Taking a large social media mental health break. Reachable by email. Probably back on before softwareshould.work starts up again. Seeya in July!

Does anybody have ins at Google marketing? I NEED to know how who was in charge of making sure this car miniature had A Chrome advert on it and how much Google had to pay (I believe the actual car had a Chrome advert, too, but surely they have to negotiate the merchandise, too?)

New newsletter, short buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Next up... "Logic isn't just for detectives and mathematicians! A small bit of logic helps us programmers in all sorts of ways, from testing better to actually making sense of left outer joins." @hillelwayne.com returns to #systemsdistributed to teach Logic for Programmers!

Logic for Programmers v0.15 is now available! This version has the first of two proofreading passes and a smaller form-factor for phone reading. Next month: 1.0, out in print! logicforprogrammers.com

The next version of logicforprogrammers.com is gonna effectively be the first release candidate. I still need some minor layouting changes and indexing, but other than that all the remaining work is stuff like book covers, website, etc. If it all lines up *perfectly* it could be out by end of month

New newsletter: Nontrailing Do Not Spark Joy, about how JSON needs to let you end lists with commas (and tbh start them with commas) buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Three months ago @ttto-ok.bsky.social told me he didn't think there were any "good" tongue twisters. So for the past three months I've had like 20% of my brain dedicated to proving him wrong. Here are some of the candidates for "good" tongue twisters we found 🧵 1. "Rich liquorice fish dish"

Do you think I can sell print copies of *logic for programmers* for $50 USD y/n

Day two of #CraftConf! Gonna try skeeting from Edge in hopes it doesn't kill my battery as much as Firefox. I just got in a couple minutes late for @kentbeck.com 's "Forest & Desert & Genie". About how AI unlocks so much creativity but also has so many challenges

Hello from #CraftConf Budapest! As always, I'll be doing my best to liveskeet all the talks I attend (until my computer runs out of battery, which happens earlier every year) Keynote speaker: "Slow Down to Speed up", @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com

Giving a talk tomorrow booya

The full house of speakers for Systems Distributed '26: Andrew Kelley @axboe.bsky.social Gerard Holzmann @jamescowling.dev @heidihoward.bsky.social Ram Alagappan Aishwarya Ganesan @zooko.bsky.social @hillelwayne.com Margaret Holzmann @dominiktornow.bsky.social @joran.tigerbeetle.com

New newsletter: knowing about things is cheaper than knowing things buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

What's the weirdest category you have a favorite thing in? For example, I have a favorite math theorem en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picard_...

Is it possible to make a slide deck in Da Vinci resolve? It's probably a terrible idea but so far no slideshow software has better fit my specific, inane needs than PowerPoint, and I despise PowerPoint

Just updated the book blurb for *Logic for Programmers*. Let me know what you think! leanpub.com/logic/

I've started saying "x, y, and zed" instead of "x, y, and z". I don't know where this comes from and I don't remember saying zed in any other context. Dialects are weird

Apparently books need a publisher label to be professional looking so now I'm mocking up injokes

I want this book to be over

New newsletter: adding assumptions weakens properties of systems buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

It is incredible just how much better an experience it is to watch youtube on Firefox mobile than to watch Youtube on the official app (why? Adblock.)

How come nobody told me about `git add -i`

Goddamn I miss having a giant whiteboard in my home

Whenever I come back to Raku I find it so hard adjusting to the implicit coercions. Eg if you have a list of pairs, and cast that to a set, you get... a list of keys. I find I have to spend a lot of time experimenting in a REPL to write any scripts, which cuts down on my velocity

Okay this newsletter is a rabbit hole: Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure buttondown.com/hillelwayne/... As part of researching this, I thought I found an error in Donald Knuth's TeXBook. Turned out I didn't, but it took me way too long realize my mistake. 🧵

An abstraction is just a homomorphism to a non-isomorphic structure, what's the problem?

One thing I wasn't prepared for, but SHOULD HAVE BEEN, was how much LLMs are an enabler for crackpottery. I'm seeing so many lean proofs and formal specs of utter nonsense, like P=NP and "QuantumArithmetic.tla". What's weird is llm-crackpottery looks identical to human crackpottery

Europeans are so backwards, doing dates as DD/MM/YY instead of YYYY-MM-DD

Slay the Spire 2 combines the very best of game design with the very worst of gamer toxicity How do I send @megacrit.com an "I'm sorry people are assholes" cake

Oxymoronically, my software pet peeves tend to fall in two categories: - Software that doesn't work out of the box - Software I can't customize to my tastes I realize these oppose each other. I am hard to please. (New hatred is Powerpoint's Cloud Fonts)

New newsletter, with two announcements buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

It's commonly said that Object Oriented Programming is based on biology, because "cells communicate by passing messages with each other." Is this actually a good analogy? Where does the metaphor hold up and how does it break down?

Worst part about getting testimonials is hastlin' people

Logic for Programmers v0.14 is now available! This version is the result of me paying a bunch of money for professional copyediting and technical editing. So the differences are subtle but the book is overall better because of it. Enjoy! logicforprogrammers.com

Book copyediting DONE Now I just need to reproofread the parts I touched up after copyediting and write some missing material the copyediting exposed and copyedit the new material and get to some feedback *not* found by copyediting and

Sometimes I think "man, I wish I bought some bitcoin back in 2009", but then I realize what I'm actually wishing for is precognition. If I bought in 2009, the only way I'd still have coins now is if I was a True Believer, and that would mean being a radically, almost unrecognizably different person.

Lobsters has a bit of a theme today

New Newsletter! This one is about distinguishing Illegal States in software systems from Unwanted States. The former we want to make impossible, the latter we need to represent (so we can get out of them) buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Why are agile people so into mutation testing and no other form of advanced testing? Like 95% of mutation testing fans I hear about are also Agile people, 0% of whom are interested in fuzzing or property testing or w/e

You have to set up a meeting with someone in another timezone. When do you tell them times in your timezone, and when do you convert times to their timezone?

Self-publishing Logic for Programmers logicforprogrammers.com has overall a positive experience. *Printing* a self published book is a huge pain. Did you know that there are TWO kinds of OpenType fonts? .ttf fonts use *quadratic* Bézier curves, .otf fonts use *cubic* Bézier curves. Astounding!

Five more hours of copyediting in, someone please kill me

A canonical example is an example everybody knows for a topic. "Hello world" for imperative programming, "Reverse a list twice" for property testing, factorial for recursive functions. Where do they come from? Popular people. The Quickcheck paper had "reverse a list twice", so everyone now uses it.

New posts, about how language implementations can break mental models about how the language works. Bonus, every subscriber got a wrong confusing title and you all get the right one buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

One month and multiple attempts later and the problem still persists. So is Ubuntu still the best beginner linux or

Copyediting may be the worst part about writing a book, along with all the other parts

Finally got a new newsletter out, and it's about the old claim that a "detailed spec" is just "code". It's technically and philosophically wrong, though prolly ok morally buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Pyret with the % operator (pyret.org/docs/latest/...) The type before the % can be checked statically or dynamically, the function in parentheses is always checked dynamically.

A type is a specification of correctness. `f :: Int -> Int` is the property `∀x ∈ Int, f(x) ∈ Int`. In most languages, the type system embeds all properties verifiable by the compiler, meaning not all "true" types are encodeable in the language. Existential properties are esp. hard to encode