Tikhon Jelvis

the same aspects that makes a large organization resilient to problems outside its control also make it resilient to unforced error and dysfunction which helps explain why so many successful organizations have such bad leadership

If you're backyard is close to water, consider building a frog sauna to help treat chytrid!

A Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim, and James C. Scott production

what if the outline view acted bidirectionally as an bulleted outline editor?

My favorite graphics in "Transportation and the Shape of Cities" #4: A typical office worker has less space in their cubicle than their car does in the parking garage.

Colors

I was excited to see "spec driven development" become a common talking point... until I realized that by "spec", most people meant "markdown file with needlessly standardized headers" and not, like, an actual specification

After months of getting things done w/ Claude Code, I've spent ~5 days programming by hand in Lean and a liquid typed language and it's…SO GREAT? I love living in a world where I can get 1000s of mindless LOC in a minute, but also spend an hour on 10 gorgeous handcrafted lines.

Hmmm. As maybe one of the only people in the world who can say they regularly measure identity threat for software teams on AI right now: It does feel catastrophic for engineers they're just not faculty with the same norms around how it gets written up and shared

YIMBYism as a project should be thought of as an effort to clean up the distorted signals of that price so that externalities are internalized (both positive and negative) and people can make the trade offs they care about cleanly.

by the way, I'm going to be at SPLASH next week, if anybody wants to meet up I live practically next door, so would be happy to meet up if anybody's coming earlier/staying after the conference

reminder: type theory is just a theory

i wish baseball teams could resolve their differences without resorting to baseball

if you're designing some new tool for C or C++, I feel like you have to have at least *some* undefined behavior, otherwise you're not really getting into the spirit

Do not carry a cold beverage in their presence. Politely decline any drinks or sweetmeats they may offer. Keep a plain iron nail in your left trouser pocket and a sachet or paper twist of coarse salt in your right shoe. Enter and leave your chair moving clockwise. Follow up with a thank-you note.

The combination of demands for cult-like singular devotion with quotidian and uninspiring products is always so funny to me. GIVE UP YOUR PITIFUL LIFE AND DEVOTE YOURSELF TO THE INFINITE PURPOSE OF....an app that college kids can use to apply to study abroad programs

LLMs are a truly novel; we can now build up to even richer ways to program as a tool for thinking and communicating... so building "factories" reaming out slop in the same languages and paradigms we've always used is a profound failure of imagination, taste and technical leadership

people sometimes think "this guy is smart, he just have his shit together" this is fundamentally backwards; the whole point of being smart is that you can get away with having your shit very far apart indeed

the biggest problem with ai programming is that too managers push for doing the same things faster rather than doing better things better

A reminder, amidst the death of math, that I will be giving this talk on Wednesday at CUNY. Depending on the speed at which math collapses, this may be the last math anyone does ever. Come check it out if you are interested in the material. sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~noson/Semin... for details.

Qualcomm released the compiler for their IDL used for "FastRPC", called QAIC, and it is written in Haskell? good to see some people still have taste! github.com/qualcomm/QAIC

"but as the map recursively improves, eventually it becomes..." *clicks to final slide in the pitch deck* "...the territory!"

I added \tm to my Emacs TeX input mode exclusively to use the symbol ironically

Rise of The Machines (2024)

You know, honestly, more than monetary donations, if somebody worked at a company that had access to a lot of 18 terabyte and larger hard drives and could talk to us, that's where we are really suffering. The internet archive has no special priority in buying hard drives and those things are insane.

Now in Gunmetal Grey!

As it becomes clear that language models—like humans—love passing notes to each other on message boards, I’m starting to think the thing we need to worry about is not the “alignment” of an isolated model but, like, the fluid dynamics of a language slurry.

It is a pity that the BBC never mention these details and stories of people on welfare when discussions related to welfare arise.

What if our ears were like our eyes, and only had three (types of) receptors? Interestingly speech is still more or less intelligible, but not much else to me this shows how much more discriminating of frequencies our hearing is than our vision. Of course our vision has much more spatial resolution

Just been reminded of this. Newer friends and followers may not know of that type 11 years ago when I was writing for the Guardian and finally snapped at their ludicrous image archive setup and it got published on the actual site. #cake #breakdown

an OCaml datalog engine ought to be called dat-o-log or, better yet, dat'o'log, so that it's a valid OCaml variable name :)

I wanted to say something witty about this but couldn't come up with the perfect bon marmot. www.wsj.com/lifestyle/tr...

all linux distros are just piles of bash scripts except for nixos, which is configured using an advanced lazy functional programming language... ...which evaluates to a pile of bash scripts

"who moved my cheese", move over: we've got a new fuzzy animal story about adaptability

I feel intensely disappointed whenever I see people building systems that replicate (mediocre!) people management processes for LLMs—just a painful lack of imagination or insight. Here we have some fundamentally novel technology, and you're trying to Scrum it?

Turns out California ground squirrels hunt and eat voles. (Note: some potentially disturbing pictures in the article!) www.ucdavis.edu/climate/news...

my hotel put up a bunch of pictures from a high school art contest this amazing dog band should have gotten 1st place, I absolutely love it too bad I could not get a photo without a bunch of glare :(