How would you define an "abstraction" in software engineering? Not with examples, but like as a definition

My best tell for AI writing is the lack of grammatically complex sentences. "No x. No y. No z." instead of "No x, y, or z." Way more sentence fragments and no run-on sentences. AIs are drama queens

ok no lie the new "split tab view" feature in firefox is lifechanging

Three major purposes of "educational" tech blog posts: 1. Inform people about topic X 2. Persuade people towards opinion X 3. Impress people with the bloggers expertise in X I know a lot of tricks to do (1) and (2) better but haven't thought about how to do (3) better (a valid thing to do!)

I think this comes back to capability/tractability: even if you can easily statically type 95% of the codebase, sometimes that last 5% is too complicated to annotate, which a dynlang can encode more simply I'm less believing of this argument now that Typescript has been so successful

Oh thank fucking god

Doomscrolling has made me unmotivated to do long-term work, so to force myself to be doing *something* besides doomscrolling: n² likes = n obscure software engineering concepts/principles/memes I find super useful

Sick and writer's block on newsletter this week

So no spoilers (I'm halfway through season 1), but does Severance's mysteries have a satisfying explanation or is it another Lost-type thing

So Claude can one-shot simple Android apps This is going to be very, very useful to me

@hillelwayne.com I was definitely waiting for the pivot to category theory or something. Sometimes a pizza is just a pizza I suppose 😁 www.hillelwayne.com/post/pizza/

Consulting conundrum: if I'm using copilot on a project and only checking in every couple of minutes, should I bill the wall time or only the time I am looking at the terminal

Didn't have time to do one this year but I'm enjoying this year's April Cools posts! www.aprilcools.club

Happy April Cools! Here's my piece for the year, where I wade into the New York Pizza vs Deep Dish Pizza debate: www.hillelwayne.com/post/pizza/

IT BEGINS

Tomorrow is the fifth annual April Cools! Let's celebrate with my favorite posts from the last few years: 2022: To Ace Exams, Get Better At The Easy Questions (predr.ag/blog/to-ace-...) by Predrag Gruevsky, with apparently an invalid handle. I've shared this post with others; it's real helpful!

I've been wondering if TLA+, and specification in general, are most valuable when you're working in the "failure zone": some property is failing and you're modifying the design to make it pass. If so, then it'd be best practice to try to reach that zone as fast as possible, right?

The canonical dad joke in (American?) English is "Hi hungry I'm dad." What's the canonical dad joke in other languages?

Just two days until April Cools! If you want to write a quick thing just for fun, there's still time =) www.aprilcools.club

Ironclad + Regent = Boys Night Silent + Necrobinder = Girls Night Someone help me name the other eight combos

Might be too sick to go to No Kings. Someone who wasn't planning on going please go so I don't feel so bad

So this is apparently how Austrians eat hotdogs

What's the coolest extinct species from after the age of dinosaurs?

First proof run of Logic for Programmers! It found a lot of formatting issues that need to be fixed, but the book inches ever closer to being an actual physical book. Obligatory PDF link logicforprogrammers.com

I found this collection of games that try to teach logic and formal methods concepts games.equiv.io My main takeaway is that making an edutainment game actually fun is really, really hard. (And also that puzzle games without "undo move" are unplayable)

Been thinking a lot about refinement recently Refinement is a formal methods technique where you show one spec is a more detailed version of another, ie any behavior of Impl maps to a valid behavior of Abstract. It's the Secret Bonus Boss of specifications. But we do similar things in programming!

Yogurt of Theseus: if you keep a yogurt culture alive for a year, and eat it every day, so that none of the original bacteria are there, is it still the same yogurt?

New Newsletter: Choose boring technology and innovative practices buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

I wish there were more "outsider guides" to technologies, that explained what it is for people who hear about it or are adjacent to it but don't need to use it. Like what is Kubernetes? What problems does it solve? What makes it a hard problem to solve? What are the legendary warts?

Factory reset my Windows box and reinstalling everything doot doot doot

I can't believe that, after committing to not make major revisions to Logic for Programmers, I suddenly realized a way better way to explain implication. `p => q` is usually defined as `!p || q` but it would be SO much clearer to define it as the (equivalent) `(p && q) || !p`

It's common programming knowledge that integers and strings "do too much": we use them for disjoint purposes where mixing is an error. Integers: ids, arithmetic, enums, ordering Strings: text, formal languages, tokens, structured data I think this holds for datetimes, too /

Welcome to day three of #QConLondon! Doing last minute touchups for my talk at 10:30, so probably not going to see the keynote. Will livepost again once I'm back to watching talks

Day two of ;#QConLondon! Starting liveskeet a bit late so not covering the beginning of @martin.kleppmann.com's keynote about geopolitical tech resilience (because USA is shitshow rn). Three topics: - Multicloud - Atproto - Localfirst For multicloud, key thing is making it easy to switch

Hello from #QConLondon! I am going to liveskeet as much as I can while very, very jetlagged. Right now we are going through conference intro and "how to attend a conference". Gotta be a couple of thousand people here

Just ordered ISBN numbers for *Logic for Programmers*! Looking more and more closer to being a finished book

New newsletter! "LLMs are bad at vibing specifications" is all about how LLMs can't do TLA+ specs well. Well, they *can* do TLA+ specs well, except they really suck at writing the properties the specs must follow. Read it here! buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

It's crazy that we don't know how to prove that P != NP. It's crazier that we don't know how to prove that P != #P. It's absolutely bonkers that we don't know how to prove that P != PSPACE.

There's 11 kinds of people in this world, and I'm the second kind

So in LaTeX the widths \oddpagemargin and \evenpagemargin don't seem to be the actual margins, but the difference between the margin and 1 inch. ...Why?! (It could be something stupid I set up in my project tbh)

Hi @buttondown.com is there a way to show the most recent few newsletters on the landing page? Looked at the docs but couldn't figure out if it was possible

I would be slightly less mad about the slopification of SPA tooling if any of them actually worked. But none of the buttons *do* anything

I'm going to blatantly ignore this prompt and instead talk about P, DLOGTIME, and BPP. P: Decision problems (yes/no answers) where we know an efficient algorithm (grows polynomially with size of input) DLOGTIME: DPs where we know a REALLY efficient algorithm (grows logarithmically with input)

Fuckit gonna try StickyKeys for a while and report back

This sounds great! Get your @leaflet.pub drafts ready! > The idea is pretty simple: on April Fools' Day…a participant produces genuine content that's very different from their normal produced content. It could be a different format, a different topic, a different style, anything.

I have somehow been bestowed a SECOND jar of cream of tartar @arachno.capital @mat4nier.bsky.social halp what recipes use, like, a *lot* of cream of tartar

I wondered why so few languages adopted the Prolog style of writing functions as f/arity, like add/2 or exit/1. Just now I realized the reason: most languages don't wildly change the behavior of a function based on arity. Prolog's partition/4 is quite different from partition/5!

I gotta lot of tasks this week I need to procrastinate, Gimme software topics to skeet about

One of the cool things about being self published is I can give out free copies of the book whenever I want

Here's a tiny bit of hopium: In 2024 we were planning on adding 160 GW of renewable energy to the grid by 2030. As of the start of this year, we had added 100 GW and are planning on adding 220 GW more by 2030. (In 2022 we planned for 60 GW in 2030. We hit that by the end of 2023)