DonaldPShimoda

8 ms·

1.
by DonaldPShimoda 21d ago
I don't mean to be overly disparaging, but I think the concept of "programming languages that look like natural language" has been played out. The result is that it's generally just a bad experience. Natural languages ar
2.
by DonaldPShimoda 2mo ago
Yeahhh currently considering going through the legal name-change process to move one of my family names to a middle name or something. It's made all the worse by the fact that my parents didn't always use both family names when I
3.
by DonaldPShimoda 2mo ago
Most complex , perhaps, but not "most advanced". I don't think there's necessarily a meaningful "correct" choice for that title, but surely one of the proof assistant languages would be a more likely candidate
4.
by DonaldPShimoda 3mo ago
That's part of it. I think another part is that it seems like the students are asked to read the papers behind a lot of the concepts, and academic literature is not generally very accessible to undergrads. (Not that they can't r
5.
by DonaldPShimoda 3mo ago
I think I agree with you, overall. But I would say that Bombadil is hugely important to understanding Middle-earth as a crafted mythos. He gives us valuable insight into Tolkien's ideas about self-satisfaction (the Ring has no sway ove
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by DonaldPShimoda 3mo ago
You haven't looked up what "capitalism" or "communism" is nor considered the possibility of other alternative economic systems, I see...
7.
by DonaldPShimoda 3mo ago
I think parent commenter is using "men" in a manner similar to mensch , as in "a person of integrity and honor" [1]. In other words, "look around and notice nobody is taking responsibility, and choose to be the per
8.
by DonaldPShimoda 4mo ago
> Not necessarily. Since the word "typed" language is not well-defined. This depends entirely on context. In the Benjamin C. Pierce school of thought (a common choice in programming langauges research; see his book Types and P
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by DonaldPShimoda 4mo ago
Agreed, this is a gorgeous blog. Makes me get the itch to redesign my own at some point (even though I've never been great at design).
10.
by DonaldPShimoda 4mo ago
I think the AI portion is not just something that ought have a toggle, but it should not be part of the platform. Somewhat recently, the ACM (one of the premier publishers for computer science) integrated AI-generated summaries for all
11.
by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
Some people also have moral issues with LLMs. If the poster is such a person, the accuracy metric may simply be irrelevant.
12.
by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
...why does it being 2026 make nondeterminism more desirable or reasonable?
13.
by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
The normal distribution doesn't account for things like "huge megacorporations pour billions of dollars into accelerating product adoption" or "other companies force their employees to use AI whether they want to or not&
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
Have you... talked to people? Like, people generally, not domain experts using these tools to augment their existing process. Tons of people think AI is significantly more capable than it is. We've known for the better part of a cent
15.
by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
> The reductionist, mechanical explanation of what AIs do is not the full picture It is the full picture, to a first approximation. The statistical models involved are incredibly complex, and the mechanisms used to tend towards better
16.
by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
I don't think anywhere I said they weren't useful tools; I said that a lot of people fail to recognize the limitations, and that even aside from limitations/utility there is a discussion to be had about broader impact. LLMs a
17.
by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
> I thought people here got excited about technology. I am passionately excited about technology that serves people , but the current hype around AI is not that. LLMs are, fundamentally, a super cool development. That we can now generat
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
> None of the would-be founders here would support unionization at their companies. :) That's because none of these would-be founders know how to turn a profit without exploiting their workers. :)
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
> Layoff Protections Companies often expect employees to give advance notice of termination of employment, but employers do not feel beholden to their employees to reciprocate. This is unreasonable. > Remote Work Protections Many comp
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
I don't think the em-dashes are particularly out of place in a list like this, though it's not the style I use. I didn't realize ARCHITECTURE.md was an LLM thing (though I suppose I would've if I'd opened it); I&#x2
21.
by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
> Features: > <bullet> <checkbox> description 1 > <bullet> <checkbox> description 2 > ... Like... why are we doing this. What is the purpose of having a bunch of green checkbox emojis in the already bull
22.
by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
> I swear I remember reading something Tolkien (maybe) said about the eye of sauron being basically an analogy about the press. Hmm I'd be interested to see a citation for that. As far as I know, Tolkien maintained for his entire li
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
There is no consistent definition of the term "weak typing". Do you mean implicit coercion? > Most people who think they have a problem with dynamic typing actually have a problem with weak typing. Ironically, I would counter t
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
> Palantir already has the blessings of the Tolkien estate. Is that true? I can't find any articles corroborating this claim. As far as I can tell from some brief googling, there is simply no legal course of action to take to preven
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
I saw the name and thought "that sounds familiar", only to realize it's the economist I've seen on social media a lot lately (e.g., he was recently interviewed by Hasan Minhaj [0]). [0] https://youtu.be/q
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
Right — they're not reasoning, they're generating text that statistically models reasoning. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
> Citing him to wave away the whole concept is pretty wild misuse of the citation. Good thing I didn't do that? > Syntactic properties create semantic affordances. I don't disagree with this. Benjamin Pierce defines type-che
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
It's in the trailer.
29.
by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
> finite programs that run on an infinite stream of events This requires coinduction, right? (That's my understanding of the formal representation of infinite streams.) If so, that does limit your options, since most of the proof as
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by DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago
> people seem to put “CEOs” on a pedestal any time things come up, like they’re an alien life form Might I suggest a viewing of the 2025 film "Bugonia"?

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