(* Vishnu: creating form *) let v = B (3, 4) (* Shiva: dissolving form *) match v with | B (x, y) -> x + y

(with apologies to Philip Greenspun) any sufficiently complicated description of an implementation by a Turing-machinist will eventually lapse into a half-coherent rediscovery of lambda-calculus

I had this stress dream last night where we were trying to catch a flight and when we got to the security line it turned out the tickets I printed out just had a big database connection error message printed on them. And attempting to install the app failed because I can't see my screen in dreams.

how to power up your github contributor graph 1. pick favorite obscure programming language 2. build a really simple app, like a web photo album 3. find that the ecosystem libraries are missing tons of mundane features 4. submit PRs for all of these features useful? kinda. looks impressive? sure

how did Valve get away with making games on Linux work reliably? if Bill Gates was still running Microsoft he would have invited Gabe Newell into a smoke filled room and given him the speech from Network

it's straight up elder abuse that Chrome force uninstalled uBlock Origin on laptops that their grandkids set up for them

the brutality of 3d graphics programming is that you're mostly dealing with arrays full of floats all day and 30 years of software engineering discipline just passes you by because there's not that much that helps with that you may as well be writing fortran

yo what was hypercard? did it run on mainframes or something?

Your kid comes back from his first semester of CS101. First it was Python, you let that slide. Then came Go. "At least it compiles" you told yourself. But now... C++? Your own flesh and blood, wearing that shirt under your roof. This is what happens when you let the universities get to them.

if the net result of an earthquake destroying TSMC/Taiwan is that every LLM gets repurposed towards rewriting Java, C#, Python and Javascript into C++ or Rust ASAP, that'd be pretty cool

I really thought the hardest part of small electronics fabrication would be understanding EE and soldering stuff but it really feels like it's 90% staring at enclosures wondering how you can fit everything together and/or if you should 3d print some stuff

so are the RL agents DeepMind developed that kick ass at video games like Wintermute whereas generative AI like LLMs more like Neuromancer?

Oh. Yes, the reason clang++-18 was not able to compile things on my box is because I forgot to... *checks notes* ... install libstdc++-14-dev

I was not expecting Tim Sweeney on Lex to bring up the Curry Howard Isomorphism and that the thing that would accelerate adoption of the federated metaverse is much stronger types in programming languages! Looking forward to seeing how the Verse language unfolds!

how did Valve get away with making games on Linux work reliably? if Bill Gates was still running Microsoft he would have invited Gabe Newell into a smoke filled room and given him the speech from Network

I remember seeing Silicon Valley (the place) for the first time. I was expecting an endless row of hacker houses, dudes soldering custom chips in garages, arguing about Lisp macros over ramen, rollerblading in massive arcades with ramps but it was just a bunch of office parks???

The modern web is now so slow that I often do errands in parallel so that I'm not just sitting at a throbber for several seconds per step. How did we get here? Networks and computers are faster than ever, yet workflows are more sluggish than ever?

Thank you OCaml

my latest idle hobby is finding personal automation things I had written in Python or F# that consume 100MB of RAM and asking Claude to rewrite them in C++ so they consume 3MB instead surprisingly effective!

So! My static analysis of the DeepSeek Android app reveals it contains significant spyware and malware functionality that a normal chat app shouldn't have. Full technical details in my new blog post: michael.bacarella.com/2025/02/07/s...

Some of my quick thoughts about DeepSeek and the AI arms race michael.bacarella.com/2025/01/31/d...

why yes, business bank, I would love to have to download all of my statements for the year one-by-one and have them all named statement.pdf

if you look closely, tons of minor things are broken on various web sites during Christmas week the B teams can't figure it out, but they don't want to wake the A teams up to fix it

Kind of amazing how much WordPress Hacked Site Repair Services don't know about WordPress.

we're all here on bsky rewriting our blogs in BrianLang 0.4 while researchers at Google are doing quantum supremacy

if you find yourself editing a dependabot.yml file, stop right now and forget about it and use the open source renovatebot instead. it's so. much. better. github.com/renovatebot/...

the tech community on bsky has some of the greatest minds of our generation but it seems overly focused on tinkering with BrianLang 0.4 to build a personal blog can nobody figure out what world-improving things to work on? is our skillset actually not that impactful?

*enters hour three of ruthlessly optimizing his advent of code solution* "maybe I should rewrite this in x86-64 assembler?" I need to stop doing these.

starting a business where we use zero saas providers

dependabot: let me fix this security vuln for you! me: ok! dependabot: I have exposed 115 new vulns me: these aren't new. it looks like you... subverted our overrides rules? dependabot: 🥺 👉🏽👈🏽

never ask * a woman her age * a man his salary * an ocaml developer what concurrency and effects libraries to standardize on

I've been getting random segfaults doing things I know should work. according to dmesg, they were all happening on a single core maybe that one core is broken? I turned it off with: echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu4/online and it shows as offline in htop and now everything is fine(!)

you ever feel like a fraud because you spend hours trying to get something to work and can't and don't know why, and then realize it's because you wrote rewards[i] = reward instead of rewards[i] += reward ? maybe I can blame this on python somehow?

is there a usable interactive python environment available for neovim? the magma (jupyter) plugin seems a bit awkward

one brutal fact of data science is that Excel is, at worst, the second best tool available for the job

just disabled the public-but-actually-supposed-to-be-private AWS S3 bucket full of proprietary data that's been in-use for about 7 years can't wait to see what workflows break!

why is torch a 1GB download? it's just matmuls!

C++: you can rely on me, I'm extremely fast and power the world also C++: one time out of 12 I'll segfault, but definitely not when you run me under valgrind or with debug symbols built in 🤷‍♂️

really loving uv. even if it wasn't any faster (although it is!), being able to install it with a one-liner that has no other dependencies and which lets you forget about pyenv, pip, venvs and poetry is a huge quality of life improvement it's even more encompassing than cargo is for rust

did github update their throttling policy? doing things that source github repos / ghcr for packages takes for-ever for me now, even though I've been chill the entire weekend

what I love about this talk is that it shows how many $100 bills there STILL are waiting around to be picked up in improving the python ecosystem www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKT...

me: you sure I don't want a quadtree for this? Claude: yes, you want an R-Tree me: well, you're the world's most advanced LLM, ok Claude: here's the several hundred lines of code ... hours later ... me: this sucks, average depth is 22,000! Claude: yeah, you really should be using a quadtree me: 😑

oh you're into functional programming? name all of the functions

C++ is so brutal you can just, like, not notice something is taking a reference instead of a copy and then have extremely mystifying program behavior later

all of this Claude Pro access and all I can think of doing with it is having it tighten up my neovim configs

men would rather buy a social media platform and help Trump get re-elected than go to therapy

since X is mainstream media now, it's officially lame