lanstin

7 ms·

121.
by lanstin 3mo ago
It really does take the breath away and leave you filled with awe.
122.
by lanstin 3mo ago
seeing the stars away from artificially lit areas, for me, made it immediately obvious why they are important to all human animals that can perceive them. Worth a trip once in a while to a dark place if you can swing it (and at least in the
123.
by lanstin 3mo ago
The * in regular expressions is from that book by Kleene; it used to be called the Kleene star. And the book is all building up the apparatus of functional programs, recursion, implementations of arithmetic and logic, etc. it is a great bo
124.
by lanstin 3mo ago
Metamathematics, by Kleene, is programming in maths. Theoretical computer science is maths. A lot of foundations work is programming. Coding itself is like an extended problem set from a maths class. LaTeX itself is programming. The differe
125.
by lanstin 3mo ago
I have never seen a profitable enterprise that doesn’t have a core of people good at math defending the maximum money behavior. A lot more people graduate with math degrees than can get jobs in research maths, but finance, operations resear
126.
by lanstin 3mo ago
And then to write installers so your coworkers who aren’t liking instructions like “then make a gpg key and install pinentry-mac” can use the extremely useful vibe coded dashboards to make the prod site transparent and viewable, digestible
127.
by lanstin 3mo ago
Open science has plenty of long and tedious articles.
128.
by lanstin 3mo ago
Diophantine equations are as they say Turing complete. That is for any question about does this Turing machine with this tape halt with a certain value there is a corresponding Diophantine equation, which has solutions if the machine halts
129.
by lanstin 3mo ago
I find I keep the git add to the be one thing I keep track of (in production services, if not throw-away or non-prod visualization vibe coded things). I've never even used git add . - I git diff each file one by one, and git add them i
130.
by lanstin 3mo ago
I had not seen that. In the nineties I worked on an alerts system where you could sign up for like some sport or weather data at a certain time of day. We stored the alert times as minutes before midnight and then ran the time to trigger ca
131.
by lanstin 3mo ago
That is more along the lines of put all the agent communication into a DB that has git’s immutable history. They still use git for the code, and beads (well, DoltDB for storage/versioning) for the tasks and a bit of non-associative me
132.
by lanstin 3mo ago
Bad movies, for example the Hobbit after the LoTR always amaze me as a human endeavor. So many smart people working together, organized, talented, funded, etc., can still make a really awful movie. It's so interesting.
133.
by lanstin 3mo ago
The factor that is missing in that analysis to me is a time based dynamic stability perspective. Humans have a pretty good ability to go off the rails in reasoning one day and wake up reasonable; a pretty good ability to pursue tasks, despi
134.
by lanstin 3mo ago
Poor skills at working together and love of high salaries over work place autonomy.
135.
by lanstin 3mo ago
I think this is the problem for companies with a single person atop - when the company needs things they aren’t good at, the company cannot respond effectively. Zuckerberg was good at running a company to sell ads on an addictive platform;
136.
by lanstin 3mo ago
Bad capabilities but maybe less wrong output? All the funny memes of Google explaining some fake aphorism is t really something Apple product would go for. Successful navigation of technology over the decades requires some timing finesse. I
137.
by lanstin 3mo ago
Your context isn’t to give it orders, they just don’t work like that. Your context (AGENTS.me, skills, per-request context we are sending in for each request to bots) is to give it the info it needs in the language category it’s trained for
138.
by lanstin 3mo ago
It doesn’t natively reproduce but still this is freaking amazing. And the process is going to be open sourced. Still can’t say we understand one cell (the ribosomes don’t assemble) but much much closer!
139.
by lanstin 4mo ago
All this debate about floats or ints or decimals, obscures the fact “reconciliation” is an essential part of dealing with money - essentially some separate implementation of the money movement that detects when your rounding strategy or flo
140.
by lanstin 4mo ago
I once worked at a place with abstractions I found to be beautifully perfect. The people that wrote the base framework had done similar things two or so times previously and got it right the third time. You couldn’t write slow or hard to op
141.
by lanstin 4mo ago
In C I used to make it so my standard per-file and per lib code could be cut and pasted to other files/libs without modification. (E.g. every file had a mLocal variable that was file-visibility symbols, every module had a #module defi
142.
by lanstin 4mo ago
This blog is absolutely true. Code to manipulate code easily and reliably reduces the cost of maintenance, the cost of having that code. Honestly, this factor is why coders like LLM so much - it keeps more decisions reversible for longer -
143.
by lanstin 4mo ago
I am optimistic about the future but I doubt happiness would increase so much; happiness is remarkably stable; I do think at the right time scale, humans as a group will have less sickness and brutality and more kindness and intelligence an
144.
by lanstin 4mo ago
Greybeam (the company writing the blog) offers a service to proxy Snowflake and route queries in the fly to DuckDB or Snowflake based on predicted size. Saves a lot of money.
145.
by lanstin 4mo ago
data without theories is not, in general, useful. Also the salient data in the human body is at several different size scales - centimeters is ok, millimeters is good, much goes on at the micrometer and ångström scales (blood type, mitochon
146.
by lanstin 4mo ago
I'm doing this now, and the thing I find most surprising is that there seems to be some invisible persistent state that gives high or low sugar a sort of momentum - so if I've been doing a fair amount of physical activity for a mo
147.
by lanstin 4mo ago
Have you ever done research mathematics? To me, the only difference between code and math is that the code can do things, make stuff happens in the world; outside of that, mathematics has a lot more opportunities to be beautiful (not to sa
148.
by lanstin 4mo ago
Or fresh oranges.
149.
by lanstin 4mo ago
I asked for that and they gave me an antibody titre, and I still have enough to be safe from measles.
150.
by lanstin 4mo ago
It leads to less cohesive shared vision on how to solve problems. In groups where I am trying to foster a shared technical vision, I try to get people to do “see one, do one, teach one” for procedures that are common enough to come up repe

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