Doom spiraled today, taking a short bsky break until I'm in a better place

Being really into the Roman Empire is a major red flag, because you should be really into the Roman Republic instead

Logic for programmers is now the 136th best-selling book on Leanpub! "Building Backbone Plugins", your days are NUMBERED

You can measure the economic value of something in Garfields. Garfield makes about 1 billion USD in revenue annually, so if an industry is smaller than that it's worth less to the world than Garfield

The three hardest problems in LaTeX are line breaks, page breaks, and tweaking fonts

In two hours (11:40 central time) I'll be speaking about designing distributed systems with TLA+ at #P99conf! It's a free virtual conference, so no excuses not to go :) www.p99conf.io

Kinda listless today, got basically nothing done :/

The New York Times recently introduced daily puzzles called Pips. You place the dominoes on the grid so the numbers satisfy the labels. I solved Pips with cool software called a constraint solver. You give the constraints, e.g. "sum to 8", and it "magically" finds a solution. Let's look closer...

After writing the last newsletter I did some experiments to see how well GPT5 would have written the same thing, and the answer is "not very". Also I found the best real-world analogue to GPT5's writing style: quippy highscooler five paragraph essays On the patreon: www.patreon.com/posts/gpt5-i...

I've got a shiny new newsletter! "Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance" continues my roasting of Vim in particular and modal editing in general. What can I say, hate your tools! buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

I know this is bait (4/5 of his "good" games are shooters) but I love talking about videogames, so here's a list of videogames that gave me sublime experiences, that make videogames into something precious and special and worthy of respect. Screenshots when I 'got em 🧵

Is there any equivalent of www.thetorah.com for other religions, like Christianity or Islam? Basically a collaborative effort between religious authorities, academics, and historians to grappled with tough questions about Judaism, like "why is Channukah eight days when the miracle was only seven"

NO KINGS

Affine units are ones where X - Y is defined, as is X + (Y - Z), but X + Y is not. Examples: temperature, timestamps, coordinate systems. Any others that are useful in CS?

Email software is so bad Calendar software is so bad Android spam filter won't let me filter by prefix Just kinda miffed at technology today

Oh geeze TIL Zohran Mamdani is younger than me Not by much, but still

Sphinx doesn't support putting captions *below* code blocks in LaTeX, and after looking at how many edgecases they hardcoded into the latex stylesheets I can kinda see why

Short newsletter this week, 'The Phase Change', about two years of running and what it taught me about teaching software. buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

The more quotes you use the more sarcastic it is. Compare `AI "Thought Leaders"` to `AI """"Thought Leaders""""`

Aww man I doomscrolled today and now I'm bummed

Something that I think people need to consider is that when Pinochet lost the 1990 referendum he refused to cede power and ordered his military to rally and oppress the people. Pinochet had full unilateral control of the military with no meaningful legal checks. He wrote their paychecks.

Just signed up and convinced two other people to go

Almost 1500 people have purchased copies of *Logic for Programmers*! Has anybody had any experiences trying to apply the ideas in practice? Want to know if the book is doing its job!

I find this article by @b0rk.jvns.ca really fascinating: "Notes on switching to Helix from Vim" I see Julia as a "tinkerer" who's really good at customizing her environments, *and also* she very much enjoys how she doesn't have to configure Helix. Some thoughts: jvns.ca/blog/2025/10...

After spending twenty minutes hopelessly confusing myself with an induction misproof I have concluded that inductive proofs is best taught with sets and lists, not numbers

For every cool (neo/)vim tip or script someone shares with me I will share one in return

On the elevator a couple of college students were complaining that their next coding test was gonna be handwritten because the professor "was tired of them using ChatGPT". "What is this, the 18th century?" Looking how LLMs are playing out in colleges, it'll be the rest of the 21st century, too.

Newsletter is redonkulously late this week, but I just published 'Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice'! It's why correct code isn't always bug-free code. Also, new LFP release! buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

For every cool #julialang tip or script someone shares with me I will share one in return

For every cool Autohotkey tip or script someone shares with me I will share one in return

Are Abalone the grossest-looking food in the sea? 100%, especially under 40x magnification Still delicious tho

I am delighted to announce the v0.12 release of *Logic for Programmers*! This new update totally overhauls the data modeling and solvers chapters, plus heavy edits to several others. It's likely the LAST major content release, after this it's all fixes, copyedits, and polish. leanpub.com/logic/

Any abstract data type that supports the flipping, bopping, twisting, and pulling operations

Hey y'all, pop up a private browsing window, turn off adblock, and google "Kpop demon hunters" (Specifically google, don't kagi or duckduckgo or be the one person who bings)

If you call yourself a "software engineer" you better be able to: 1. Flip a linked list 2. Flip it again 3. Bop it 4. Twist it 5. Twist it 6. Pull it 7. Bop it

TLA+ has found bugs in everything from cloud services and message queues to video games and SSD firmware. @hillelwayne.com‬ will give an overview of how it can be applied to find design bugs in low latency systems at our free and virtual #P99CONF. www.p99conf.io?latest_sfdc_... #ScyllaDB

There's "I think AI is a net negative to society" anti-AI and there's "I wish your human son had died" anti-AI

TIL about the `-s` flag for `git status`

Did you hear the joke about sword wounds? You wouldn't get it, it's bit of a deep cut.

Is there any advantage to organizing my personal powershell scripts into modules or is that just extra work for no benefit

This close to just giving up and making all Logic for Programmers graphics in graphviz

Continue to feel like 95% of "why programmers should learn category theory" blogs are really "why programmers should learn abstract algebra" Which is annoying because there are 1000s of blogs on category theory and 0 on abstract algebra

Business question: assuming the American soybean industry is permanently ruined by the trade way and international competition, what crops would we replace soybeans with? I know that a lot of farms will go out of business, I'm just curious what the remaining farms could adapt to

HOW SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS LIKE A BANANA 1. They both have a mythologized, better "past". In Software it's C and low-level being "real programming" while JS is not, with bananas it's Gros Michel being the "real" flavor and Cavendish is not

I'm writing about data modeling logic for programmers, and wanted to find the canonical TEXT-BASED data modeling notation to use. Turns out there isn't one, so Alloy it is

One thing that really irks me is when devs justify using advanced techniques with the rhetoric "I'm not smart enough to not use it" e.g. "I'm just a dumb dev, I'm not smart enough to program without formally verifying all my code" Tries to be self-deprecating but comes across as condescending

Read the quoted thread, the NSA invented Agile

You know what would be a cool LSP feature? `Open method on package's documentation website`

I have a sparkling new blog post for you all! "A Very Early History of Algebraic Data Types" traces the history from the first innovation by John McCarthy, through its early use in imperative programming, and to its mainstreaming in FP. Come check it out! www.hillelwayne.com/post/algdt-h...