One thing I find odd is that I don't have a "primary language". I am skilled at writing Rust, Haskell, ML, Lean, Isabelle and Agda, yet if I am faced with a new project I might choose any of these or none. The most recent programming I was doing was in Kotlin.

But they’ll still shove it into everything, force-feed it to everyone (unwanted integration into software, unproven edtech etc), externalize costs, induce unpaid work. …

Ult The whole point of "AI" is that there is no apparent way to correct it when it goes wrong. Rather, we the humans are to blame for our failure to conform to its stupidity. The people who are doing this to us, I promise you, can survive without oxygen.

New Angela Coliier video about vibes physics @acollierastro.bsky.social nebula.tv/videos/angel...

I tweet about this so much but it just kills my soul a little bit. I will tweet "AI stuff is boring trash" and get comments like "Yeah I totally agree but not in the case where I use it' and then they post their boring trash.

AI is useful for tons of bad stuff though. Generating bombing targets? Check. Automating managerial oversight? Check. Political surveillance? Check. Suppressing wages? Check. None of these depend on the model working well, just well enough to be well above chance. Which they are.

Holbert-NG will be the largest piece of software I've written in an ML dialect (ReScript). I'm quite happy with it as a language so far.

Does @kagi.com take other people's de-ranking of pages into account when ranking results for other users? Because I think it would be a good feature to implement -- if we all start deranking AI-generated slop it will stop showing up so prominently in our results.

I use Orion+ as my daily driver. The only thing it's missing is Arc-like auto-disposal of tabs.

I wrote up my thoughts on an as-yet hypothetical redesign of Holbert. liamoc.net/forest/loc-0...

Society is less human now. Social media replacing in-person socialisation, LLM slop replacing authentic media, online commercial megacorps replacing human-oriented in-person commerce, economic indicators having little-to-no relation to citizen's experience of the economy, global enshittification..

I’ve got so much respect for @kagi.com and it’s only enhanced by posts like this. I suspect that many Kagi customers feel that their support for the company equates to taking a stand against big tech, but even if you don’t feel inclined to rebel, their service is simply *better* than Google Search.

This was a profoundly disappointing article to read, and I'm surprised that you wrote it. I'm even more surprised that Kurt insisted you post it on the company blog. I will revise my expectations of fly.io going forward. But out of respect, I will spend some time and tell you why I am disappointed.

I also became a Kagi customer recently and highly recommend it. I have no interest in their LLM products but they never force me to use them like Google does. The Orion browser is also good.

It used to be that every piece of text you read, everywhere, was text that *someone* thought about and wrote down, to communicate to you. This was a fundamental property of human language. It is now irrevocably destroyed, which is dreadful.

The ChatGPT summer book reads list in the Chicago Sun-Tribune fills me with dread about how much we’ve already lost and how much we will lose to AI slop. I think about all the little pieces of human writing I care about but maybe most people don’t—museum placards, book flaps, photo captions

I finally converted all of my domain theory notes to forester! liamoc.net/forest/dt-001Y

At first I was put off by the fairly high price of the @play.date but the hardware is clearly amazingly high quality, with a lot of attention put into the design of every component. I will have fun developing games for this I think!

@play.date your shipping provider for Australia is the worst courier on the planet. I'm pretty sure they've lost my playdate :( Just thought I'd let you know in case you're considering switching providers.

i don't like the bots. i pay money to use a text editor that doesn't try to get me to use the bots. I use a browser that doesn't try to get me to use the bots. /butlerian

Types.pl is down?

Amazing and important

Our upcoming paper uses a bit of topology, so I've been learning some topology. Of all the maths I've studied, it probably has the least consistent notation and terminology yet. Closure can be indicated with a overline, but its dual, the interior, is indicated only with "int".

While writing our upcoming paper, I have the feeling that we've discovered something that has been under people's noses for a long time. Very excited to share! (maths is still invented not discovered though)

Think of AI as a research assistant who generates more work for you and will not benefit from your mentorship

I love Mad Magazine

Don't know if I have many Korean followers here yet, but the president of South Korea just declared martial law, attempting to seize authoritarian control of the country. He cannot be allowed to get away with this. Everyone should condemn this in the strongest possible terms.

Attention🚨 We are looking for motivated students and researchers to be members of the PLDI 2025 Artifact Evaluation Committee. This year, we are accepting self-nominations (the form is here: forms.gle/2TPmixasDmqM...). Deadline: Dec 23rd, 2024. For more info: pldi25.sigplan.org/track/pldi-2...

I've set up a bluesky account for the Journal of Functional Programming. Please follow for all our latest papers, news about special issues, and other announcements!

I have PhD positions available at the ANU! Includes a stipend, open to students from overseas. See this page for more details. Please contact me if interested and forward to those who might be! liamoc.net/work_with_me...