tikhonj

18 ms·

271.
by tikhonj 2y ago
I worked on a 500+ page book[1] in Pandoc that included a bunch of code samples, math, a table of contents with working links and an index. (In hindsight, I wish we had thought about the index from the beginning rather than adding it after
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by tikhonj 2y ago
I disagree entirely. Design is fundamentally a human-oriented discipline, and humans work almost exclusively with code before it is compiled. A strong shared mental model for whatever we're doing is as much a part of software develop
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by tikhonj 2y ago
What's there to dislike so much in APOSD? The book struck me as giving mostly reasonable advice, none is which was overly prescriptive. None of the things I disagreed with struck me as egregious .
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by tikhonj 2y ago
There are a few Haskell functions with names like reallyUnsafePtrEquality# or accursedUnutterablePerformIO, and you know something interesting is going on :P
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by tikhonj 2y ago
Counterpoint: competitions are games, games are about fun, Haskell is fun.
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by tikhonj 2y ago
That gets at what makes using additional functions like in the blog post a bit arbitrary: we don't have special notation for "+ 1" or "* 2", but we do for "^(1/2)" and "log_2". It's not
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by tikhonj 2y ago
I haven't played many different games over the last few years, but both Half-Life: Alyx and Zelda: Breath of the Wild left strong impressions. Both games have a rare sense of place that's hard to replicate in other mediums—the s
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by tikhonj 2y ago
One aspect seems pretty clear to me: it's much easier to learn how to communicate effectively as a team than it is to massively broaden your collective knowledge and experience. So, given a sound team culture and environment—great rega
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By Looking(jelv.is)
4 points by tikhonj 2y ago|0 comments
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by tikhonj 2y ago
I use Orgzly on Android. It isn't amazing , but it's pretty good; I just wait on more complicated and bulk operations until I get back to a computer.
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by tikhonj 2y ago
I am pretty ADD. For me, moving to a system using org-mode helped a lot . It didn't make me an "organized" person (hah!), but it has repeatedly kept me from losing track of important things and has given me a place to take
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by tikhonj 2y ago
Pretty different from the blog post, but I've definitely had periods in (and out of!) my career where I learned a ton that weren't super-busy. I got to do some really high-leverage work in a strong environment with great colle
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by tikhonj 2y ago
> who cares what libraries it is using? Presumably the people who have to read, debug and maintain the resulting garbage. Then again, we have so much garbage code before LLMs, that it was clearly never that important.
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by tikhonj 2y ago
SNAP doesn't make food free in the sense of free parking, it gives money to poor people to buy food . The equivalent for parking would be market-rate parking with means-tested parking vouchers, which would be a much, much better sol
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by tikhonj 2y ago
> There’s no benefit to improving code that never changes, even if it is highly complex. Only if you don't care about being able to understand and debug the code in the future! And even then it's if you're confident in p
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by tikhonj 2y ago
Making it easier and cheaper to cut corners and make stuff up will result in more cut corners and more made up stuff. That's not good. Same problem I have with code models, honestly. We already have way too much boilerplate and bad cod
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by tikhonj 2y ago
A much more common story would be people knowingly cutting corners because of management pressure/demotivation/etc, then fixing the resulting bugs. It's easy for somebody doing that to look like a hard-working hero compared t
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by tikhonj 2y ago
Jira/etc is not necessary, sufficient or even particularly effective for managing engineering work... but I've never had real success convincing managers of this unless they already thought like this. Changing somebody's fund
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by tikhonj 2y ago
Seconding that book. It's one of several things that got me to realize that a lot of the problems I had seen with hierarchies were not fundamental to the idea of a hierarchy but rather functions of culture, practices and individuals.
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by tikhonj 2y ago
I mean, there's a reasonable argument that large swathes of current copyright law in the US also violate the First Amendment. I haven't read it yet, but the book No Law from Stanford University Press[1] makes that argument and h
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by tikhonj 2y ago
The puzzle case is no different to how you can't sell somebody a rubiks cube without allowing them to "solve" it by taking it apart and putting it back together. You can make a physical item intentionally hard to work with or
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by tikhonj 2y ago
The more direct solution would be a law that required distributing human-editable code alongside software. No need for copyright or anything remotely similar. Code being copyrightable would just be getting in the way at that point. But in a
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by tikhonj 2y ago
And straightforwardly lying to its users as well!
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by tikhonj 2y ago
The GPL does the exact opposite of copyright; the fact that it uses copyright to achieve that is just an implementation detail. If you believe information should be free to share and remix, you would believe that copyright infringement is
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by tikhonj 2y ago
so like studying (human) biology and becoming a biologist
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by tikhonj 2y ago
I did some work with his Greenarrays chip as a student. It was very limited and awkward to use but it could also operate on absurdly low energy, with very low overhead for waking up or almost completely powering down. At some point, we ha
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by tikhonj 2y ago
When this attitude becomes too prevalent, important problems either don't get reported at all or morph into "the problem is that we're not implementing my exact solution". That's how you end up with pervasive organi
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by tikhonj 2y ago
> Types can't represent truth. Real world data doesn't have types. It changes incrementally however it wants, and all the time. You can use types to not let something you don't want into your program, but you can never rep
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by tikhonj 2y ago
Sure, but you can work around gRPC's issues too—"workable" might be the only bar that matters in practice, but it's a remarkably low bar. The risk with JSON is that too many systems understand it, and intermediate st
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by tikhonj 2y ago
Yeah, that's where you just have to know what the "words" function from the standard library does.

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