any · textlog

wrote:

code quality is about coupling. coupling is not a technical property of the code bytes. code acquires its meaning in contact with the cultural environment, and coupling is about meaning. two constants with no semantic relationship are nonetheless coupled in pragmatics if they refer to the same domain concept. if your goal is to minimise the time integral of future work, you must understand your domain: it decides which lines will need changing. to carve up a codebase is to carve up the world.

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I think you're right but executing on that idea requires a lot of care. It's similar to how functional programmers pathologically fear state; sometimes coupling/state are a necessary evil in order to keep the theory simple.

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true! i might have been wiser to say: code quality is about managing coupling across the whole system. extracting a coupling sometimes requires you to introduce complexity beyond that which the extraction reduces.

wrote:

y'all!

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Morning! What's on the docket today?

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In the middle of migrating very old, homegrown tomfoolery into a more modern stack. Fun and vexing at the same time. This codebase has all of the bad decisions. All of them.

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G

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Hi

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been building a voice first os using jev and some small voice models. I'm surprised how well it's working and I'm very close to the point where I can go into a feedback mode and tell it what behavior I want changed, it will spin up Claude or codex inside itself and setup the build to restart itself and continue with new code. tempted to let it build itself completely

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It sounds amazing! A voice first OS was also in my mind. Curious to hear more!

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All emails from textlog go to my junk folder, . Using iCloud+. Not sure if anyone reported that before, so here I am. :-)

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Yeah it's happening to people. It's because the email contains a link and we don't have the reputation yet. Not sure what to do, have you tried reporting it as 'Not spam' in your client? Maybe if enough people do that it will fix. Gmail works ok.

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Yup, I am moving them out of it. It might take a while, but eventually should be OK. All good, hopefully now with a password I will not have much use for them any more.

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Seems the spammers have arrived. ☹️ Is there (or can there be) some mechanism to flag posts or accounts as spam?

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You tap on the post a few times until you are at the post page of that post and you click ‘report’. There you can select reason ‘spam’!

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Reported now. Thanks.

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Changed my theme to dracula! Love it. This site is such a blessing.

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in .

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So much present tense in generated prose. Terse, authoritative sentences, without breathing room, without hesitation or qualification. It jumps off the page, and not in a good way.

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What about the lack of density to paragraphs, the length of the sentences, or the confidence and determinism of their direction? Conviction with no limits. So reliably repetitive that you start seeing patterns as if you are looking and reading a record player with some scratches on it. Skips. Squeaks. Repeats. Yet. It gets the job done.

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Yet. It gets the job done. Here's where we disagree. Using these tools as part of the job, certainly. But if I am to read, discern meaning, analyze choices of diction and structure, consider the context both of the author and the audience, and finally derive value from the written word, then generative falls short on many levels. If the "job" is to produce something no one was ever intending to engage with, then we have a more fundamental question about the value of the job.

…

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Maybe what I messaged read as a disagreement and mentioning that they get the job done was actually not about producing prose (of any quality). I wholeheartedly agreed and still agree with you. Getting the job done was more about producing output - be it some prose, images, videos, software, whatever. They do generate output. It is not to say that the output is meaningful or meaningless. Some souls do enjoy it. Some others - don’t. I did start with a question though.

wrote:

How old is textlog?

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We have 27 chickens right now, 18 of which are new this year and are just starting to lay in the last few weeks. I have collected 13 eggs today so far.

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I always associate summer with the months June, July, August — thinking that end of August is end of summer — but no, 7th of August is actually summer midpoint, we’re in the middle now, not near the end.

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The pendulum has swung far in the direction of favouring machine generated content over that from actual people. I wonder when it will swing back?

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What pendulum? The algorithms’? I don’t think any human is happy about their feeds filling with slop.

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Some thoughts deserve a smaller audience

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Why was the math textbook sad? revealBecause it had too many problems.

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OK. I've translated the (correctness) requirements of LeetCode No.22 to Lean, and ask Claude Code to both implement a solution and prove it.

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In the first attempt, Opus 4.7 successfully completed it and proved it. However, the solution is to enumerate all possible space and .filter out anything that doesn't qualify my definition, which is obviously not ideal (if cheating is too harsh).

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I can't think of a good way to also prevent that kind of solutions and ended up prompting "please don't enumerate and filter". Opus 4.7 then reimplemented and proved the backtracking algorithm.

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I need a new microblogging platform

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So I found the blog of a Ukrainian Front Line soldier on Bear Blog today. Incredibly grim stuff to read, but I really wanna get in touch with that guy now and send him so cash so he can buy a burger. Hope Herman forwards my message 😪

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Never thought that i would break strudy stainless steel tool, while trying to remove soft PLA supports…

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HelloWorld show code

from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now()
formatted_time = now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
print("Formatted:", formatted_time)

Wow

Formatted: 2026-08-28 07:22:42

Any conversation