lex-lightning

Dope. Thanks.

Have you written much Prolog?

I was thinking about in Prolog terms and I think it’s the hardest paradigm to avoid the scoping problem in

Are you better at inventing than the worker is?

Are your subsequent inventions better than the art they create?

Do we really need double the widgets?

I mean, the top post on this site yesterday was a self-balancing cube someone invented. This is precisely the community that should understand that inventions for inventions’ sake aren’t necessarily improving anything.

I’ve asked Bing about sexual health questions and been told it’s not okay to talk about that.

I asked it a question about Christianity and it stated things with the tone and certainty of a preacher.

Just gross. And worse to put something like that in the hands of billionaires.

I am somewhat of a doomer not because I think it will be the Terminator. More like AI theocracy here we go.

Count me unimpressed too

Bing Copilot can’t even answer simple questions about businesses in a particular city without lying. When confronted, it will apologize and then repeat the same text verbatim.

Zero reasoning happening.

If I wanted to deeply pedantic, I think the blocks associated with those monady bits keep the parameters in scope longer than needed.

But I never got into Haskell so I don’t really know.

I’m a contrived idea man, not a contrived solution man, damnit.

What if someone works 30 hours a week performing a service which is not yet automated, but uniquely theirs, like their own standup comedy.

Contrast that with the replicable software example.

I still don’t fold clothes. I just buy stuff that doesn’t wrinkle. Work smarter not harder.

In the first case no, in the second yes.

Great that you reduced the need to work. You are a hero to society.

Not great to use that as a reason to control others.

Devil’s advocate: they’re both clerks and the liquor store is more dangerous, so yes they should be paid more

Hey I’m down to party with some monads, but I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

One note: each variable only gets assigned to once, so FP won’t magic that away.

The side effects might have a different way of management in FP. But the IO will happen in the same order in reality anyway.

So I don’t think there’s a way out, but I honestly would be interested to see it.

The logarithmic decay could be more about more and more people hitting their satisfaction level, than about what the wealth can purchase. In other words, very few people actually want to be billionaires.

Or more simply: most people want to retire.

I think genuinely most people don’t want to exert power over others, so the value doesn’t increase for most

I appreciate your interest.

I’d argue that even declaring ‘c’ is against the spirit though. To say nothing of the eldritch shadow cast there (no disrespect, I think we’re both enjoying playing around here)

What about different working conditions? Is one hour in a coal mine the same as one hour as an actor?

What if a person has a debilitating illness that prevents them from working but is also expensive to take care of?

You are morally and intellectually superior.

I would have paid double my taxes over my career if the US would spend it on elevating the poor. But asking me to not retire, to give away my savings to very few people? What, that’s not ethical.

What if I made a lot, but spend very little? Shouldn’t that weigh in, if your issue is consumption level?

What if in my early retirement, I go around lifting people up in non-monetary ways?

What if my job earned me a lot of money but was ultimately doing something I found socially harmful? I should continue working to the detriment of my mental health and against my principles?

We can elevate the poorest and decrease the amount of work the median/average person must do.

keyword references: degrowth, UBI

My personal pet peeve is how every retirement calculator bakes in an assumption like “you’ll NEED 75% of your current income as living expenses when you retire.”

Like your salary won’t change over your career. Like you’re just an impulse buyer. Like there’s anything but a distant correlation between these numbers.

I think there’s a conspiracy or a (USA) cultural aversion to not working.

I had a great manager who was a coding genius, always available to pair even if it took hours to explain something, and has been a friend for years after we both left that company.

But before that company I had a manager at a very small company who absolutely had no ability to do the work — and would have failed a personality test on top of that.

a = getInt(); b = getInt() + a; c = getInt(); d = b / c; puts(d); puts(c); puts(b); puts(a);

Nothing in the middle of this code prevents using ‘a’ even though it isn’t relevant to ‘c’. And there’s no way to arrange it to change that.

For real though. This was my biggest frustration when I was an SE.

Want people in a large organization to ignore your ideas? Speak them out loud.

Want them to follow them as dogma? Write a blog post under a pseudonym.

When I was a kid I would tell my parents I cleaned my room, then they’d look in the closet and see everything in a pile.

you are specifically the person who should get a case. Or wipe your hands or something? This is an absurdly high rate of breaking phones. no one here has any incantations or runes that will safeguard you from physics

This isn’t always possible, even in lisp. Compare to Rust’s non-lexical lifetimes

This sounds like another option while maintaining agreement with the gist of what I meant. Those are good, though that’s where I start preferring smallness

I agree. I love my iPhone and my iPad. But that touch bar era on the Mac was rough.

Smooth, squiggly, hard, and pointy are my gotos

But what if the two houses are otherwise identical? Even a small convenience will tip decisionmaking

Yes, but programming is more akin to copywriting than mathematical notation most of the time.

Math has very well-defined, well-trod conventions that are densely packed into the notation. When people try to write code like this though, it’s hard to read.

All else equal, I’ll take a snippet of code with more characters in it but less work to unpack those characters. Reading linearly is cheap; I get tired reading formulas faster than reading technical prose. Precedence makes the mental parsing nonlinear.

The drawback of the microscopic function craze is you lose the ability to read a whole procedure from top to bottom. If some code is truly reused, break it out into a function with a good name, sure.

But in my domain I have seen countless one-line functions used in one place each, and it’s frustrating having to jump around the code (and add to my mental context stack*) rather than just putting some curly braces and a comment. Functions aren’t primarily meant as a hygiene mechanism. I really like the curly brace scoping in Rust.

I found my style partly by reading John Carmack and Casey Muratori’s coding philosophies and putting them to the test for myself.

* For a natural language analogy, consider the difference between parenthetical remarks and asterisks. You have to remember your place in the text.