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• Post #4186070

  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 an...

• Post #4186069

  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?

• Post #3498744

  I'm kind of enjoying sitting here people watching but also some of the conversations I'm overhearing are making me want to yell at clouds. And we even have clouds today so there is an audience. Anyway, I'm not typically the kind to take selfies but here we are.

• Post #3456757

  I ran out of Factor 50 this morning (I am vampire, and I don't mess about on protection...). Anyway, I've just bought some more, while I remembered. I should probably have looked at the label earlier. Apparently the manufacturers think it's for kids, rather than vampires, so it's amusing to dye it blue. Anyway, if you're going to ECOOP this week, I'll be the one with the pale blue skin.

• Post #2050340

  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.

• Post #1676537

  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.

• Post #1450713

  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.

• Post #1402991

  I find myself in a London pub surrounded by category theorists from Strathclyde. Please send help. Actually, maybe don't. This is fun.

• Post #1402990

  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.

• Post #1402989

  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 wher...

• Post #1402988

  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 th...

• Post #1402987

  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.

• Post #849388

  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. Wha...

• Post #849387

  @dysfun Who would have etc

• Post #849386

  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?

• Post #849385

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

• Post #849383

  You can tell I haven't been on social media much lately because it turns out I forgot what a bad idea it was to mention choice of first programming language to teach. I promise you, we have enough opinions of our own without getting more from strangers on the internet... (Don't worry, I'm sure *your* opinion is the right one, though ;))