vanderZwan

Thanks for the in-depth reply, appreciate the elaboration on where you did and didn't use LLMs. Looking forward to reading the blog posts and other future updates!

Hey, that's the same one I was taught in the Netherlands in the late 80s! It seems to have been replaced with an English-style in recent decades though, is that the case in Germany as well?

Huh, I just indirectly learned from this article that the way I write a lower-case "t" in cursive is a Dutch way of doing so (edit: sollniss' comment implies it was a common style in Germany too). A quick search suggests it has been replaced with an English style of "t" in the last decades too.

I wonder if that makes my handwriting harder to read for anyone who isn't Dutch and over 40 years old.

Anyway, just bringing it up because you don't need to lift up your pen to write that kind of "t".

Search for "koordschrift" on https://primarium.info/countries/the-netherlands/ to find the illustration showing how I was taught to write it in the late 80s. It's the letter vaguely shaped like a pine tree.

So just my 2 cents: I also have an immediate "ick" reaction when I see the vibe-coded aesthetic of the website itself, expecting the worst, as well as serious ethical concerns about using LLMs at this point in history. Luckily in this case, it also was (somehow) immediately obvious to me that actual thought was put into the language, so I was willing to take a closer look to see if some genuine effort was put into it.

But be aware that a lot of people won't be willing to do that. Based on my experience in proglang chat servers and fora I'd say that most of the people with the niche interests most relevant to you (deep dives into non-standard ideas for proglang design & implementation) are in that subgroup. Especially the ones with inspiring ideas and knowledge to share.

Beyond expecting honesty about the usage of LLMs I'm not going to say anything about whether you should use them to develop your langoage or not, that's up to you. But I'd strongly advice for avoiding it in the presentation side of the language (website, whatever) at all costs, because it will get in the way of connecting with your potential audience more than it will help.

To give a point of comparison: you are undoubtedly aware of the issue that popular open source projects have with slop PRs? One problem is that it is so much harder to to see where the LLM output ends and where human effort starts. And the last part is where the actual conversation takes place! Having to filter for that is just exhausting and starts to feel disrespectful.

When I'm reading your language I want to read the part of it that is your language, not the LLM generated bits of it. The LLM aestetic and writing style of the website is an extra layer between me and your thoughts, and it's distracting the same way a chain smoker's body odor is distracting to non-smokers despite being oblivious to it themselves. If this is a language you're passionate about, and it looks like it, then I'd say it deserves better than that.

So I want to preface my next point by stating actually really like how syntax reads, hitting a sweet spot of leaning just enough into APL's symbol-focused terseness without losing the familiar structure of literally every other popular programming language ever that makes it easy to follow the code. I imagine it could be a great language to pick up for working out an algorithm with pen & paper (the best limus test for how well a language functions as pseudocode imo).

Having said that, I have my doubts about the reduced token claims because of a lack of "begin" and "end" or "{" and "}" delimiters. Surely, if your language is identation based, LLMs will treat significant whitespace as a token too, since they need to keep track of it? Which would result in an extra token per newline compared to using explicit begin/end token?

I suspect that to really optimize for tokens one would have to go the concatenative route, which significant whitespace very much isn't.

I mean the last bit is a pretty important skill regardless of safety features, especially in a country like the Netherlands.

> those who don't want to (…) spend as much money

That would generally speaking be the average Dutch person, no?

You're making it sound like the motorcycle equivalent of the original Fiat Panda 4x4 (well, except that you didn't mention anything about repairability, but you get the vibe I'm going for)

Yeah, and keep in mind most of those houses where merchant houses where trade happened at the time so there probably was a lot of loading and unloading going on everywhere.

Although, given the current-day Dutch attitude to bike helmets I wouldn't be surprised if our ancestors were just being stubborn too, haha.

Funny, I'm Dutch and have an arts degree so obviously the name Van der Heyden is familiar to me, but I didn't know he was also an engineer who modernized our firefighting systems.

Having said that, "Dutch golden age painter invented better way to pump water out of the Amsterdam canals" sounds more like someone tried to cram as many stereotypes about the Dutch into a sentence than an accurate summary of something that actually happened, haha. I'm surprised it's real history.

