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• Post #3095771

  What is it with the quality of barrel connectors these days? Two different products, two different cable/strain designs, four months apart, same failure mode. In this case, the appliance (a bike battery) fell several inches onto the cable. In the other case, the barrel broke when I moved the appliance (an electric litter box). Literally the first two such failures I've ever seen.

• Post #3095770

  Anybody remember the old TLC game Robot Odyssey? I just imagined a reboot of that, but where you wire up everything in Verilog instead of as a discrete soldering exercise.

• Post #3095769

  Just read through https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/04/22/high-quality-chaos/ I've reached the point where I don't think it matters what programming languaeg you use to solve a given job. Use untyped lambda calculus for all it matters. Your type-checking problem has extended beyond the boundaries of what we think of as belonging to programming languages. At this point, people need to be talking about invariants. "Principle of least surprise" is a soft invariant...

• Post #3095768

  The name "Benoit B Mandelbrot" is a quine.

• Post #3095767

  (slow, single-tap ride cymbal, neon reflecting off wet asphalt) They handed me a type signature like a key to a room that didn't exist. “Total,” they said, their voice smooth as polished marble. “Well-founded.” But I looked under the floorboards. I saw the unsafeCoerce bleeding through the floorboards like engine oil. I saw the termination checker getting paid off under the table with an structural decrease that was just a pointer trick in a cheap wig. They call it an escape hatch. I c...

• Post #3095765

  I've been listening to Nine Inch Nails' "I know You Can Feel It" from the Tron: Ares soundtrack. and the more I pick up on the lyrics and place them in the context of the plot, the more I realize that Tron: Ares is amazingly layered and is what the Ghost in the Shell movie *should* have been.

• Post #3095764

  If the hand wants the hand, and the eye the eye, I wonder what the head wants, by and by. Ohh, the head of vecna. Less famous than the rest. But I'll tell you a secret; the more they put it to the test, the less that anybody knows. I wonder how a thing like that goes?

• Post #2275272

  It's one thing to know how to do something. It's another to know why it's done that way. The latter is the context required in order to work around obstacles safely. #ai is really good at "knowing" how to do something. It's really bad once the skill level required goes beyond tutorial blogs and stackoverflow.

• Post #2121857

  Flat-earthers' philosophy has its roots in the rejection of others' observations as normative; a thing must be observed by the self, directly, or it is not substantive. As such, all arguments made by someone other than oneself can be rejected as not directly observed by oneself. This effectively becomes Not-Invented-Here syndrome as applied to epistemology.

• Post #2121856

  You know the classic party game Twister? Here's Twister for hackers: Everyone starts off with 16 symbols. Every round, a program synthesizes a (mostly) random unit test around interacting with one or more of those 16 symbols. Every player's program has to pass all unit tests within a time limit, at which point a new random unit tetst will be added.

• Post #2121855

  Yup. Basement's going to flood tonight for the fourth time this calendar year...

• Post #2121854

  Too much #math . I misread "update todos" as "update topos"

• Post #2121853

  ### "Twists" (Parody of "Dreams" by The Cranberries) **Verse 1** Oh, my group is changing every day In every possible way And oh, my rings The scalar multiplier brings A twist to everything **Pre-Chorus 1** I multiplied these terms before But now the scalars matter even more Because the twist came through A 2-cocycle out of the blue... **Chorus** And then I multiply and see The loss of commutativity! A twisted basis set, $u_g$ It alters the geometry... La-d...

• Post #2121850

  With apologies to Eric Claptopn... Would you know my class If I met you in loop space? Would it be the same If I mapped you in loop space? I must preserve The points and curves 'Cause I know this path belongs Here in loop space. Would you hold the line Through a smooth deformation? Would our bounds align Through a smooth deformation? I'll map my way From X to A 'Cause I know this curve can't stay In a fixed state. Spaces shrink you down To a single point Cuts w...

• Post #2121849

  With apologies to Weezer. Oh yeah. All right. Some open cover Is mapping to nothing My Betti number Is filling with dread Guess I'll just close the set. Oh yeah, all right, the void inside Look at the sequence, wrestle with Sartre Meaning is empty behind my back The complex is ready to blow. Say it ain't closed! This loop is a soul-breaker Say it ain't closed! The void is a space-taker. I can't compute you I never could prove That which might bound you So try...

