ughitsaaron

Part of the point of SICP is to be generic about its programming principles. The core principles and concepts are independent of any particular programming language (so long as it has first class functions, and probably a few other common features). Since Scheme has virtually no syntax it was an ideal language for Ableson & Sussman’s course. It’s notable that SICP spends hardly any time teaching the language.

I’ve never understood, therefore, the motivation behind trying to “translate” SICP into a language like JS (or Python, etc.) It over emphasizes the importance of the preferred language in a way that very obviously undermines the book.

The point being: if you’re gonna do SICP do it in Scheme. You’ll get more out of it.

I get ads for this all the time but still have no idea what I could do with it.

I really love that book and also couldn’t help but think about it while reading this.

I just want to call out how much I appreciate the comparison of “vibe coding” to the endless scroll.

When you watch someone who knows what they are doing, you'll see them looping over the following steps:

Build a mental model of the requirements

Write code that (hopefully?!) does that

Build a mental model of what the code actually does

Identify the differences, and update the code (or the requirements).

This is pretty right on but I think it leaves out an aspect of writing code that I think is often pretty under appreciated. Code does two things at once: it provides a set of instructions to a machine and it communicates the authors' understanding of the program behavior those instructions are intended to express. I think this is a large part of what makes programming so fascinating and frustrating. It's what's behind the cliche that "naming things" is one of the hardest parts of programming. In growing software systems it's often not enough that a feature's implementation works. Ideally, that implementation should impose a minimum barrier to understanding for contributors to do something with it afterward. I'm not convinced this is an aspect of software development that LLMs will be able to meaningfully achieve.

I really agree. I think this is particularly peculiar to English speakers because the mix of origin in our vocabulary is such a grab bag.

My apologies.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/wireStory/noam-chomskys-wife-r...

I actually laughed out loud when I read that conclusion. Not only does it sound infeasible and unsustainable, it also sounds not a little arrogant and likely annoying for everyone else working with them.

My hunch is that because `child` is so common place and suggests no semantic reference to oppression.

I think it’s easy to overestimate how thinly skinned most people really are because an exceptional complaint (that’s not easily dismissible) commands attention. (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, insofar as it’s indicative of sympathy and sensitivity.)

Hristos a înviat! Multumesc, brother.

That _is_ a much better link.

At the very least, even if you haven’t read Camus, I expect that any programmer of any experience should already have some intuitive sympathy with “The Myth of Sisyphus.”

The publication is still around, at least online. Weirdly, I also noticed there’s a 2600 Meetup group nearby where I live.

Why of all things should simplifying tax filing be means tested?

In a few centuries (and a couple hundred medical nightmares)

I came here to share that article in case nobody had yet. It provides a very healthy reality check in discussions on this topic.

That explain why an audio version exists, but not why the audio is hosted by a different, unaffiliated publication.

A fun fact about this essay. It was published after Anthony’s mother made an unsolicited submission of it to David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker.

Bourdain began his ascent as a writer and public personality when his mother sent a manuscript to me more than twenty years ago. Like any editor, I receive many unsolicited manuscripts, and each one carries a message: ignore this at your peril; brilliance could await. I read Bourdain’s piece and started laughing almost immediately.[0]

I was fortunate enough to get to see Anthony retell this story during an interview at The New Yorker Festival, shortly before his passing.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/sunday-reading-r...

sounds like a perfectly cromulent topic to embiggen our knowledge.

My bad. The description early in the linked article didn’t sound familiar but reading a bit further they even use that term exactly.

Is this also the function of numbers stations?

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

This is a cool idea. I think this is achievable with APIs/scraping of news sites, some machine learning/LLM (to assign locations to news stories), and an open source library like Leaflet.

I have a similar background with math as the commenter. +1 to Lockhart. If the commenter finds numbers interesting they may also really enjoy his book “Arithmatic.” I found it so refreshing. It truly reoriented my whole relationship with mathematics.

Takk fyrir!

I’ve been using autojump for years to the point of forgetting it’s not out-of-the-box behavior for zsh.

https://github.com/wting/autojump

Given the stakes of an “edge case” in a war machine, not to mention their cost, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect the number of such cases to be zero.

So does this mean that whenever one is working in 8 bits that it’s taken for granted that the upper bounds represent negative integers? Or does it rather depend on the context?

Very well explained.

Amazing! Thank you for sharing.

My wife and I are moving from a Bortle 9 (NYC) to a Bortle 3-4 (Upstate) soon and I'm excited to start attempting more DSO imaging. Up to now I've been mostly focused on capturing Jupiter and Saturn which are, honestly, challenging as it is.