C++. Including Python itself. There is a reason why there are literally millions of C/C++ programmers out there working on C/C++ code every day.

Wayland is such a waste of programming resources and user obstacles.

No you don't need to reinvent the wheel thank you.

He’s absolutely right. I always wait for the hype to die down before deciding whether to adopt new tech. Because most of the time, I’d just be wasting effort on something that turns out to be underwhelming.

It’s the same with games. I give them a few months for the inevitable bug fixes and balance patches before jumping in. Saves a lot of frustration. And a lot of wasted time.

There are plenty of non-games software companies that are treating devs purely.

However almost all of the companies I have worked for in my 30+ years career treated devs well.

So if you are in a shitty situation, I highly recommend finding another job instead of just placing yourself over a barrel.

Completely disagree. I have used code generation for years (way before modern LLM's) and it typically automates about 90% of the code I need to write to create an application.

However it is not AI. It is simply a program that takes a declarative spec as input and generates all the boiler plate code I would otherwise have to write by hand.

It is a huge productivity boost!

Excellent article! I learned a lot from it. Thanks!