I feel the same as you about programming games, but can sort of see it for truckers, because surely some truck drivers picked that job because getting in the "flow" of long-distance driving appealed to them. I presume the trucking games try to appeal to exactly that feeling without, as you say, many of the actual stressors of the job.

So I can imagine it might let them reconnect with that feeling and be a relaxing experience much more easily than a programming puzzle game would let us reconnect with what we love about programming. Being a puzzle game it inherently will involve some frustration, which is the thing I want to escape from after a day of programming.

Hey, as someone born in Ghana I just want you to know I think it's pretty cool you used a Mankala-based game as the minigame this time :)

(at least, that's what I'm prematurely concluding based on ten frames of trailer footage)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala?wprov=sfla1

The hive-mind reads another history article about how self destructive the various meta-hive-minds acted over the last centuries. While the critical self-reflection is justified, it thinks the non-hivemind versions weren't much better at first, stuck in a cycle of repeatedly nearly exterminating themselves with their own wasteful toxic oxygen for 800 million years, until some of them figured out how to use it for something.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130124200735/https://www.pathe...

I think you're better off watching any of the various recordings "Performance Matters" conference talks[0] by Emery Berger to learn about all the ways that developers are benchmarking the wrong thing using the wrong techniques, and what you could do instead

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g1Acy5eGbE&t=5m3s

US drug policy is more "which population demographic uses it?" based than anything else.

Does this new proof have any practical consequences for determining if a PRNG algorithm is any good?

> Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.

I mean not using the Dutch translation of the n-word as part of your username and thinking you're clever for hiding it in a plausibly deniable way would certainly help with me believing you're arguing in good faith.

The police of Amsterdam also used to have Porsche police cars

https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/for-more-th...

Any other police departments that did this or just those two?

David Hockney has indirectly been incredibly important to me during a very difficult period of my life. Thanks to him I'm probably the only art student to ever win "Best Talk" at a conference for physics students.

Over half a lifetime ago now I tried studying physics. I failed miserably at it, and after a few years had to make the difficult decision of dropping out (it would take another 15 years before I would get the ADHD diagnosis that explained my struggles). This was nothing short of an identity crisis for me, on top of already struggling with my mental health for years, since becoming a scientist (or what childhood me thought a scientist was) had been a lifelong dream of mine.

Younger me decided to go all in on that identity crisis, I guess, since I switched to studying art. I was absolutely miserable during the first year, not knowing what I was going to do with my life and feeling like a complete loser. Oh, and my first serious relationship also ended on a very bad note around the same period. Those probably were the most depressing months of my life.

Around that time, friends from my former studies asked if I was going to join the International Congress of Physics Students again the next year. At first I declined, thinking it would just be a confrontation with my personal failures. I never even managed to get to the point of having a basic student project of my own to present a poster or talk about!

Then our art history teacher showed us a documentary about the Hockney-Falco thesis[0]. Which argued that the jump in realism shown by Renaissance painters was due to them secretly having access to optical aids like the camera obscura long before they officially were considered to be known to European cultures. A topic that bridged art and science.

And then, maybe as a response to being sick and tired of how I was feeling sorry for myself, I "decided" I that was going to hitchhike to ICPS 2008 in Krakow[1], meet another cute hitchhiker on the way to have a brief summer romance with, give the best talk of the conference using the HF thesis to illustrate differences between art and science, and then live happily ever after.

Absolutely ridiculous of course, but I needed a goal to keep me going. I'm actually quite introverted and used to be terribly scared of giving presentations, or anything that would draw attention to me really. Realistically I just hoped a few people would show up and enjoy the talk. But as a weird kind of self-help occupational therapy (and probably also out of fear) I went all-in on preparing the talk when not at school.

I tried to cram every sprawling thought on the topic into the talk, ending up with about 120 slides. I had 20 minutes for the presentation. Instead of doing the sensible thing of cutting down on content (did I mention I would get an ADHD diagnosis a 15 years later?) I ended up doing dry runs multiple times in the mirror with a clock, figuring out where it needed rewriting and reorganization slides to make the story flow better, and so on. Oh, and of course each slide had to have at least one joke too.

