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Tikhon Jelvis

@jelv.is
354 followers 107 following 1.3K posts

I like programming languages. A lot. Especially Haskell. Tools, types and functions. Based in Berkeley, CA

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Reposted by Tikhon Jelvis
Jon Bois @jonbois.bsky.social · 13h
i wish baseball teams could resolve their differences without resorting to baseball
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 28/09/2026
if you're designing some new tool for C or C++, I feel like you have to have at least *some* undefined behavior, otherwise you're not really getting into the spirit
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Do not carry a cold beverage in their presence. Politely decline any drinks or sweetmeats they may offer. Keep a plain iron nail in your left trouser pocket and a sachet or paper twist of coarse salt in your right shoe. Enter and leave your chair moving clockwise. Follow up with a thank-you note.
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Stephen Judkins @stephenjudkins.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The combination of demands for cult-like singular devotion with quotidian and uninspiring products is always so funny to me. GIVE UP YOUR PITIFUL LIFE AND DEVOTE YOURSELF TO THE INFINITE PURPOSE OF....an app that college kids can use to apply to study abroad programs
forbes.com
‘You Chose That Life’: Some AI Startups Require A 7 Day Work Week
Silicon Valley has always glorified hustle culture. Some startups, like AI education company Arrowster, recruitment unicorn Mercor and Y Combinator-backed Corgi, are taking it to another level with 6 ...
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 24/09/2026
LLMs are a truly novel; we can now build up to even richer ways to program as a tool for thinking and communicating... so building "factories" reaming out slop in the same languages and paradigms we've always used is a profound failure of imagination, taste and technical leadership
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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
they're saying the AI can do math and science again, so it's time to reread Thurston's On Proof and Progress in Mathematics, a lovely articulation of the social work of assembling understanding, i.e., the best reason to tackle hard problems. www.ams.org/journals/bul...
When I started as a graduate student at Berkeley, I had trouble imagining
how I could "prove" a new and interesting mathematical theorem. I didn't
really understand what a "proof was.
By going to seminars, reading papers, and talking to other graduate students,
I gradually began to catch on. Within any field, there are certain theorems and
certain techniques that are generally known and generally accepted. When you
write a paper, you refer to these without proof. You look at other papers in the
field, and you see what facts they quote without proof, and what they cite in
their bibliography. You learn from other people some idea of the proofs. Then
you're free to quote the same theorem and cite the same citations. You don't
necessarily have to read the full papers or books that are in your bibliography.
Many of the things that are generally known are things for which there may be
no known written source. As long as people in the field are comfortable that
the idea works, it doesn't need to have a formal written source.At first I was highly suspicious of this process. I would doubt whether a certain idea was really established. But I found that I could ask people, and they
could produce explanations and proofs, or else refer me to other people or to
written sources that would give explanations and proofs. There were published
theorems that were generally known to be false, or where the proofs were generally known to be incomplete. Mathematical knowledge and understanding were
embedded in the minds and in the social fabric of the community of people
thinking about a particular topic. This knowledge was supported by written
documents, but the written documents were not really primary.
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 21/09/2026
people sometimes think "this guy is smart, he just have his shit together" this is fundamentally backwards; the whole point of being smart is that you can get away with having your shit very far apart indeed
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Mikell Taylor @mikell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
This gets back to the moravec’s paradox thing where we wrongly assume that if a computer can do something we think is hard, it must also be able to do all the things we would have to learn to do in order to do that hard thing.
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 21/09/2026
the biggest problem with ai programming is that too managers push for doing the same things faster rather than doing better things better
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Sridhar Ramesh @radishharmers.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
A reminder, amidst the death of math, that I will be giving this talk on Wednesday at CUNY. Depending on the speed at which math collapses, this may be the last math anyone does ever. Come check it out if you are interested in the material. sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~noson/Semin... for details.
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austin 🇵🇸 @stdlib.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Qualcomm released the compiler for their IDL used for "FastRPC", called QAIC, and it is written in Haskell? good to see some people still have taste! github.com/qualcomm/QAIC
github.com
GitHub - qualcomm/QAIC
Contribute to qualcomm/QAIC development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Good Trailcams @goodtrailcams.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 17/09/2026
"but as the map recursively improves, eventually it becomes..." *clicks to final slide in the pitch deck* "...the territory!"
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 12/09/2026
we can use AI as an excuse to build the next 700 programming languages
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 10/09/2026
I added \tm to my Emacs TeX input mode exclusively to use the symbol ironically
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Rory Blank @roryblank.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
Rise of The Machines (2024)
Fred Flintstone stands, hands on his hips, looking incredulously at Barney Rubble, who is at the corner of the panel barely visible. He appears to wearing tiny sunglasses.
"C'mon Barn, what's with the getup? and what is that on your head?" Fred asks.
"oh this, Fred?"
We now see Barney is also wearing a black trench coat and smoking a cigarette. A small bird is taped to the side of his head. "Just the latest in cybernetic enhancement technology- wired right into my brain."

