<p><span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> who wants you dead personally?</p>

<p>The reason I get so annoyed about people pitching LLMs as a way to 'democratise programming' or as end-user programming tools is that they solve the wrong problem.</p><p>The hard part of programming is not writing code. It's unambiguously expressing your problem and desired solution. Imagine if LLMs were perfect programmers. All you have to do is write a requirements document and they turn it into a working program. Amazing, right? Well, not if you've ever seen what most people write in a requirements document or seen the output when a team of good programmers works from a requirements document.</p><p>The most popular end-user programming language in the world (and, by extension, the most popular programming language), with over a billion users, is the Calc language that is embedded in Excel. It is not popular because it's a good language. Calc is a <em>terrible</em> programming language by pretty much any metric. It's popular because Excel (which is also a terrible spreadsheet, but that's a different rant) is basically a visual debugger and a reactive programming environment. <em>Every</em> temporary value in an Excel program is inspectable and it's trivial to write additional debug expressions that are automatically updated when the values that they're observing change.</p><p>Much as I detest it as a spreadsheet, Excel is probably the best debugger that I have ever used, including Lisp and Smalltalk.</p><p>The thing that makes end-user programming easy in Excel is not that it's easy to write code, it's that <em>it's easy to see what the code is doing and understand why it's doing the wrong thing</em>. If you replace this with an LLM that generates Python, and the Python program is wrong, how does a normal non-Python-programming human debug it? They try asking the LLM, but it doesn't actually understand the Python so it will often send them down odd rabbit holes. In contrast, every intermediate step in an Excel / Calc program is visible. Every single intermediate value is introspectable. Adding extra sanity checks (such as 'does money leaving the account equal the money paid to suppliers?') is trivial.</p><p>If you want to democratise programming, build better debuggers, don't build tools that rapidly generate code that's hard to debug.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://cathode.church/@s0" class="u-url mention">@<span>s0</span></a></span> ktemkin!</p>

<p>now you might ask &quot;why care about this, just use lix&quot; however consider: one of the lix people wants me dead personally, while the nixos people might want me dead at most as a potential foreign adversary or something</p><p>i like the latter slightly more so i stick with nixos</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@samth" class="u-url mention">@<span>samth</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling" class="u-url mention">@<span>jonmsterling</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://types.pl/@wilbowma" class="u-url mention">@<span>wilbowma</span></a></span> Its intended purpose (graduate applications) is not to rank whole departments, but departments in a particular subfield. It&#39;s rubbish at that, because &quot;top two conferences&quot; is too narrow a metric. </p><p>I do know that my own department has a strong group in computational biology, particularly in organ modelling. I don&#39;t know how strong, relatively speaking, but it is about one tenth of a strong department. You wouldn&#39;t know from csrankings. Not that it is misranked: it doesn&#39;t appear at all. Csrankings only considers two conferences, both in molecular biology; my colleagues publish in journals, and not in mol bio.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> that...is something 😳😮😦😧😨</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@dabeaz" class="u-url mention">@<span>dabeaz</span></a></span> I really should learn Rust at some point, but... I still like C 😔</p>

<p>nixos bans anduril from recruiting on nixos forums <a href="https://discourse.nixos.org/t/anduril-industries-electromagnetic-warfare-team-is-hiring/62569/10" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">discourse.nixos.org/t/anduril-</span><span class="invisible">industries-electromagnetic-warfare-team-is-hiring/62569/10</span></a></p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://urusai.social/@thepi" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>thepi</span></a></span> Is there anything that is genuinely not-embedded? A multikernel system where the OS runs on all the cores, including the little ones responsible for power management and the like?</p><p>(yes, I have already seen “It’s Time for the OS to Rediscover Hardware”)</p>