I was doing some software history research and stumbled on this absolutely FASCINATING letter from 1964: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... Some random defense contractor writes in to say "You should deliver a minimal prototype as fast as possible to get feedback and involve users at every stage of labor"

My god challah makes such good grilled cheese

Three months late, but I really liked this one: rebels.cs.uwaterloo.ca/papers/tse20... Authors claim that type annotations catch ~15% of bugs found in the wild, with breakdowns of type of bug, how long they estimated annotations would take, etc.

I think the reason so many monad analogies ("monads are just burritos/boxes/semicolons/pipes") fall flat is that no mathematical abstraction is really teachable by analogy, and we don't know this because we don't learn math abstractions as adults. Like take numbers. Numbers are a math abstraction!

Man I forgot so much about chocolatiering in the past six months

@kagi.com is amazing and I recommend it to everyone but you know what feature it really needs? "Mark website as slopfarm" I don't just want to block it, I want to warn everyone else too

this seems like a good idea I don't have as many followers as Hillel, so different scaling 1 like = 1 opinion on food or cooking

Research question for people who aren't software developers: Have you ever used LLMs to make a software script for something? What was it for and how was your experience?

One silly trick I've started doing for long-running scripts, like LLM calls or model checking: ``` $ script-thingy ; beep-function ``` A tray icon would probably be better, but this is real easy to set up!

The doomer vibes today are absolutely rancid so here's a distraction n² likes = n blursed Raku features

Where do fish watch porn? On the finternet!

After a few blessed-free years, I've started seeing the "dynamic types are unitypes" meme crop up again

Okay newsletter may be a little late this week, so lemme quick rant about what got me sidetracked: Do the names of "sum" and "product" types come from their cardinality, or their operations? IE `Bool | None` a sum type because it has `2+1` values or because it obeys identities like `A+B = B+A`?

Wait Google Slides seriously doesn't have a "freeze video on last frame" option? What kind of tinker-toy kidpix software IS this

Just wrote a few hundred words on algebraic laws on algebraic data types and just realized that a lot of my confusing edge cases are resolved if I think of AlgDTs as modifications of set union and cross product, not + and *

So this is a real interesting interest of slop farming I haven't seen before. After my newsletter "Many Hard Leetcode Problems are Easy Constraint Problems" went viral, someone posted a new article with the same name... generated by ChatGPT. shekhar14.medium.com/many-hard-le...

Finally learning to use neovim-multicursor and godDAMN this is great. Shoutout to @rosactrl.bsky.social for telling me about it

Question for other city people: do you have a spider season or is that just a chicago thing?

Me: hey GPT what variant type do I get when evaluating the expression `safeDiv 1 0`? GPT: It's not just num, it's nothing

I recently noticed that a surprising number of Logic for Programmers purchases come from my blog coupon. "Surprising" because I only wrote three posts this month and one of them was an April Cools. Guess my archives are doing some work

Reminder that Kill Six Billion Demons started out as Homestuck fanfiction (That's a lie, it started as a comic on the MSPA forums, which is still pretty funny)

News got me doomscrolling the past couple of days, so I might as well hop on and share some of the writing I've done. In reverse chronological order: First of all, I got a new Patreon out about all of the "chaff" produced by Logic for Programmers: www.patreon.com/posts/chaff-...

I am delighted to announce the v0.11 release of Logic for Programmers! The changelog is ENORMOUS: complete rewrites of databases, decision tables, contracts, and an *entirely new chapter* on proving code correct! Over 20% more content than v0.10, so check it out today! leanpub.com/logic/

Still on break, but I had to log in to celebrate the first anniversary of Logic for Programmers! I wrote about the process of first getting it out, how the book has changed since then, and the plan to get it to 1.0. Read here: buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Bluesky and general news consumption has been pushing my anxiety to new heights, going to take a break for a bit. Might post the *logic for programmers* one year retrospective next week, otherwise let's see how far I can get into July without logging back in.

Gotta say I'm really looking forward to @bretdevereaux.bsky.social 's annual 4th of July "here's why I love America" essay

What are the big tech blocs on Bluesky? Like which of these would get the most angry responses: - TDD is bad - Dynamic types are bad - Functional programming is bad - Comments are bad

I think part of my malaise is I'm out of software ideas to post about

Was gonna make the weekly newsletter about Logic for Programmers' first year in early access, but I just just checked and the anniversary is NEXT week. You still got a week to juice the sales numbers if you want leanpub.com/logic/

Took care of errands today but did not get any work or writing done and now I'm a little sad. Gym will quell my tears

Really need to start building roots again in the Chicago tech scene

There's a good chance the BBB will pass the senate today, and dooming on Bsky will reach an all-time high. Dooming is corrosive to our souls. I keep hopeful by imagining the ways that, in the long run, the GOP's goals will backfire and give us opportunities to reach a better society. 🧵

I think if a PAC wanted to really hurt Trump they should take out a lot of ads on Fox about how he cheats at golf

There is always the opportunity for a better world on the other side of this.

Hot take: writing code is actually a bottleneck. Imagine if you could write code infinitely fast. You could compare three possible versions of the code at once, refactor the whole program at will, effortless use high-boilerplate languages, do tedious-but-useful practices like TDD and cleanroom...

Software communities are judged by the loudest asshole in them.

Without looking it up, how big do you think an anglerfish is?

"Uphold Western Civilization" types are always all about scientific racism and conspiracy theories and never about baking really tasty bread

they should’ve called it “amateur intelligence”. not in a derogatory way… but it helps amateurs like me venture into other fields. and it mostly produces amateur results. whether that’s ok or not depends on what you’re trying to do

okay guys. i know why Discover is so broken for me. it seems like it does not acknowledge "Show Less" for the "clusterv2" source. i don’t know if i’m the only one affected but i beg the Discover team at Bluesky to read this thread and fix this here's how i reproed this. first, a bunch of posts:

New post: Colocating your pytest fixtures.

It's kinda weird that `it's` could be `it is` or `it has`

Spent the last two days rewriting the Databases chapter of leanpub.com/logic/. 2400 words deleted, 3200 words added. Overall way less embarrassing, doesn't feel like it's crammed with filler anymore. But now I gotta make a SQL demo script to error-check all my claims

One cool use case of LLMs: in my book I just wrote "X can't be done in SQL". Wasn't sure, so I asked the LLM "how do I do X in SQL" If there was a way, it would have prolly told me, so the fact it only gave me hallucinations gives me more confidence it's impossible.

Didn't feel like writing this morning so whipped up a couple TLA+ specs of fork-join models, one in PlusCal and one in raw TLA+. It's a good look into the comparative advantages of each, which I should really write up, except I don't feel like writing. Is this a catch-22? (no)

Hey @simonwillison.net this is right up your alley george.mand.is/2025/06/open...

Dumb politics question: say Trump goes to -20 or -30 net approval. How does that lead to the administration changing policy, mechanics wise? It can't be "Trump gets spooked and makes changes", because he is utterly incapable of self reflection. Is it "Congress gets spooked and turns on him?"

Imo most software tools/libraries could be made 1000x more learnable if every feature/api came with a small demonstrative example. Looking at you Z3

The two hardest problems in databases are getting data out of it and keeping the data inside it correct

My new RAM sticks have on-by-default rainbow lights. To temporarily disable them, you have to run a userspace program. There is no permanent "don't show these lights during startup" option. Just... *why*?