The background dissolves and Barney stands next to a free floating diagram of a human body with several small birds going into it and says "we're entering a new age, Fred- the synthesis of man and machine as one flesh. This is the future. It's hack or be hacked."
Fred looks incredulous. 

The bird pecks Barney.

Barney puts his hands on his head and screams "the machines are turning against us! We have built God only for him to destroy us!" as the bird continues to peck at him.
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Jason Scott @textfiles.com · 05/09/2026
You know, honestly, more than monetary donations, if somebody worked at a company that had access to a lot of 18 terabyte and larger hard drives and could talk to us, that's where we are really suffering. The internet archive has no special priority in buying hard drives and those things are insane.
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InfoWars @realinfowars.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Now in Gunmetal Grey!
A person in the background carrying a bag over their shoulder. In the foreground, a large gray cat sits beside a cardboard box labeled "CATS FOR MEN." The text above reads "Introducing CATS FOR MEN™," and below the box, it says "The first feline designed for real, masculine men."
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 04/09/2026
As it becomes clear that language models—like humans—love passing notes to each other on message boards, I’m starting to think the thing we need to worry about is not the “alignment” of an isolated model but, like, the fluid dynamics of a language slurry.
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David Graeber Institute @davidgraeberinst.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
It is a pity that the BBC never mention these details and stories of people on welfare when discussions related to welfare arise.
"Most rock bands started on public relief. If you give money to working class kids, a significant number of them will form bands, and a few of those bands will be amazing, and it will benefit the country a 1000 times more than all of those kids would have done had they been lifting boxes or whatever they’re making them do now as welfare conditionality."

— David Graeber
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Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 02/09/2026
What if our ears were like our eyes, and only had three (types of) receptors? Interestingly speech is still more or less intelligible, but not much else to me this shows how much more discriminating of frequencies our hearing is than our vision. Of course our vision has much more spatial resolution
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Dr Dean Burnett @drdeanburnett.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Just been reminded of this. Newer friends and followers may not know of that type 11 years ago when I was writing for the Guardian and finally snapped at their ludicrous image archive setup and it got published on the actual site. #cake #breakdown
A cake
I Do you know how long l've spent in the Guardian's image archives to find a picture of a bog
standard cake? Bloody ages! Thousands of images and not one thing that you'd recognise as a
normal cake. This weird ice cream thing is the best I could do. Everything else has a sodding fried
egg or a bunch of parsley obscuring it, or has been arranged to resemble a Picasso painting or a
sculpture reflecting the futility of existence. When did this place becore riddled with hipsters?
God, I'm so tired... Photograph: Brian Hagiwara/Getty Images
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 01/09/2026
an OCaml datalog engine ought to be called dat-o-log or, better yet, dat'o'log, so that it's a valid OCaml variable name :)
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King Algamemnon @adamrothman.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I wanted to say something witty about this but couldn't come up with the perfect bon marmot. www.wsj.com/lifestyle/tr...
wsj.com
Marmots Are Terrorizing California Hikers and Stealing Their Shoes
The cute but destructive rodents are criminal masterminds, easily circumventing humans’ meager defenses.
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 01/09/2026
all linux distros are just piles of bash scripts except for nixos, which is configured using an advanced lazy functional programming language... ...which evaluates to a pile of bash scripts
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 31/08/2026
"who moved my cheese", move over: we've got a new fuzzy animal story about adaptability
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 31/08/2026
I feel intensely disappointed whenever I see people building systems that replicate (mediocre!) people management processes for LLMs—just a painful lack of imagination or insight. Here we have some fundamentally novel technology, and you're trying to Scrum it?
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 31/08/2026
Turns out California ground squirrels hunt and eat voles. (Note: some potentially disturbing pictures in the article!) www.ucdavis.edu/climate/news...
ucdavis.edu
Carnivorous Squirrels Documented in California
California ground squirrels hunt, kill and eat voles, reveals a study by UC Davis and UW-Eau Claire, sharing the first evidence of widespread carnivorous behavior among squirrels.
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 29/08/2026
at o9, we have a proprietary query language (as one does), and I've been writing a typed PureScript library for it PureScript is great and row types are fucking amazing I've long maintained that row types are the biggest thing Haskell is missing, and I'm even more convinced now
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 29/08/2026
my hotel put up a bunch of pictures from a high school art contest this amazing dog band should have gotten 1st place, I absolutely love it too bad I could not get a photo without a bunch of glare :(
a picture of a bunch of dogs (or wolves?) having a great time playing in a band

