Testing interacts with your dopamine system, so you will a small yay! every time all tests passed. This is crucial, because motivation tend to decays exponentially and to experience inevitable “crashes” after spikes. TTD is sort of a direct consequence of type-driven (or “types first”) approach to prototyping. Ideally, each type is associated (in an one-to-one correspondence) with each distinct concept in the problem domain, at an appropriate level of abstraction. ...

Maybe it is time to settle this discurse once and for all, and move on. Recently I asked Deepseek (otherwise amazing), Grok (a meme) and Gemini about idiomatic way of enabling syntax highlighting in blocks of code, which may appear in an eww or nov modes. What they all give me is some stylized pasta from StackOverflow and Github about polymode and mmm-mode and how to use regexps to find particular blocks and to apply some low-level function on a range. ...

Reading less social media bullshit and using ones own well-trained mind sometimes helps to clarify complex and noisy topics. Here is why, in principle, any LLM coding (I cannot call this crap “programming” because there is no uderstanding involved) will always yield sub-par bullshit. LLMs operate on tokens, which are abstract numbers, if you will. Parts of words of a human language are being associated with a distinct token, and then a probabilistic graph-like structure is created out of these tokens, using a fundamental back-propagation algorithm. ...

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. ...