Edwin Brady

Today, thanks to a former PhD student, I learned that LLMs are terrible at generating Whitespace code: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09678

Also today, I was invited (and I am accepting) to join a group on redesigning our undergraduate curriculum, which includes discussions on our choice of first programming language.

I am not saying that these things are related. I just happen to be mentioning them both at once because I saw them both today. You get a lot of characters in one toot after all.

What?

I'm finally building up some momentum on the latest incarnation of Idris, which is (for reasons best known to myself two months ago) currently called LTT3. I can't even remember what that stands for. I need to find another Oliver Postgate character to name it after I suppose.

It also just occurred to me that a reason I'm keeping this to myself for now (aside from it being yet another hacky experiment) is not that I don't want people seeing it. People are great and have wonderful ideas and contributions. No, it's that I don't want machines seeing it.

I hate this timeline.

My favourite thing about the internet is when you make a silly joke then someone nitpicks the details.

Did I mean favourite? Or did I mean the other thing?

My favourite programming project at the moment is one that means nothing to anyone except me. It's just a little tool I'm working on to make some aspects of my own life easier. It is, of course, written in Idris. There's minimal dependent types. Just the tiny things that make it easier to use, really.

I spent decades (literally) thinking I was supposed to write things to make everyone else's life better. Then at some point I remembered the point was that I had this special secret superpower that meant I could make my own life better. Nobody - not even Generative AI, would you believe - knows better how to do that than I do.

Thank goodness I bothered to learn things when it was still possible. You still can too. Please, I am begging you, take the chance to learn things and use them to make your own life better before someone else decides what they think is best for you.

I've probably shared this before, but in the unlikely event that I haven't, tonight I have a beer that tells us of the challenges of de Bruijn indices.

Whatever else might be going on, make sure of this: Conspicuously have fun.

There'll be people who hate you. Make sure they see you having fun above all. They hate that. That's their problem.

When I was an undergraduate, working late one night on some deadline that probably matterered at the time, I spent several hours instead arranging a perl script into the shape of a circle so that it could read itself in and calculate an approximate value for pi.

I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, except to say that this sort of thing is fun if you only know how to make this sort of thing fun. You could just ask an LLM to give you the wrong answer for the value of pi but where is the fun in that?

Tomorrow morning is my last class until September 2027. I am definitely not demob happy and I will be taking it completely seriously. Just in case anyone is asking.

Also, I definitely didn't stay out too late tonight. It's all fine.

The way booking.com pops up every time I search train times on nationalrail.co.uk is so obnoxious that I'm inclined to delete my booking.com account.

(Actually it's not even a pop-up. The thing I'm searching for is in a pop-up, and booking.com is just where it takes you.)

Anyway, in case it's useful to you: bahn.de has always been better at train times in the UK than any actual UK service. I just needed the reminder.

Spotted on an afternoon out in Perth today. I'm not going to argue but I think this claim needs some peer review. Anyone willing to help?

I'm glad I mentioned LLMs yesterday because it was useful to be reminded that sealions still exist.

Today's most pleasing discovery (thanks to non tooter Marilisa) was Skoob Books in Bloomsbury, which I wish I'd known about years ago. I forced myself to leave after finding a couple of unexpected things.

I predict it will be troubling my wallet a lot on future London visits.

Actually maybe it's good I didn't know about it until now. I only have so much space for bookshelves.

@dysfun@social.treehouse.systems Who would have etc