Hitchhiking from the Netherlands to ICSP 2008 ended up being a lot of fun, but no romance sadly. Then I ended up being really grateful to past me for obsessively preparing, because instead of a handful of friends showing moral support for the art weirdo like I expected, the auditorium was completely full. To my own surprise I wasn't scared because I had prepared my material so much. And the audience loved it, to the point of my talk being picked as best talk of the conference afterwards.

And as a cherry on top I met a cute Polish hitchhiker on the way home who also felt like having a brief summer fling :).

As for the "lived happily ever after" bit, obviously life still has its hardships, but yes, I'm generally happy with my life now. Because that personal success was the first time I started actually believing my life could get better, and it on average has had an upward trajectory ever since as a result.

So thanks, Hockney, you never knew me but in a way you probably saved my life, and it wasn't even with your art (love your collages though!)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080215014752/http://www.icps.a...

Yeah, ages ago I read in a book about evolution that mammalian genes are actually simplified (or optimized, if you will) compared to amphibians because we don't have to accomodate as wide of a temperature range due to being warm-blooded and giving live birth.

I also recall seeing in a documentary that the temperature of crocodile eggs will determine if it's a male or female. Wikipedia seems to back that up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_dete...

I'm sure it does and you have my sympathies, but your situation would not be a reason to let Texas freakin' Instruments off the hook. They're not exactly "a small company", and I wouldn't be surprised if the $5k would have been cheaper than dealing with the response to this, so this just comes across as incompetence on their end.

Well, as far as I understand it's pretty much a given that it happened underwater or underground, to protect against cosmic radiation and other harsh conditions averse to lifeg so that's not really a "what if" unless you meant something else than I think you did.

Mind you, "soil" as we know it did not exist before life was there to create it. Geology as it exists on Earth does not exist on lifeless planets.

Well I wasn't about to spend hours looking up sources and details specifying this hypothesis. All I remember now is that it's one that's taken seriously.

There's a hypothesis that sign language evolved before vocal languages, and that the latter "took over" as the default because it's energetically much more efficient. There's lots of circumstantial evidence but of course it's impossible to ever conclusively prove. This feels like another data point in favor of it.

Yeah, one of the cool things about sign languages that most people don't realize is that it's spatial, and that allows it to be more "parallel" compared to vocal languages because its "information channels" (e.g. two hands, facial expressions and "whole body language") can be placed side by side inside that space.

Of course spoken language also has multiple channels (e.g. tone and sound) but they still lack the spatial aspect.

Apparently, people who pick up sign language later in life commonly typically make what is known as a "split verb error", where they structure their signs sequentially like vocal languages when they should do those things simultaneously.

Now I wonder if mixed Italian-Dutch children have two different forms of communication by gestures. Would be interesting, especially since neither are true sign languages.

Nah, food comas are noticeably different, at least for me. Plus I also had this drowsiness at student parties where I whs the only sober guy (because tee-totaller) while everyone got tipsy, and no food was involved either.

Well, this is probably a thing where humans are very diverse in their subjective experience.

I'd say this is definitely a noticeable thing with small children at family gatherings, birthday parties and the like. But I grew up in a household where both of my parents came from families where big family gatherings with even extended family was common, and I know not everyone has that kind of experience, so who knows how much of that is nature or nurture as well.

In my case however this has persisted well into adulthood: despite being a chronic insomniac who has a really hard time falling a sleep normally, at these types of social gatherings I often have to fight off falling asleep precisely because I feel comfortable and safe among friends and/or family (I wonder if that is in any way related to my ADHD).

Well, at certain angles you actually get very noticeable gaps in the strawberry that are visible when rotating it, but almost invisible when static. I think it's mostly due to that.

Oh nice, thanks for the tip! Don't know if I can justify picking up a copy given that I do not work with C++ at all nor with large-scale systems. But I know a few people who might be interested.