noelwelsh

5 ms·

31.
by noelwelsh 2mo ago
Writing the notes is more the point than re-reading them, at least for me. Writing stuff down forces me to kick things around and find a good structure, and that's where the useful stuff happens.
32.
by noelwelsh 2mo ago
A few comments on the previous abundance of cod, from https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/a-tragedy-wi... In 1873, French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote that if every egg reached maturity, within three
33.
by noelwelsh 2mo ago
Very nice!
34.
by noelwelsh 2mo ago
Scala's capture checking [1] is a modal type system. [1]: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/cc...
35.
by noelwelsh 2mo ago
Good article. We really need more nuance in the discussion of using LLMs for SE. Not all tasks are the same; we shouldn't expect to use the same process across them! In my experience, the more constrained the LLM is, either by existing
36.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
Good article. Not much to add to it, other than I think more people should look at modal type systems like found in Scala 3 and OxCaml. If you want safe arena allocation they are a lot more ergonomic than Rust's approach.
37.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
You might enjoy digging into the world of effect handlers: it's a very neat model for expressing these features and boils down to continuations in the implementation.
38.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
These are not things I need to know :-)
39.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
A nice thing about being left handed is there a few things I can't get precious about. Fountain pens are never going to feature in my life as I'll just smudge everything. Similarly, I'll never end up collecting gaming mice as
40.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
Can anyone explain how this works? Humans have 3 (sometimes 4) cones, so I thought that going beyond 3 primaries wouldn't increase the perceivable gamut. Update: thanks for all the great explanations!
41.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
Absolutely. Take a look at "unconscious perception".
42.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
A collection of thoughts I had while reading the article: 0. Overall, a nice article. 1. There are several places where the (LLM assisted?) writing is a bit odd. For example, the code for hash table insertion is irrelevant. The "“Un-fr
43.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
There is no real evidence that we'll reach AGI any time soon. It relies on AI continuing to scale, and we have no proof that will continue to be possible. There is an alternative interpretation, which is that Demis looked at the US gov
44.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
The premise is "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away". If this is true, establishing an institution to ensure things li
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by noelwelsh 3mo ago
This blog post is very relevant to the discussion: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-multiversity-is-finis... A quick summary: the modern university is really a "multiversity", combining research, trade
46.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
Wow. Not a Haskell user, but a big user of other languages with expressive type systems (mostly Scala; some Rust). My experience is the complete opposite. I can't imagine using a language without a good type system to catch all the jun
47.
Coaxing quality (writing) output from generative AI(scala-lang.org)
3 points by noelwelsh 3mo ago|1 comments
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Artificial Adventures(scattered-thoughts.net)
2 points by noelwelsh 3mo ago|0 comments
49.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
This is the book I'm working on about mental models for better code. It's getting very close to complete, and there is a 150 page free sample. The book is all about making explicit the structure in code, and the structure in the p
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Show HN: Functional Programming Strategies, the book I'm working on(functionalprogrammingstrategies.com)
5 points by noelwelsh 3mo ago|1 comments
51.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
That's a reasonable way of looking at it, but capabilities are not restricted to low-level system properties. Here's a terminal UI system built around three main capabilities: - layout (adding components to the component tree) - e
52.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
You'd probably like the work of Tomas Petricek: https://tomasp.net/ He does research in "the history and philosophy of programming", amongst other things.
53.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
You're right, they are related. One difference is simply lineage. Capabilities come out of the erights / security world (e.g. [0]), while dependency injection comes from the XP / agile / Martin Fowler world. More interes
54.
by noelwelsh 3mo ago
What Zig is doing is called "capability passing". I don't know if the Zig team is aware of this field of work, or have independently arrived upon it, but that's what is achieved by passing IO, memory allocators, and othe
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by noelwelsh 4mo ago
Exactly. I don't understand why people think the ternary operator is needed when you can just make `if` an expression instead of a statement. Then there is no new syntax to learn and `if` just becomes more useful.
56.
by noelwelsh 4mo ago
The "shovels for gold miners" analogy is generally a good one. It applies to Nvidia, for example. It doesn't generally apply to developers though. Developer tooling is notoriously difficult to monetize. Developers themselves
57.
by noelwelsh 4mo ago
A few comments: * The core idea sounds interesting. Make it the first paragraph, not paragraph seven. * Spend more words describing what makes Oak different. * "I built a version control system in my free-time called Jam". You pro
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by noelwelsh 4mo ago
Still working on my book, which is about how to think about code, and how to turn these models into code: https://functionalprogrammingstrategies.com/ I'm currently writing up what is the last major chapter, which intr
59.
by noelwelsh 4mo ago
The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tool
60.
by noelwelsh 4mo ago
I've used Doom Emacs for years and it rarely breaks. Sometimes things get out of sync, and I delete the git repo and clone it again. That happens once every few years. People holding your attitude is one thing that keeps people away fr

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