gylterud

Juniors learn. Some juniors are potential good seniors. Over time they will internalise good architecture and be able to make good judgments on their own.

Micromanaging LLMs is like having Dory from Finding Nemo as your colleague. You find ways to communicate, but there is no learning going on.

On my spare time, I am working on my game, a sci fi dungeon crawler – written in Haskell. Currently finishing up the graphics engine. OpenGL based. 2.5D but with a real 3D dynamic light system. In game objects and entities cast realistic soft shadows, and are lit up realistically. Took a lot of mathing and thinking to get working!

Next up is actually implementing game play!

There is a little video demo here (but bear in mind that everything is temp graphics) https://hakon.gylterud.net/diary/2026-05.html#2026-05-02

As a university professor, I still get random people e-mailing me “dumb questions” every once in a while. And I still try my best to answer them – in the spirit of keep the Internet alive!

Online community and connections are very valuable, and I also get genuinely interesting e-mails from random people. Usually someone who has read something I wrote, and want to discuss it. I also send out random e-mails, and my experience is that many people will answer, if you write to them about something they care about.

No changing when schools and kindergartens are open. Where I live, kindergarten closes 16:30. So 8–16 it is!

Not sure why the comments here are so negative! I found it mildly interesting, and worth a few minutes on a Sunday!

I did not realise there are ads for LLMs. Of course if I thought about it, I would conclude that there must be. But somehow the concept seems strange to me. What do they advertise? The LLM can do so many different things… I guess they are all “welcome! To the world of tomorrow!”

Then again, I know nothing about ads these days. Last time I had any ad exposure was twenty years ago, when I lived at home with my parents.

Countries do not do, things people do.

Dehumanising “the others” is a human trait, and a very destructive one. Just like violence and greed. People have different susceptibility for these, but we should all work to counter them and it is in its place to point it out when observed.

I owe so much to this blog! It was such an inspiring read when I started out programming in Haskell back in 2007.

Today I am a professor in computer science and still draw on it for examples in my advanced functional programming course. Just last week we did the loeb function, as an example of interesting use of Functor.

Loeb function: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/11/from-l-theorem-to-spreadsheet...

No, but they emulate intelligence by making up connections between seemingly disparate things, where there are none.

Well, with the help of Microsoft and Apple, who knows? This might just be the years of the Linux desktop!

Valve has made Linux gaming a thing. So, even normies are trying it…

https://hakon.gylterud.net/

I write there about anything which interests me. My site is written in Markdown and an mkfile builds it using Pandoc. There is even an atom feed for my diary entries. Also generated using Pandoc!

I used Gentoo for ten years (2005–2015), and I was very happy with it! Stable was not the word I would use, in that updating frequently broke and required manual intervention. But it was so flexible! The easily accessible options one has for choosing everything about the system is unparalleled in any system I have tried since. I would still use it if I had more tinkering time. These days I am on NixOS, mostly to have the same setup on every machine I use.

One would then maybe suspect breaking up alliances with Europe is the point of the whole thing.

I had not thought about this perspective (I wrote this essay many eons ago). But now I have a good colleague who is dyslexic, and he said the same thing. He says, for him, the colours carry more meaning than the characters often.

I guess they were confused by the GHc documentation which says that the language option TraditionalRecordSyntax was introduced then, and enabled by default. Of course, the actual syntax was always part of the language. There just wasn’t an explicit option to enable/disable it.

Cool. I might go back to it sometime some time! I really liked the routing protocol and the ease of setting up services for it.

What is the status on I2P these days? I used to run a lot of stuff on it. It was a lot of fun. It was like this cozy alternative development of internet, where things still felt like 1997.

The day when LLMs generate useful code with dependent types! That would be awesome!

The way code is written in Haskell, small laser focused functions and clearly defined and mockable side effects, lends itself very well to property based testing.

This might not be impossible to achieve in other languages, but I haven’t seen it used as prevailently in other languages.

I have found that Haskell has two good things going for it when it comes to LLM code generation. Both have to do with correctness.

The expressive type system catches a lot of mistakes, and the fact that they are compile errors which can be fed right into the LLM again means that incorrect code is caught early.

The second is property based testing. With it I have had the LLM generate amazingly efficient, correct code, by iteratively making it more and more efficient – running quickcheck on each pass. The LLM is not super good at writing the tests, but if you add some yourself, you quickly root out any mistakes in the generated code.

I usually treat the LLM generated Haskell code as a first draft.

The power of Haskell in this case is the fearless refactoring the strong type system enables. So even if the code generated is not beautiful, it can sit there and do a job until the surrounding parts have taken shape, and then be refactored into something nice when I have a moment to spare.

Great explanation!

I guess it also hints at why the sequences keep getting smaller when you compress it several times (as mentioned in a footnote). Each compression peels away layers in this expansion. That’s my intuition at least.

Yes, sorry for just teasing its existence. I shall see if I can find a good way to present it when I have some time!

Neat!

The AI game seems to go on forever. It hasn’t found the winning strategy. Which is fine. The infinite sequences seem to be getting the most juice in the discussion here.

Cool! I haven’t thought about varying the number of stones one could put. It’s definitely a variation to look into!

Would your intuition be that this makes it so that neither player has a winning strategy? That perfect play would yield an infinite sequence?

Cubefree! Oh, that’s a good keyword to find more results about this.

From your link it seems it is a conjecture that this is the lexicographically earliest one. Very interesting!

A neat, but perhaps difficult question just occurred to me: Is every irrational number which is represented by an anti-pattern game transcendental?

Without having a proof ready at hand, I am quite sure that the `generate` sequence from my post represents a transcendental number.

Some irrational numbers are not valid games. For instance, I am sure the expansion of let us say π/4 in binary has 000 as a subsequence somewhere. But that could never happen in a game, because it disallows repetitions of a substring three times in a row.

And by adding a constant to the specification of your programming language, any sequence can have complexity 1! (But of course not every sequence can have its own constant.)

Ah, I hadn't tested this on mobile. I could try find some way of preventing the line break.