infinitebit

has the estate of arnold lobel been compensated for this?

THANK YOU. I’ve always felt this way about PR review. I feel like people should write a natural language description of the change, and every section of it should link to part of the diff, and every part of the diff should be linked to by part of the description. That or just leave a comment on every chunk of the diff.

The second recursion example introduces 2 syntax features without explaining them (let, square brackets)

Oh my god thank you. I have been trying to put into words what is so draining about pair programming with claude, and “doing creative work to impart meaning to the words” is exactly it.

this seems like more anthropomorphizing. even if it has similar results often enough to be useful, next token prediction is not searching a solution space.

you even end with a paragraph saying “it’s not too dissimilar from what we do”. how is that not anthropomorphizing?

and if what we do isn’t “thinking” then what is or ever has been?

I agree with the idea that the taste, for lack of a better word, was the only thing that ever mattered. What I disagree with is the idea that slop that is “good enough” is indistinguishable from something that is crafted is “indistinguishable by the market”. I think it is indistinguishable in the short term, but very distinguishable on a long enough time span. The same way that hacked together slop has always been “good enough” to close a ticket and even get someone a promotion, but later costs the company thousands of engineering hours to rewrite once it becomes completely unreliable, slow and impossible to modify. We’re just speed running that now. It’s the same battle engineers with “taste” have been fighting with sales teams and product managers and lazy teammates before LLMs, just in fast forward.

I started toying with perlin vector fields as a level design tool for a game idea, then became more interested in visualizing them than the game they were meant to support. this weekend i realized i think im making a (short) ~game in which you control a dust mote riding air currents, trying to gather enough water to fall back to earth as a raindrop

i love this. i don’t understand why web games like this aren’t more prevalent

Does anyone here know any mathematicians who can’t do long division or basic algebra?

Probably not, because they *don’t exist because learning basic math is necessary to learn higher level math*. Whether or not we have calculators to do basic math is irrelevant if you want to become a mathematician.

I’d argue that “whether or not the average dev will be writing any code by hand in 5 years” is irrelevant to whether or not one should learn to code *if they want to master designing and building complex software* using whatever method they will be using.

I’ve recently started using PBT at work and it has been more than worth it, and I want to try Model checking next.

“The second condition falls out of the first”. Hi claude!

i don’t think anything in the article advocates for not prioritizing “single source of truth”, as in, if we know that there are multiple sources of truth for something, it should absolutely be deduped. the article is more saying “be a bit more skeptical of any two pieces of code actually representing the same thing” and “be more willing to break apart an abstraction that is trying to represent multiple truths.”

I feel this deeply. Although abstraction isn’t a one way door, “deduplicating” logic tends to be much easier than breaking big functions back down, and so these days I tend to leave a comment with the date wondering if it is too similar to some other code. then if i come across it again months later and it still is, then maybe it is safe to make it DRY.

I think DRY is the first heuristic for “good code” that most junior devs actually grasp, and so they become very dogmatic about it for a while

I love this

Ty, checking this out!

We have cross-field invariants that merging at the data structure level can't ensure (in an obvious way, at least), and "lose the semantic meaning of a conflict". The main idea behind their approach is that certain parts of the model can have custom "mergers" that are able to run business logic to maintain these invariants.

Worth noting, the decision to eschew CRDTs predates my time here, and I've pushed for a CRDT rewrite quite a bit since I believe it could be done. The other main concern they had was memory usage, but it seems like EG Walker would solve that. Our system uses a "Commit DAG", (an Event DAG by another name), and does a three-way merge using a common ancestor of the diverged documents, and so a lot of the bones of EG Walker are there, and I'm exploring ways in which we could gradually move to it.

I was about to ask where you work that you’re implementing new CRDTs and then I noticed your username! Thanks for all that you do!

I work on the live collab at my company, and using AI while coding has into recently sort of “clicked” for me. We use an (I’m pretty sure) unheard of algorithm for collaborative editing, and I’ve had a long term goal of turning it into an implementation of EG Walker, but our document model is very complex and most out of the box CRDTs don’t quite fit. Maybe Fable will be what gets me over the hump.

> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.

If this were true, shouldn’t most of the software we use be adding new features and fixing bugs at a faster rate, while becoming more stable?

Do you feel like that is happening? Do you have an example of an app (besides claude code or cursor etc) that you use that has seemed to improve more rapidly since the advent of agentic coding?

I feel so incredibly sad for your daughters. Read books to them.

So glad to see a MSM outlet take the words of an AI ceo with even a single grain of salt. I’ve been really disappointed with the way so many publications have just been breathlessly repeating what is essentially a sales pitch.

(ftr i’m not even taking a side re: is AI going to take all the jobs. regardless of what happens the fact remains that the reporting has been absolute sh*t on this. i guess “the singularity is here” gets more clicks than “sales person makes sales pitch”)

I am SO thankful to see a news outlet take what tech CEOs say with a grain of salt re: AI. I feel like so many have just been breathlessly repeating anything they say without even an acknowledgement that there might be, you know, some incentive for them to stretch the truth.

(ftr i’m not even taking a side re: will AI take all the jobs. even if they do, the reporting on this subject by MSM has been abysmal)

out of curiosity, how did you get comfortable with temporal logic? i’ve had a hard time finding good resources aside from H. Wayne’s stuff on TLA+

An app for helping groups of friends decide on restaurants, movies, etc using ranked choice voting and a Tinder esque swipe interaction for creating rankings.

Been dabbling in game dev and have been having a good time with a little sailing game that I think could be a cozy “A Short Hike” esque , but where you have to grock how (simplified) sailing works.

I think it’s worth trying for ethical coding jobs for a bit. I think with your resume you could work at a lot of places, and you may be able to rekindle passion for something that you used to love and make six figures.

I have wanted something like this for a long time but… in something besides java. Does anyone know of anything like that?

I just recently had this revelation! I a full time software dev who has dabbled in game dev for years, but i’ve always given up on ideas because i can’t make “good” art/assets. just a couple of months ago it dawned on me that i love inept/amateurish/DIY/outsider art in most other mediums (except writing maybe) and decided to just put time into to awkward crappy looking models. and i love them! now i’m just trying to create a distinctive shambolic aesthetic for my tiny games. it’s so freeing.

z

I’ve made a poll/group decision making app for my family and friends, and i’m this close to starting some sort of collaborative note/list making app because apple notes causes us so many headaches

Location: Portland, OR, USA

Remote: Yes. About 4 of my 7 years experience have been remote.

Willing to relocate: No.

Technologies: Node, Typescript, Python, Go, React, Postgres, MongoDB, AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFormation, SQS, S3, EC2)

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/marcushaddon/resume

I have 7 years of diverse experience (2 employees to 80000+, established apps and greenfield projects). I was most recently at Vox Media working on their open source commenting platform.

I care deeply about correctness, testability, and writing code that is meant to be read. I am not afraid of novel problems.

i came here to say this (specifically saving cmd line equivalents)