chris_armstrong

10 ms·

1.
by chris_armstrong 13d ago
This one resonates hard. So many companies are rushing headstrong into automating everything with AI, risking their ability to reproduce the critical skills their organisation needs that are experiential and social . (And yes, it's
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Comments Considered Harmful(chrisarmstrong.dev)
2 points by chris_armstrong 14d ago|0 comments
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by chris_armstrong 17d ago
I can appreciate the pain of trying to bind against GTK4 with a functional language. You definitely get a lot of difficult-to-verify and special-case boilerplate C code.
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by chris_armstrong 1mo ago
Reinforced continuously toward a fixed goal is not an incentive, it doesn’t lead to a creative process
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by chris_armstrong 1mo ago
A small bone to pick, but describing an AI that is operating autonomously as creative seems wrong - at best, this process is accretive , because the AI is adding and adding, but has no ability or incentive to shape its output toward some
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by chris_armstrong 1mo ago
I interpreted this as being a little tongue-in-cheek - reflecting the obscurity of CL and the way the expressiveness of a lisp can make you feel powerful that others will struggle to understand
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by chris_armstrong 2mo ago
I didn't interpret it as an argument about layers of abstraction. You need to be in the detail at the level you're writing (and it's certainly advantageous to know some of the detail of the abstractions below) because you&#x2
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by chris_armstrong 2mo ago
It might just be me, but I find his baroque style very readable. Despite using a vocabulary much broader than mine (irritating but admirable), he at least seems to have read his prose aloud, and considered how it's meter makes its mean
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by chris_armstrong 3mo ago
I'm working on ocgtk, which are GTK4+ bindings for OCaml. My current focus is adding support for signals, amongst other things: https://www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/ocgtk-development-updat...
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by chris_armstrong 3mo ago
Not yet - it's mostly a build tool, but package management abilities (which is otherwised covered by opam) is being added to it^1. It's currently usable for some projects (and worth trying out), but still in preview mode. ^1: h
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by chris_armstrong 3mo ago
Installing via opam and using the cygwin method is supported and should be working fine (cygwin is just used for build - binaries still just link with mingw). That specific combination (ocaml + mingw) has a known problem with ocamlfind that
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by chris_armstrong 4mo ago
I completely forgot about Wolverine, but you've reminded me I was using that back in the day to read my mail from Fidonet point (as well as Bluewave).
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by chris_armstrong 4mo ago
“cognitive surrender” It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves
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by chris_armstrong 7mo ago
The answer, as always, is to write a compelling story about it, and make the front page of ‘new’.
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by chris_armstrong 8mo ago
No where in Australia would you expect a fridge to be supplied as part of a tenancy. It does restrict what you can buy, as may removalists will not touch move a fridge if there’s too many stairs or if you can’t get it in the door
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by chris_armstrong 9mo ago
I would say Australian English relies on this negation even more than British English, to the point of being confusing without more cultural context.
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by chris_armstrong 10mo ago
Genuine independence is almost impossible at this size, because you need a strong internal discipline to only rely on small donors, and not bend your organisation’s mission to keep larger donors
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by chris_armstrong 10mo ago
I think this because nonprofits are subject to a similar market discipline as companies: they compete for funding, relevance, market share etc. And their board composition converges similarly as those same people are relied upon for their c
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by chris_armstrong 10mo ago
Non profit organisations trying to remain relevant (or just survive) behave this way because they arent much different from companies operating in a market for profit. Their leadership is often not that much different, with similar people w
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by chris_armstrong 10mo ago
I stand corrected - there’s so little known about it that it’s probably some strange labor of love from recent centuries
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by chris_armstrong 10mo ago
It was discovered in the 1800s, the shell grotto is much much older and probably built over a very long period of time
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by chris_armstrong 10mo ago
This is probably the highlight of a visit to an otherwise unremarkable English seaside town. The chambers are very old (even by English standards) and so unlike anything else medieval that is still around.
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by chris_armstrong 10mo ago
It's interesting reading many of the associated comments, because there is a genuinely active effort to address many of the pain points of the language: * Windows support has improved to the point where you can just download opam, and
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by chris_armstrong 11mo ago
I also find languages like OCaml avoid a lot of this nonsense in their libraries because the ability to build layers and layers of complex abstraction isn’t there in the same way as Haskell, Rust, or any of the LISPs
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by chris_armstrong 11mo ago
This resonates. I spent a fair bit of time thinking about library design for an OCaml library that didn’t directly expose more complicated language features (like functors and first class modules) where they weren’t needed. (I presented on
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by chris_armstrong 11mo ago
The ICFP/SPLASH papers are now starting to find their way to HN. This was a HUGE combined programming conference with several competing tracks over 7 days. You can find the program here ^1 (you can often find a link to the abstract or
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by chris_armstrong 1y ago
zig has a cross-compiler frontend (zig cc) which can be used as a drop-in replacement for a custom sysroot + binutils + gcc for several platforms. I've used it to build OCaml cross-compilers that only depend on zig itself ( https:&#x2F
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by chris_armstrong 1y ago
If I recall correctly, this is one of the final pieces that allows zig to be used as a fully self-contained cross-compiling C toolchain (once its linker is enabled for more platforms / formats)
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by chris_armstrong 1y ago
Damn this is a blast from the past - it was such an ambitious project with so many interesting ideas to explore. CoreObject itself was revolutionary in its thinking about distributed document sharing and versioning, let alone some of deskto
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by chris_armstrong 1y ago
I almost never find a use for GADTs or functors or carefully specifying module types, but when I need them, they help me get stuff done neatly. Even the object system which most OCaml developers avoid, is actually very useful for some speci

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