"It was always difficult to recommend a single up-to-date learning resource. This book fills that niche perfectly, providing both a gentle introduction to the language and a deeper hands-on dive into the practical side..." -- Tikhon Jelvis, Chair, Haskell.org Committee. @cercerilla.bsky.social

My favorite down-time/stress release activity lately has been making tabletop gaming maps. I haven't been active on bluesky for a while, but I thought it might be nice to share a couple of them.

I wish we could have more grown up nuanced discussions like this about AI. I find it useful, and recognize its limits and the social effort to adapt to a world where it exists.

If you've thought about giving Haskell a try, this is a great opportunity to get Effective Haskell at a discount. Whether you check out Effective Haskell or not, I'm always happy to answer questions or help folks who are interested in functional programming.

If you've thought about giving Haskell a try, this is a great opportunity to get Effective Haskell at a discount. Whether you check out Effective Haskell or not, I'm always happy to answer questions or help folks who are interested in functional programming.

I’m really excited to announce my first chapbook, “Trans Artifacts: Bones Between My Teeth,” will be published by Porkbelly Press in 2026/7!

I’m working on my second book right now, Haskell Brain Teasers. It’s shorter and more structured than Effective Haskell, but writing is still a lot of work. One thing that helps keep me motivated is the belief that kind and empathetic technical writing that celebrates the reader is important.

I’ve been working for a while on an article that aims to explain pure functions in terms of dictionaries. It’s been slow to write so I decided to release part 1 now and I’ll follow up with a part 2 soon: rebeccaskinner.net/posts/2024-1...

As an example: rebeccaskinner.net/posts/2025-0...

One of my favorite things is writing completely unhinged code that should never exist.

The fact congressional Democrats have not hired three dozen D&D rules lawyers with oppositional defiant disorder and turned them loose on parliamentary procedure with the goal of maximum obstruction is such a fucking missed opportunity

I’ve been studying middle Egyptian lately, for no particular reason. I’m pretty early on, but here are some of my big takeaways so far…

Did you know that a lot of middle Egyptian words written using hieroglyphic are valid Haskell identifiers? You can just use Unicode in your programs, nobody can stop you.

I don’t know how to explain it, but Q feels like it should come later in the alphabet than it actually does.

I actually have a mug I made for myself that says “I would rather be wrong” because truly, being a member of the Cassandra Corps is awful. But being right isn’t about my emotional needs; it’s about supporting material improvements. People who reverse that purpose aren’t allies.

There are things about very large LLMs that concern me. Centralized control of them is the big one, but also the risk of hallucinations in critical systems, their utility in propaganda and misinformation campaigns, and how they’re used to launder responsibility.

i ask this question of every member of the @democrats.org claiming to fight for us: we are in unprecedented times. what unprecedented actions will you be taking?

Gonna put some more fire on this take. Many publishers are not manually going through each and every review when they are looking at reviews to determine if they want to re-sign an author or acquire an author previously published elsewhere. They just see that Paige O'Woord's last book has a 3.5 on

There are more and more shows on streamers that did put out physical releases (Harley Quinn, The Boys, etc.) that have decided to just stop partway through the show and I will never not be DEEPLY annoyed by this What do you MEAN you'll sell me 3 seasons of a 5 season show

We are pleased to announce that nominations are now open for the Haskell.org committee. You can nominate yourself or a friend for a three-year term (2025-2028) by sending an email to [committee at haskell.org] by January 31, 2025. More info below: discourse.haskell.org/t/call-for-n...

And can the “class only leftists” actually shut the fuck up? Yall have multiple think tanks and editorial boards who were giggling about “anti identitarian politics” and “pro gentrification” And that includes the non white ones who capitalized or just rested on transphobia nd misogyny

After a few months taking a break from work, I'm looking for a job again.  Anyone hiring a software engineer with a penchant for low-level stuff?  I'm looking for something remote in the US (or, at the very least, something in the Seattle area). (Reskeet for reach? Thanks!)

Just as the rules of programming languages are invented by people in the pursuance of good engineering outcomes, so human rights are invented in the pursuance of human dignity. ACM SIGPLAN should explicitly construct its own minimum standards of human rights for its event host locations.

