Nicolas Paul

@arstechnica@mastodon.social Who could have guessed, what a surprise!

@phillip@social.cologne @webjac@mastodon.social @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu "the market" is EU's entire raison d'être, and the reason why they apply such stupid ruling

@neauoire@merveilles.town Beautiful! Do you mind me asking for the typeface's name? It looks good

It's funny that modern AI-assisted programming is about creating and refining a model until it's good (enough), which is pretty much what Dijkstra suggested during his career. Another W for the Arrogance guy

I think the success of YouTube shows that video lessons and tutorials are better than written ones (for most stuff) as it can exploit multiple sense at the same time.

And the cherry on top of the cake for the whole anti-democratic EU constructions: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/eu-parlament-verabschiedet-chatkontrolle-10181552?utm_source=sharing&utm_medium=desktop&utm_campaign=article_default Fuck the EU

the fact that most people are pro-actively staying ignorant is what will make ai win in the long run. why

Monsieur le Président a tellement fracturé notre République au profit des idéologies néfastes étrangères qu'aujourd'hui c'est la Nation qui se fracture.

Ce qui est sûr c'est que les idées survivront les hommes.

And the same apply to programs. Software are done with context, as to solve a specific problem, meet a client's dumb requirements, trap users into scrolling, &c. It's all bottom-up, we're starting from the existing as to fix our need. But as Prof. Dijkstra said, computers are a new kind of new whose full potential is outside the existing.

And then Anthropic replied, "yes Edward, the submarine does swim!"

it's my time to develop an addiction over niche instagram things !!!

We apply different algorithms on trees than on graphs, and algorithms are the languages of our thoughts (c.f. Iverson, Hoekstra).

Because the naive interpretation of his notes would simply be that software is a sound and total mathematical object specifying a computation, and therefore side-effects are controlled or simply does not exist (side-effects are the things requiring maintenance...). But there's no world where Prof. Dijkstra would have reduced his vision to this, he was too smart for such a reduction. I'm pretty sure there's something hidden. A gem.

If you have a bit of free time and wants to explore the famous BYTE magazine, have a look at https://vintageapple.org/byte

Windows is no longer an operating system, it's a consumption system

@neauoire@merveilles.town Thanks!

Human ChatGPT wrapper is such a good name for vibe coders

"If language is the speculation of space then economy is the speculation of time." is my next thinking exercise

"Secondly, it explains why the world of mathematics all but ignored the programming challenge: programs were so much longer formulae than it was used to that it did not even recognize them as such. Now back to the programmer's job: he has to derive that formula, he has to derive that program. We know of only one reliable way of doing that, viz. by means of symbol manipulation. And now the circle is closed: we construct our mechanical symbol manipulators by means of human symbol manipulation."2/2

JAVASCRIPT IS THE NEW COBOL

Still thinking about web log or fediverse...

"The cloud is the new mainframes" they say, but at least mainframes were cool

So does that mean we should program random stuff without exactly knowing why, all until we've got a concrete idea and simply refine our random programs into a specialized one that do something useful? I guess? But it feels strange... Enough rambling tho. sry for spamming

A while ago I explored various ways of creating custom glyphs for the Web in fonts without leaving a11y on the table. I ended up with two ideas: (1) small SVG with ARIA alternatives, (2) TTF ligatures of specific words that can be activated via a font feature own a specific CSS class. Turns out Google chose (2) for theirs, so I guess I was smart!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnYaExb5JvM ahah

Or maybe he does mean it? Programs should be written as description of mathematical objects (denotational semantics of functional programming language) and verified (deductive reasoning from axiomatic properties). And "software engineers" would mostly be tasked with maintaining the thing abstraction layer that derives the concrete symbol manipulator (the computer) from the program, a.k.a. a runtime?

My idea doesn't seem to far from my interpretation of this paragraph, and I'm quite happy for that.

@numerique_gouv@social.numerique.gouv.fr Peut-être faudrait-il déjà assurer la sécurité des systèmes d'informations...

Whoops, everyone is dead now. And I won't be able to use Claude until 4 A.M.

Like why can't websites be more like music flyers? Those looks so fucking good, they're mesmerising me.

Discovered from Paged Out 1, https://github.com/taylorconor/quinesnake it's so cool

Factorio is legit the best way to answer the monolith vs micro services question. Not that it matters anymore with Claude...

Overall his idea of a new curriculum still holds in my opinion, but most of the difficulties stem from students having a hard time realising they are manipulating symbols and nothing else (there is no effect when manipulating a symbol, it means nothing until we give some semantics).

Math would be easier if we accepted that it's just a bunch of theories, that most mathematician aren't rigorous (because there is no need to be most of the time), that theories should be crafted from a set of axioms without trying to find the most universal axioms, and that there are a bunch of variants for a same theory when changing axioms.

Alors que Trump a permis de casser le narratif financier de la mondialisation et nous donne donc un moyen de retrouver les cultures nationales contre l'impérialisme européen, il ne fait aucun sens d'appliquer des règles contre la dépense publique dans les secteurs culturels et industriels. On est dans un modèle similaire aux idées de Keynes, et on est dans le bon cadre temporel, il faut dépenser maintenant pour voir un retour hors norme !

So companies outsource thinking to consultants who outsource thinking to AI. Great

"Another way of saying the same thing is the following one. A programming language, with its formal syntax and with the proof rules that define its semantics, is a formal system for which program execution provides only a model. It is well-known that formal systems should be dealt with in their own right, and not in terms of a specific model. And, again, the corollary is that we should reason about programs without even mentioning their possible "behaviours"." (from the same note)

from https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html

(out of thinking: I love the idea of enforcing linguistic changes from the programmer's vocabulary, especially the "no anthropomorphism" one, because a program don't think, nor does he see, or waits, etc)

"So, we have to design abstract symbol manipulators. We all know what they look like: they look like programs or —to use somewhat more general terminology— usually rather elaborate formulae from some formal system. It really helps to view a program as a formula. Firstly, it puts the programmer's task in the proper perspective: he has to derive that formula." (1/2)

I think it is hard because it highlights the uselessness of most things in life: we often act expecting certain behaviours. We give semantics to our actions before even doing the actions as to give us faith or something, when in fact, it's mostly a nothing burger (WARNING: DO NOT FALL INTO NIHILISM OR ABSURDISM AS A LIFESTYLE). People do not want to do stuff without a reason, what is manipulating algebraic symbols good for?

If you're using AI to speed things up, may be the things was useless and required reengineering in the first place?

I was listening to this episode of ArrayCast and I absolutely love the way the company was structured and handled, how the hiring process sounds logical and sufficient. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVCTmmHfIqY&list=PLtgenDWOwCAAq3k23dpMlMGmfR6eedKVa&index=31

But that is the reality of math and therefore the entire CS world. By themselves, symbols mean nothing. Take the Pythagorean theorem: it is useless and mean nothing, until we actually are in a context where it is useful.