• Post #2121848

  With apologies to Black Sabbath: Weights are gathered in their clusters Just like nodes in dense adjusters Tensors plotting back-induction Optimizers for production In the racks the silicon's churning As the training loop keeps turning Minimizing loss and finding Local optima they're grinding Oh lord yeah! Top-down parsers hide themselves away They only triggered the call Recursive descent leads the way And pushes the stack to the wall! Grammar’s left to the core Time complexit...

• Post #2121847

  With apologies to No Doubt: In the reals we felt so safe One axis, rules we could trace Then doubles came along at night Pairs of pairs, still felt just right But every time we cross that line A mirror flips, a twist in sign Don’t *fold*, I know what you’re extending Every step breaks what we’re defending From fields to things that only pretend To behave the way we planned them Complex planes, a spinning phase i squared laughing at our ways Quaternions start to bend the sce...

• Post #2121846

  Every time LinkedIn shows me an ad to work of Customs & Border Patrol (you know, human rights violation central here in the US), I report the ad as for a dangerous or extremist organization. I've had to do that twice now...

• Post #2121845

  There are two kittens behind me chasing each other with the zoomies...on a slippery floor. I'm imaging them playing mario kart in battle mode.

• Post #2121844

  So this was funny. My solver rederived theorems that had been marked as private because it predicted they'd be there. Twice. #agda ``` -- Made public 2026-05-02 (Step 1 of orbit-aware-completion-residue -- arc): NSAHomReal2Complex re-derived `α*0` / `0*α` / `neg-0` -- inline; Goal-T's `*-comm-ℂ` proof would re-derive them again. -- Two re-derivations of identical content trigger RFS to expose -- the originals. Behavior-preserving for existing callers. ```

• Post #1662122

  I feel like a civilization without gravity would have a very different approach to entity relationships; much less of a dependency on hierarchy.

• Post #1647554

  (With apologies to Metallica. Except for Lars.) I can’t remember any field Can’t tell if this is real or not Deep in the algebra I dwell Nothing is real but scalars now The basis vectors start to spin Orthonormal and orthogonal I wake up to a wedge and dot Geometric product’s all I’ve got Multi-vector is my name A grade-$k$ blade is all I claim I cannot commute with you Anti-commute is what we do Fed through the Cayley-Dickson map Doubling the dimension trap Associative property remains But I’...

• Post #1024799

  The problem with trying to say Hesgeth's name backwards (to banish him) is that you have to try to pronounce "htegseH", which feels like invoking Lovecraft, which would be worse...

• Post #1010243

  Making "don't perform premature optimization" more rigorous: First, you need to graph the formal coboundary of your problem. Only once you've done that is it safe to contract your graph around your actual obligation cells. This is often called "waterfall". If the problem is moving too fast to do that, you need to start with a smaller part of the problem, but apply the same rigor. And then compose, gluing the next cell, which you will have co...

• Post #1010242

  I appreciate that greek yogurt is sufficiently dairy to use as a substitute for milk in my cereal. Less splashy and doesn't make things soggy, either.

• Post #1010241

  "No obligation with hasDischargeQuery found -- the system cannot witness its own discharge" #phrasing

• Post #969555

  I just literally refactored code by running a select query for the categorical pullback between (the apparatus representing select queries) and (the apparatus representing ask queries). This week or next, I should have finished discharging the proofs I need to confidently say this thing is what I think it is. But what I can definitely say is it's awesome and absurd. #programming #mathematics

• Post #945727

  I just had a funny mental image of taking the old Win32s drawing API and replacing the idea of a uniform field of pixels with a sparse lattice of nedges.

• Post #945726

  "cybromaniac" : noun : Individual with an irresistible urge to partner with #AI on productive tasks. Portmanteau of "cyber" and "pyromaniac".

• Post #945725

  #gabion now analyzes its own repository identifies any symbols which aren't in use (or aren't in use except called by tests, or aren't in use except in aliases, or aren't in use except as re-exports...), identifies which symbols would _become_ not-in-use if those were removed, and provides a nice unified diff to for you to try if you've got git stash handy and are feeling lucky.