Any conversation

I’ve had quite the successful day cooking today: make a Dutch baby for breakfast with blueberries, a bean stew for lunch using up all the week’s odds and ends, make a coffee and walnut cake, and barbecued/slightly smoked a whole spatchcocked chicken for the first time!

The mental shape of a programming language resurfaces, and my mind craves writing programs in it. Array languages, concatenative, Lisps, Smalltalks.

why the hell did youtube add gifs to comments this change is top 10 worst changes of all time

having just spent a week camper-travelling Norway, hiking mountains and glaciers, swimming in fjords really put some things into perspective for me - I should take more vacations

tell me if this makes sense to you: not all expensive chairs are worth a lot but the chairs that are worth a lot cost a lot of money

Maybe adjust the last part to “most Chairs that are worth a lot…” - because I guess there are chairs that are inexpensive but still good and thus could have cost a a lot?

…

my guess is the inexpensive chairs can be a good value for the price you pay but I doubt there are many of any chairs that are inexpensive and yet worth a lot

Good chairs are expensive, yes. Can’t find myself a good dining chair set for a year at €500/4 chairs budget.

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.

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).

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.

The Perfect Hiring System

I need to re wire my brain a bit. Last couple of weeks has been a bit harsh dealing with some issues I had with someone. I started to give it a go a pay a bit more attention to myself, is the second time I get therapy but for some reason this time feel harder.

Do you walk your neighborhood? Do you sit on your front porch and say hello to passersby?

Theory reuse > code reuse almost every time.

History is written by the people who write stuff down.

Haha. Seems necessary but not sufficient. Isn’t being victorious part of it, too?

…

That's definitely the common knowledge but I'm starting to think that victory -> writing about it has it backwards in a lot of cases, esp in modern corporate life.

good one liner :D makes me wanna write things down

I notice that language models are much better at programming than at writing. This is largely because, in programming, they have a closed feedback loop that allows them to find errors. Writing is much more complicated because the feedback is much more diffuse and delayed over time. In fact, it is often not well-defined.

What is the function that determines whether a poem is good? This means that models do not know how to think; they lack judgment. If they do not know how to think, it means that we humans are still essential. In fact, even when programming, you have to stay right on top of them. My conviction is that this will not change.

They will become increasingly useful, but they will never be able to replace the human who defines objectives and evaluates the quality of the work. All these news stories claiming that AI is going to kill us all are stupid. Humans will always be able to turn off the machine.

…

In three years Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defence. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14am, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

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.

Productive weekend started four hours ago for me (at 06:00 EDT). Visited aunties and mum. Just got home, and waiting for wife to finish preparing to get on the road again. Next destination: nursing home (visit family, and “adopted” elders).

First post on textlog!

Haiiii