There are lots of literal degens (undeveloped, unrefined, lacking any sense of beauty and elegance) who keep parroting the stupid mantra “syntax does not matter” or “syntax is not important”, or “it is a mater of individual prurience”. Idiots. There is a universal human notion which we call [careful and even obsessive] “attention to details”. In certain cultures this part is very prominent, and one can tell. Every neurologically normal person could name that particular country. Other countries had either brief periods of such “enlightenment” in their past, that can still be observed in traditional architectural and art forms, or have some occupations in which attention to details is the paramount, like that long lost German automobile engineering in the 70s and 80s. ...

There are some philosophical “ideals”, which has been identified since antiquity and to attainment (or approaching of) which people are striving ever since. To see things as they really are. To do things just right way. To find an optimum or a “perfection” Perfection has been famously defined as “when there is nothing else (more) to take away (to remove)”. Modern meme-based socially-constructed (by retarded majority) social concensus frown upon “perfectionism” and sees it as the inhibition to “getting shit done”. They are not wrong, though. Approaching a perfection (finding a local optimum) is a very different process from just putting together some slop. Yes, indeed, “perfection is the enemy of good-enough”. ...

There are lots of hysterical complains in the social media gutters, like /g/, about Leetcode and apparent uselessness of such math-based drills.. Nothing can be further from the truth. First of all, every remarkable programming achievements of the past, be it of NASA missions, or of Bell Labs, or of Ericsson, or some academic breakthroughs like ML or Scheme or Haskell – they all are due to the fact that the only way to have access to a computer used to be through mathematics, applied and even purely theoretical. The early Computer Science was basically considered, and especially taught at good schools, as applied math. It should remain this way(but, unfortunately, everything has been ruined). ...

“The Darwin Gödel Machine: AI that improves itself by rewriting its own code” https://sakana.ai/dgm/ There is what is actually going on. A model trained on a large amount code is, in principle, no different from any other LLMs – it is just a statistical model that predicts the next token based on the previous ones. It does not understand the code it spews out, it does not “know” what it is doing. These are just mathematical procedures (not even functions) – given an input encoded in a particular way, it produces an output, not even the same for the same input. ...

Some midwit tried to be clever, and other midwits applauded. The top story on Lobsers. https://lobste.rs/s/y13fa3/poor_man_s_types Replying with the Djikstra “presense, not the absense” quote would be too easy. There are two principal distinctions. First how type-classes (in Haskell) can formalize and systematize so-called duck-typing (walks like a duck, quacks like a duck) for the most general mathematical notions, such as equality, ordering, etc. This alone would have been enough to ever rise this bullshit again. ...

A product-type is a generalized notion of having a bunch of things at the same physical locality (or proximity) – this and [also] that. This is what molecules are. A sum-type is a generalized abstract notion of having this-or-that (either-this-or-that, and NOT both). This is, among other things, a “fork” on a path – never both can be taken (except when backtracking). These notions are enough for everything and they are our basic building blocks. ...

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1925710474366034326 I have read the notes. they are a mess. For me, Carmack, aside from being a legend, is sort of Goggins of imperative procedural programming, who learned everything by doing without studying the theories first. His ultimate strength is, it seems, in a focused doing, ploughing through a problem, if you will, without being exceedingly dramatic. Learning from experience (actual trails and errors and quick feedback loops) and gradual improvement of his own “emergent” intuitive understanding – ones own mental model of how things should be done. ...

Yes! yes! https://thewayofcode.com/ > Free from intellect, free from abstraction I see. Some humanties and liberal arts majors are staring in wonder and awe at changing complicated symmetrical patterns. Many such cases. So this is a new cult forming right before our eyes. Now I got what is the thing about so called vibe coding – it is the appeal to exactly that kind of “arty types” (highly emotional, without habitual critical thinking, incoherent, undisciplined minds of generally low IQ, who usually follow all the emotionally charged esoteric bullshit) so they could “create” without knowing, leave alone understanding. ...

On the very auspicious occasion of the th Buddha Jayanti it is good to show that his teaching – to see things as they are – still cuts through and illuminates the darkness of ignorance. The praise of an intuitive knowledge, which is based on attentive observations with a quiet mind, to capture the common and recurring patterns, properly generalize them and abstract away the irrelevant details by capturing the “essence” as an abstraction and then to give such abstraction a name. This is not just how mathematics “works” (came to be), but it is a more general and universal process, which is behind not only a human language (which is prior to any math), but how the brain structures has been shaped (trained) to match some aspects and constraints of the shared environment in which it happen to evolve. ...

What is so “natural” about Gentzen’s “Natural Deduction”? It is that our brains are conditioned by the Environment In Which We Happen To Evolve, and the environment is governed by what we call the Law of Causality, which has been captured in the East by the Buddha’s “Dependent Origination principle” and even more precisely by Modus Ponens in the West. When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases. ...