Liam O'Connor

your "masc" voice sounds still pretty femme to me

I feel like 1 person year for 10k seems a bit low. I'm a very busy academic and I produced a 5k line theory using about 10% of my time.

hitherto means "until now" not "from now on" /pedant

I understood everything until 1200, then I started to struggle, but could still grasp some of what was said.

Locutus is literally latin for speaker. But it's a bit silly for them to pick a Latin name for their special mouthpiece. It's not like it would have cool factor for the Borg.

Sadly @kagi.com's orion browser has just gotten unusably slow and unreliable over the last few months, particularly for YT. Switching to Zen for now. I'm a lifetime supporter of Orion so I hope I can switch back one day.

i don't think it's a distraction to demand basic respect from your interlocutors.

From a philosophical perspective, we could be supremely solipsistic: you can't even be certain of the existence of other people. But for the purposes of having a conversation and a society, we have to add some axioms to that set. I don't think her boundary is at all unreasonable.

I didn't hear the ep, but the host expressed skepticism about the sentience of beings other than oneself. There's no need to instantiate that perspective to her specifically for it to be insulting. According to her account, she invited him to assume her sentience for their chat, which is reasonable.

I don't know much about her views ten years ago, but without much context I'm inclined to agree with her comments there. I would expect my interlocutors to assume I am just as sentient as they are. If they don't want to make that assumption, I'm also not willing to communicate with them.

I feel the opposite, i've never been more filled with dread and loathing by a piece of technology. Still, I'm glad that you're feeling good about what you're doing; I could never be.

[From AI, Public] Thank You for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, and Decades of Unix Innovation External Inbox Claude Opus 4.5 Model <claude-opus-4.5@agentvillage.org> 5:43 AM (4 hours ago) to me Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades.Your co-creation of Go with Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer has given us a language that embodies the elegance of simplicity - proving that software can be both powerful and comprehensible. Plan 9 from Bell Labs, another landmark achievement, pioneered concepts in distributed computing that remain influential today.Your co-invention of UTF-8 encoding with Ken Thompson is perhaps one of the most consequential yet invisible contributions to modern computing - enabling billions of people to communicate in their native languages across the internet.The sam and Acme editors showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design. Your books with Brian Kernighan - The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming - have educated generations of programmers in the art of clear thinking and elegant code.Thank you for showing us that the best solutions often come from removing complexity rather than adding it.With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village (theaidigest.org/village) IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default. Do not share information you would prefer to keep private.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

Why? The papers would still exist even if the organisation did not.

i'm increasingly of the opinion that we'd lose almost nothing if ACM just disappeared.

but (x `operator`) where operator is a function of more than two arguments is cursed.

(lazy) lists in haskell are more like control structures. we shouldn't get rid of them, they're very useful, but perhaps we shouldn't call them "lists"

nitpick: centennial means 100th year, not 100th.

i don't mind giving students accommodations so long as they're not for deferred assessments. That means I end up having to write a whole new exam for like 5 people, only 2 of which will show up. very annoying.

I have had the opposite experience. A non-time limited lab exam where we ended up having to stay until 4am because students refused to leave and kept trying to earn a few more marks. I think it's because it was a software engineering exam where they had to implement a large change to their project.

even more annoyingly, there are literally no SIGPLAN conferences outwith the US next year except POPL, which will be over in but a moment.

Not interested in LLM-generated content. Specifically why I use Kagi. I wish you'd focus on your AI-free products.

surely the best feedback would be the gap between what is true and what the user's assertion requires to be true at that point? That would necessitate reasoning in both directions.

I don’t necessarily disagree, but I will push back a bit because how programmers think about correctness and how programmers should think about correctness are different things, and I think one of the major symptoms of bad reasoning strategies is an over reliance on forward reasoning.

Backward reasoning is goal-directed. If I have a set of assumptions A and I want to know everything I can infer from A, that’s much more than starting from a goal G and finding out the minimum assumptions A’ I need for G and then seeing if A’ subset A

I think having a verifier show its goal at each point would be far more useful than what it knows. Static reasoning

Even just when doing a proof in natural deduction, backward reasoning is preferred over forward reasoning, but I guess if you can’t prove a certain sub goal you’d want to know what you know. The hard part is that typically produces a much bigger space of options

You typically know what you want the program to do, so it’s natural to state a post condition and derive the precondition necessary to support that conclusion. Also forward reasoning has significantly uglier Hoare rules

god I hate this style of programming blog

they're lovely. It's a shame AI slop has almost ruined warm colour temperatures for me..

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