mithametacs

The withdrawals are fucking garbage from even mild abuse (3x prescribed). I passed out and cut my head. And was anhedonic. And lethargic.

And I started taking it as an adult. So I had 4 or 5 ADHD diagnoses under my belt.

I literally did the thing you’re not supposed to do.

my psych kept giving me everything by Adderall. So I went to one of those online doctors and got Adderall through her.

Then I just told my psychiatrist that I have Adderall prescription and she took it over.

For the record, she’s actually really reasonable and I like her but very conservative about the stimulants. Which when I finally got them were a revelation. Medication that actually works.

Awful take.

Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances.

That doesn’t make everyone a murderer.

Why didn’t I have you in my English classes peer reviewing my papers. Nicely done.

You just put a text file with the names of the team or developers who own the directory.

What research?

You don’t hold onto it. It’s just lost when you die.

Heaven has no bitcoin ATMs.

now we have a benchmark

The dumber the technique, the less it should be used for this.

Not everything is a functional program though and side effects are important. Types can’t* represent this.

*Not for practical programs

Sure code can be cool for the same reason hip-hop is more than just the meaning of the words.

The typing is the rhyme scheme. The algorithm is the rhythm.

I don't want to write any code. I want to think about the design of the program and have it pop out of my head fully formed.

The latter gives me dopamine. The former gives me carpal tunnel.

I’m satisfied bouncing between the free tiers of Claude and ChatGPT

I usually only have like a few hard questions per day, where I have lots of unknown unknowns.

If the LLM doesn’t get me an answer within the free tier number of messages, it’s not gonna get there

I had no choice most of my career doing Rails.

Now I do C++ and I would fight to the death to keep autocomplete.

But Copilot I bought a license for a got a refund for after a few months. In the net, it wastes your time.

And I mean, copilot in particular is especially bad. It refuses lots of valid programming questions. Other LLMs are better. But they still are wrong a lot.

they’re still bad for generating any significant body of code.

They’re a little bit better about deciphering errors.

They’ll still bullshit* you and send you on wild goose chases.

*hallucinate if you prefer

The Senate is quite deliberately there to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

But they should also have foreseen the routes for abuse. That's also their job.

The DMCA is a disaster.

I/O is just built on top of the tape. Real computers reserve a map of memory to I/O.

This is like saying a CPU isn't a computer. It's sort of right but sort of wrong, you know?

An algorithm designed for translating between human languages has now been shown to generalize to solving visual IQ test puzzles, without much modification.

Yes, I find that surprising.

I've never thought of a micro-lookup-table!

That's cool. What have you used those for?

I read that and the followup. It’s good writing but I slightly disagree. Imperative is actually a closer mathematical formalism for some things.

I find imperative better for expressing state machines. I find declarative better for backtracking.

You can write a state machine with just a loop, an assignable, and conditions. Writing state in prolog is irritating.

Sounds like a page worth another search if you don't mind. I'll give you Internet Points in return!

-- my attempt:

Imperative defines the order and semantics of each step.

Declarative defines the prerequisites and intent of each step.

The algorithms each can implement are equivalent.

That's the hard part of project management.

Is it worth spending a bit more time up-front, hoping to prevent refactoring later, or is it better to build a buggy version then improve it?

I like thinking with pen-and-paper diagrams; I don't enjoy the mechanics of code editing. So I lean toward upfront planning.

I think you're right but it's hard to know for sure. Has anyone studied software methodologies for time taken to build $X? That seems like a beast of an experimental design, but I'd love to see.

I agree with the distinction in approaches. In other words, it sounds like you're distinguishing agile and waterfall.

I just find it odd to analogize:

agile : waterfall :: imperative : declarative

Yes you can, you handle every case equally. You don’t even need the reflection mechanisms to be visible to the user with a good type system. A good type system participates in codegen.

for a really simple example: languages which allow narrowing a numeric to a float, but also let you interpolate either into a string without knowing which you have.

A statically typed Console.log in JS/TS would be an unnecessary annoyance.

Grandparent was such a good post otherwise!

I love strong types. I love for loops. I love stacks.

GP! Try Rust. Imperative programming isn’t orthogonal to types. You can go hard in Rust. (I loved experimenting with it but I like GC)

GP! Try data driven design. Imperative programming isn’t orthogonal to declarative.

Real talk, show me any declarative game engine that’s worth looking at. The best ones are all imperative and data driven design is popular. Clearly imperative code has something going for it.

and the advantages aren’t strictly speed of development, but imperative can be clearer. It just depends.

I find the most interesting possibility: - life finds a way - life gets too smart - life kills itself - life finds a way

We've set foot on only 1 other stellar body.

Luna is sort of made from the Earth. And it's so close that Earth has a stronger pull on it than Sun.

So we have set foot on another stellar body, sure. But we also... kind of haven't.

And then we had to retreat from it anyway. Homo sapiens, hunter champions, arrived at an uninhabited body and were outmatched.

Way to go, smartest species we know of. You've done jack shit.

Beyond the stars, a static void. Ions, but no aliens.

Till one day SETI finds a 5k line template compilation error!

Rejoice! We are not alone! Aliens have to deal with C++ too!

I've undergone psychiatric care for things not related to psychosis. As for psychosis, I am mentally healthy.

As a child I was obsessed with math. I had a pseudo-religious obsession with Platonism, connected with my childhood fear of mortality. A bizarre belief system.

While trying to make new friends in a new city, I was shunned from a new group for unknown reasons. I was going through a breakup from an abuser. I was depressed and grasping for explanations, thinking I was being conspired against. A persecution complex.

Lack of information and strong emotion are enough.