Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 28/09/2026I created an AI model that takes ANY software system and produces a TLA+ model that satisfies ALL its properties. Software engineering is solved forever! 2322
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 17/09/2026Someone on LinkedIn has extremely low expectations of my wife, my grandmother, and Donald Knuth 5640
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 29/07/2026To make sure it looked good in print, I did five proofs. The printed version actually its own complex toolchain to build, as it needs different fonts and margins than the ebook PDF while still preserving 1-1 page compatibility. I think the results are worth it, though! 190
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 17/06/2026Does anybody have ins at Google marketing? I NEED to know how who was in charge of making sure this car miniature had A Chrome advert on it and how much Google had to pay (I believe the actual car had a Chrome advert, too, but surely they have to negotiate the merchandise, too?) 171
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 21/05/2026Apparently books need a publisher label to be professional looking so now I'm mocking up injokes 0100
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 13/05/2026The alleged problem is this section, where he says that the American TypeFounders Association defined a point as exactly .013837 inches, citing a NIST document. But NIST is codifying existing use, so they had to get it from SOMEWHERE. So what primary source gives that definition of a point? 110
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 23/04/2026I've been using .ttf fonts for the pdf because they zoomed in and out better. Then I got a printing proof and hoo boy that looks gross. This is 10x magnification but 1x also looks bad So now I need to make two versions of the book, one with .ttfs for screen reading and one with .otfs for printing 160
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 25/03/2026First proof run of Logic for Programmers! It found a lot of formatting issues that need to be fixed, but the book inches ever closer to being an actual physical book. Obligatory PDF link logicforprogrammers.com 0221
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 25/02/2026Every rich person's nightmare is that they will somehow have to give something back to society 3231
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 24/02/2026"Do not cite the 'IBM Systems Sciences Institute study' as evidence, as it does not exist. Also The IBM Systems Sciences Institute study proves we're right." 330
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 28/01/2026Logic for Programmers has now passed 50,000 words, making it officially the longest text I have ever written. 1450
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 24/01/2026One more basic misunderstanding of the problem domain: "if a problem takes O(n^3) to solve, it must take O(n^3) to verify a solution" Our best algorithm for solving 3SAT is ≈O(1.4^n) (n being number of variables). That's exponential. But we can CHECK IF A SOLUTION IS CORRECT in linear time. 1290
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 24/01/2026Then we get to the paper and... hoo boy. The central claim is that LLM output has O(n^2) computational complexity (n being input length), meaning it cannot solve problems harder than O(n^2). Later they give the example of printing all length k binary strings, which would take 2^k steps. 1271
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 21/01/2026The gist of it is that A left join B is the inner join unioned with all the records of A where *no* B matches the join condition. This is one of the few ways to introduce universal quantifier into a SQL query. I've got a longer explanation in the next version of *Logic of Programmers* 120
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 21/01/2026Why are Venn diagrams of SQL joins misleading? Let me count the ways: 1. The inner join is the intersection of A and B. But A and B are different types, so the intersection should be empty! 2. The left outer join is the whole circle A, so... what's B even doing there at all? 193
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 16/01/2026Either way I gotta figure out what I'm gonna do about this problem 310
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 08/12/2025Thanks to everybody who donated to the Feedchicago fundraiser! We raised a total of $2250 for @fooddepository.bsky.social. I donated last week to leverage a Giving Tuesday 2x match so it's $6750 total 0100
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 20/10/20256. CAVES OF QUD: The Citizen Kane of Dying Earth. Nobody could truly have liked the Dying Earth genre/setting before because, prior to Qud, nobody had truly experienced it. This game is a century-old idea finally reaching its real potential. Live and drink, traveler. 161
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 20/10/20255. CASE OF THE GOLDEN IDOL: If this was around in 2005 Roger Ebert wouldn't have written that "video games aren't art" rant. This game is art by any conventional definition of "art". It's also proudly a game, telling its story in ways impossible in books or movies. 150
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 20/10/20254. HEAT SIGNATURE: the second closest you'll feel to John Wick. A game about leisurely unfolding 5-alarm crises, demanding clever solutions to problems accidentally created by clever solutions to previous problems 160
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 20/10/20252. RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN: A therapist once told me that all anger comes from loss. I told her some anger came from joy, because one discovery in Obra Dinn was SO GOOD it made me physically angry. Emotion hysteresis is real 2101
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 20/10/20251. FACTORIO: @r.whal.ing and I spent like 80 hours beating the space age expansion, the single most incredible experience I had playing a game. By the end of the factories and shipping lanes we built were a work of craftship, unclear where engineering ended and art began 2110
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 13/10/2025You can create customer pickers! I got one for "open neovim files" bsky.app/profile/arac... 151
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 10/10/2025If you ctrl click+drag on firefox you can select multiple independent sources of text and copy them all at once bsky.app/profile/benj... 020
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 07/10/2025FYI not all the abalone barnacles were dead, this 'lil guy even survived a night in the fridge 010
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 07/10/2025Are Abalone the grossest-looking food in the sea? 100%, especially under 40x magnification Still delicious tho 240
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 03/10/2025There's "I think AI is a net negative to society" anti-AI and there's "I wish your human son had died" anti-AI 0140
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 20/06/2025Picture of the vs screen, though I think it loses a bit without the animations and the music (oh hey the lights turned yellow because the last race is with DuckDB) They plan to release the program so you can make your own database races 151
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 20/06/2025Tigerbeetle also had the ability to do full replication and durability checks, since it was fast enough to afford to spend cycles on that. That was at 10% contention. Now benchmarking 50% contention with the proprietary postgres million-dollar cluster. Gets 2 minute headstart vs tigerbeetle 111
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 20/06/2025THE STAGE LIGHTS CHANGE COLOR THEY CHANGED COLOR THIS WHOLE TIME #sd25 152
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 20/06/2025bufstreamIO [uses/is Kafka?] Kafka has some wierd properties, like you can insert a write in the middle of a read. Going through some of the bugs he found with jepsen, like a lease expiration never getting transmitted These slides are v good btw 110
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 20/06/2025It's day two of Systems Distributed, hosted by @tigerbeetle.com! I'll be liveskeeting all of the talks, except mine (at 11 AM). Since the venue is a film museum, they're setting up special posters for each talk. #sd25 2354
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 19/06/2025Break time. Since the conference is taking place at the Eye Filmmuseum, organizers made parody movie posters for each talk. #sd25 250
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 24/05/2025Messing around with laminated candies. These are molasses brittles with a chocolate shell 1340
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 23/05/202511 (for real)/ #Excel has "spillover arrays", where you put the formula in one cell and it creates an array over many cells. Operations on the formula cell act on the whole array. This makes Excel an APL and yes, you can tersely implement Game of Life in it 1141
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 22/05/2025Tweaking the design of *Logic for Programmers* always seems to take so much more time than writing or editing it. Changing the title design took three hours and changing the tables took another three 190
Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 17/05/2025Hooray for SMT solvers, a real useful tool for doing real useful work 180