there is a puppy with big eyes dancing in front of the base drum

crazy it only got 3rd place, it was totally robbed

the label on the bottom of the frame credits it to "MHS Damion Ceniceros" from 12th grade
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 28/08/2026
too many places put "comfortable with ambiguity" in job descriptions, and then can't handle it when you join and you're ambiguous about what you're working on, when :P those leaders should not have hired themselves
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 27/08/2026
apropos of nothing, Jane Street's sexplib format is still the best general-purpose text-based data/config format I've used I prefer it over JSON, YAML, TOML, XML, INI or custom formats like .cabal
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 25/08/2026
Instead of TUIs, we should build EUIs (Emacs User Interfaces),
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Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 16/08/2026
Drawing all 16,777,216 possible 12 bit RGB colours in one 2D image, each exactly once. Pixels are mapped from the 256³ colour cube, following a three dimensional Hilbert curve, to a two dimensional Hilbert curve filling the square. so nearby colours stay close.
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Jimmy Miller @jimmyhmiller.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Now that language adoption is not bottlenecked by people learning it or liking the syntax, we are going to start seeing more ambitious languages. Type system craziness, distributed systems languages, dsl first approaches. All the crazy dreams of pl nerds are now possible.
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 19/08/2026
I just saw a startup doing "data centers at sea", and that's the whole "data centers in space" thing This is obvious nonsense, right? Are investors actually taken in, are they making a bet on working around local politics/regulation, or is there something else going on?
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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 19/08/2026
Helluva thread here
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 19/08/2026
Berkeley paths are a lot of fun, and you might even meet guys with cool dogs: www.berkeleyside.org/2026/08/18/b...
berkeleyside.org
Green Day guitarist is obsessed with the hidden pathways of the Berkeley Hills
Jason White has lived in and around Berkeley since the early ’90s. He’s on a mission this year to hike every path and staircase in the hills.
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Stephen Judkins @stephenjudkins.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
(also kind of remarkable how many supposed Thought Leaders have been crowing about how LLMs are ushering in The Eternal Age of TypeScript when in fact LLMs make using less popular languages much easier, not harder)
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 15/08/2026
the anti-bikelane hysteria on nextdoor is a painful reminder that people can remain stupid longer than you can stay sober
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 14/08/2026
heavily product-managed software is still struggling to do light mode vs dark mode, while bottom-up stuff like Emacs has had lots of different color schemes for ages make of that what you will
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 13/08/2026
The Berkeley hills have a lot of really cool, semi-hidden pedestrian paths. I love exploring them. I always assumed they were a historic artifact, and that it would be ≈impossible to build more today. Turns out it's possible! (If, still, rare.) www.berkeleyside.org/2026/08/10/b...
berkeleyside.org
The first new path in 5 years is being built in the Berkeley Hills
Volunteers with the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association are constructing a trail near Terrace View Park.
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Zeb Larson @zeblarson.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
WHAT IF THE USE AND DESIGN OF TECHNOLOGY IS AN ORAL TRADITION YOU SAY
fastcompany.com
The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI
For decades, software engineering has relied on something surprisingly fragile: veteran developers passing down institutional knowledge from person to person. As AI transforms how code gets written an...
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 09/08/2026
If we observe some expert programmers, I'm sure we'd fine that most do not actually have a clear separation between abstracting, architecting, planning or "coding". It's all integrated with a smooth feedback loop. For experts, programming *is* planning.
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Sridhar Ramesh @radishharmers.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Good comment from @jelv.is on "Coding was never the hard part". news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922...
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 08/08/2026
This 1911 book shows that taking photos of cats and furnishing them with an amusing caption was a thing long before the internet publicdomainreview.tumblr.com/post/8243890...
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 03/08/2026
Happy birthday Pandoc! Pandoc is amazing, and so is its story. I've used Pandoc over 15 years myself, including working on a 700-page CS textbook, my entire website and countless individual documents. I still love it. pandoc.org/twenty-years...
pandoc.org
Pandoc - twenty-years-of-pandoc
A universal document converter
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 31/07/2026
if you're so convinced that your theorem prover is the best, prove it
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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 27/07/2026
cat path closed?
a path was closed because of construction, with a "PATH CLOSED" sign where somebody added the word "CAT" by hand

so, of course, there is a cute and elegant gray cat walking along the path, right by the "CAT PATH CLOSED" sign
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