One of life's most frustrating experiences is spending hours on hold being chastised by an automated system for not using the website that doesn't actually support the issue you're trying to address. Trust me, automated recording, if there was a way to do this without talking to a human I'd do it.

I talk about this a lot, but here’s the thing: Right-wing grifters are actually really good at gaming algorithms and co-opting popular topics, platforms, and other such concepts. They know how to break into the mainstream and pull people inward.

Last night I dreamed that Aliens were invading earth. Instead of fighting them, we talked to them about dependent type theory and they were so fascinated they became our friends and opened up a programming languages research institute on earth to collaborate with us.

Sudan is by far the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet right now, and not a single major power seems willing to do anything about it. A death toll from starvation in the millions is possible if no food aid reaches the area soon.

Agreed

Her final essay was on Claudia Rankine's Citizen & the white gaze. She turned in two versions. Her original essay cited Fanon's Black Skin White Masks to great effect. The AI version cleaned up some of her grammatical errors, but also deleted every mention of Fanon from her work!

Of all the discourse I see around generative AI models, I find arguments based on intellectual property the least persuasive. I think intellectual property is a legal fiction that does more harm to society than good. We should focus less on "theft of knowledge" and more on risks of centralization.

Every December people tell me how you have to follow recipes if you want to bake and that you can't just go make stuff up, but you can put any combination of flour, butter, and sugar in the oven. Nobody can stop you. This post brought to you by something halfway between cookies and lemon bars.

I don’t know what normal people do when they drink but I’m working on a vampire chronicles / SG1 fanfic where Apophis has to tell Lestat his god complex is a bit much, meanwhile Armand is hip-deep in Teal’c’s Jaffussy.

Adding a “live tv (including ads)” option to an ad-free tier on a streaming service means that it’s no longer ad free and should not be advertised as such.

I’ve advocated for this as well. Library sciences are applicable to a lot of problems organizations have and any large software team would benefit enormously from having a librarian. Not to mention the benefit to a user base who need access to technical information.

I decided to give gnome another try on my primary desktop machine. It seems like the “omg gnome removed every feature” complaints are exaggerated but there were a couple of odd friction points. Overall it seems fine, although I probably won’t stick with it. Nice to try new things sometimes though.

Can someone who understands monetization explain to me why there is a market for paid "fewer ads" tiers? I would assume that there's a pretty strong split between people who accept ads and people who don't, and people who are okay w/ads just don't pay, and "no ads" people won't pay for "fewer ads"

boosting the Cisgender Women Against Bathroom Bans petition again, please sign and share if you missed it the first time around! It’s at a little under 8,500 signatures now and we would love to try to get it to 10,000 by the weekend! actionnetwork.org/petitions/no...

Your periodic reminder that your social media posts are and will be seen by American law enforcement. Don't create the evidence for your own trial. Yes I will lose followers for this, I do every time. No I'm not a cop.

Literally just got up and looked out all the windows because I thought there was an injured goose outside but it was just my stomach being dramatic about my choice to have guacamole for dinner.

It's not normal to shout "I told you to stop chewing on the playstation", but with a parrot it is.

I wish that disabling auto-play of animation was a persistent setting rather than a per-device setting. My browser is configured to delete all cookies, history, etc. every time I close the browser and it's annoying to change that setting every time I open bluesky.

Amazing work improving the Haskell tooling ecosystem this year. Huge thanks to all of the contributors and mentors, and to Aaron for all of the work he does organizing our participation in GSoC.

If you are curious about Haskell or wanting to start using functional programming to build real applications, this is a great chance to save some money on Effective Haskell and other great functional programming books.

blog post for reference: www.haskellforall.com/2021/08/name...

*explaining gender euphoria to a developer* so, imagine you're learning about a whole new way of appearing to the world, and talking to computers doesn't have to be so painful and alienating!

Anyone who reads my stuff regularly should understand that I am not invested in electoralism as a primary means to change. But right now fascists are about to take over and we need to signal mass dissent at every turn, VERY MUCH INCLUDING THE BALLOT BOX

Jokes like this are poissoning my feed.

This is for Nex and all my trans siblings and the ways we should be loved in this world.

Finally got an old favorite today.