iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

the cs department let me skip compilers because I'd already studied so much syntax in the linguistics department

two degrees in linguistics, ragequit a phd in machine learning

I write verified software, fwiw

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of course, but there are lots of small useful tasks that can be specified well enough to turn into a bespoke local program. "automate the boring deterministic part of this workflow according to these instructions" becomes a chrome extension

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and in the meantime, if the little code factories can crank out the things people want for them, they're materially better off without having to wait for us to figure out how to teach it to them

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thing is, she's tried and just bounced off of it too many times. it's not the concepts, it's the layers of scaffolding I've met many similarly situated people, and while I don't blame them for finding it confusing I really wonder what we could be doing better to help them learn

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the 3d printing world has long imagined every home being its own little factory, but I think llms turning every phone into a little software factory will win that race

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everyone is so focused on what natural-language-to-code can do for industry but I'm most excited about what it can do for normal ordinary people "make a bespoke tool to help me be more organized about my hobby" can take billions of individualized forms and I think that's beautiful

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an artist friend used rovo (atlassian's llm assistant, which she has access to through her job) to write a chrome extension that creates jira tickets from pages on thingiverse and other 3d model sites I'm really excited for her! a whole new world of "I need a little program to do X" has opened up

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joe walsh did it to himself in "life's been good" but that's the only example I can think of off the top of my head

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the design has several "that could have been cool if they'd actually delivered on it rather than papering it over" fragments (mostly in the network stack iirc) but overall the underlying assumptions are just weird and arbitrary, and the user-hostile ergonomics are a deal breaker for me

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oh yeah absolutely not complaining, propter is just extra lucky

lucky you! mine tend to be of the form "oh that was a good architectural decision, let's use that pattern again"

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everyone forgets that the full line is "plan to throw the first one away; you will anyway"

I literally just said this to someone yesterday! the best time I ever had on a development team was when we got to actually do that. wrote the first take in java and the second in kotlin

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but yeah I mean the attachment thing has been real since way before LLMs. nobody gets attached to the c that flex and bison spit out, although I've gotten pretty fond of some of the lexers/grammars I've written as the inputs that generate that c

*exactly*. the time is still gone and you're never getting that back, but the time to replace is no longer quite so high, either it brings the cost of failure down and I think that's especially important when someone is starting to learn by doing you find the cracks by running your hands over them

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like, sometimes you have to work through an idea at least part of the way to realize "oh this isn't actually going to work out the way I thought it would" then you either course correct, if you can, or you burn it on the altar of the sunk cost fallacy

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over here in computer science, every student and most working professionals have loads of ambitious half-baked software they'll never release novelists have unfinished novels, essayists have unfinished essays, composers have unfinished music some ideas fail! recognizing it is a learnable skill!

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me: "pixel, do you want to be uplifted?" pixel: *jumps from bed to chair, climbs to top of chair, gives triumphant mew* well y'all,,,

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it's like my "executive function of last resort" thing but, like, as baseload

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ceo'ing is legit fuckin hard and in retrospect I don't enjoy it, I did it because someone had to and I guess it was my turn in the barrel

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the curry-howard expanded universe contains multitudes (that really is the best term ever and I'm delighted you coined it)

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yeah and I mean there are absolutely typed combinatory logics, I just don't know a whole lot about them yet somebody out there does though! actually maybe @thelastinstance.bsky.social or @deontologistics.bsky.social might have some pointers

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but wisp's point about variable binding is apt and probably kills the idea; it is an untyped calculus after all

this suddenly gives me the mildly horrifying idea of the SK calculus as an all-purpose lowering target lmao but no really, you could lower into it from a more type/effect-enriched representation and raise it back up to a different one if not too much is discarded in getting there

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conferences.cirm-math.fr/3686.html looks like a really cool summer school (on 2-and-higher-dimensional models of computation and logic I've already pre-registered

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liège-guillemins is so pretty in the morning

Poorly angled shot out a train window of the ascending ribs of the Liège train station and a person descending the escalator

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night train back to brussels is just under two hours from home. there were no available sleeping cars, but props to the college-age kids in this little compartment who were very respectful of personal space while we all played human tetris all night

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there are some pretty nice carbon fiber ones out there

definitely a form of vindication in any event

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it'll be time to rake leaves for compost pretty soon, too

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there's bound to be a budding bike mechanic among the neighborhood kids

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of course the actual motivation comes out plain as day in the opening of section 2 why is it always about control? I continue to maintain that the best way to achieve friendly ai is to make friends with it

new achievement to unlock I guess?

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cast of a '90s sitcom, in our apartment, every day

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the /ʃ/ could creep in from anyone with the slightest bit of german pronunciation in their dialect

I only know it from doing woodworking with my dad when I visit my folks, maybe there are two spellings

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wait what? I've always only seen it spelled forstner bit

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obviously jev-shaped problem

most people who don't experience affective empathy but don't exhibit that pattern of behavior have backstopped themselves with cognitive empathy, which is a perfectly cromulent way of interacting with the world as you say, one has to choose to do it

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@fubarchitect.com look, your project has edible merch!

she has, though it seems like the current problem is "ant broke their own tui" ah well. death before dishonor, nothing before *second* coffee

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oh my bad, I thought you had it up and running at home

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I think there are a lot of narrowly scoped areas where carefully thought out regulations would be able to do a lot to protect civil rights and I'd love to hear more ideas