✧✦Catherine✦✧"are software engineers Real Engineers or not" is a pointless distraction. software engineers who don't know how to deal with guilt love to self-flagellate with it and other than that there's no basis in reality for that discourse. do something useful instead
tautologico
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Andrei Formiga
Alex RussellA conversation with a coworker re-triggered an intrusive thought that I find myself returning to regularly while working in a firm in the grips of AI influences:
Teams and engineering processes are like fish in tanks. There's a careful balance of the nitrogen cycle that keeps delicate organics alive; above a certain pH, it's just not plausible to believe things will keep working. But to understand effects, we have to take into account causes and add the effect of time.
DmytriI hereby coin the term "Ptolemaic Code" to refer to software that appears functional but is based on a fundamentally incorrect model of the problem domain. As more code is generated by AI, the prevalence of such code is likely to increase.
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Jeremy Gibbons@sree Thank you for that suggestion! The question from @lindsey sent me on my own dusty filing cabinet rummage, and I dug out our copy of "Design Considerations for a Functional Programming Language" by Rod Burstall from 1977. This is the paper that introduced NPL, a predecessor to Hope and hence to Haskell; it's an early published source for algebraic datatypes and pattern matching, and also for list comprehensions. When I have time, I intend to write a blog post about it. I couldn't find it anywhere else online, so it is now at https://archive.org/details/burstall-design-considerations-for-a-functional-programming-language
Burstall Design Considerations For A Functional Programming Language : Rod Burstall : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Scan of the paper Design Considerations for a Functional Programming Language by Rod Burstall, from the Proceedings of the Infotech State of the Art...
GusRe: last boost https://chaos.social/@dpk/115589097803252590
That OCaml PR is textbook open source in the era of vibe coding...
It's got everything:
- PR submitted without the author acknowledging they didn't write it and don't understand it.
- Copyright laundering.
- "I just wanted to get it done!" versus maintainers who know they have to live with code contributions for years.
- Zero-effort pasting LLM output as reply to real people's thoughtful questions. (At least the author acknowledged what they were doing that time.)
- It doesn't matter that it's hard to review because "AI has a very deep understanding of how this code works."
- "Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn't question it."
If this is our new world then it's going to turbocharge maintainer burnout. 
(If you don't want to read a quite long often depressing thread, would still recommend reading this well reasoned comment by one of the maintainers:
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3556593972 )
Daphne Preston-Kendal (@[email protected])
Fucking. Hell. https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
Tim Berners-LeeThank you to The Observer for this thoughtful review.
“Berners-Lee is clear-eyed about the benefits and the dangers. This Is for Everyone contains some very sharp thinking about what we need to do now.”
We must fight for the web we want.
Forrest Brazeal
Anil MadhavapeddyI've been rounding up some of the alternative uses of Bluesky via ATProto here, including long form blogging and chat projects. Most entertainingly, it made me go back and read @quentinsf 's blog circa 2012 :-) https://anil.recoil.org/notes/atproto-for-fun-and-blogging
SIGPLANPL researchers often want to claim that something is “usable,” “intuitive,” “easy to reason about,” etc. But how should we examine these claims without full-blown user studies? @tonofcrates has advice. https://blog.sigplan.org/2024/11/21/evaluating-human-factors-beyond-lines-of-code/
Molly WhiteThe Trump family’s latest crypto scheme, “World Liberty Financial”, has the makings of the biggest clusterfuck in Web3 is Going Just Great history.
