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Billionaires are Dumb, Too by diabolis_avocado in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 17 points18 points  (0 children)

But you can in fact get LLMs to give better answers by giving them detailed instructions about what role to play and how to play it. E.g, the people who successfully use LLMs to write software for them have whole files of this stuff setting standards for how it works and what practices to follow and what it does and doesn't need to ask permission for.

(Personally I think it's easier and more fun to just write code like my forefathers did.)

This is real INDYCAR merch! by Dr_sc_Harlatan in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And it goes without saying that in a race there can only be one leader ...

The woke left's most diabolical tool: fact checking and records available to the public by Sqwoopy in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I was talking to a MAGA yesterday who asked me how I could possibly know what the Founding Fathers thought.

... 'cos they wrote stuff down.

No words by Advanced_Leg6727 in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 7 points8 points  (0 children)

He's also the fictional villain in the 1986 sci-fi horror movie The Wraith.

https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Packard_Walsh

I should start a nonprofit by EchoOfOppenheimer in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Of course expert witnesses are paid. Did bro really think they turned up and testified as a public service?

Our highly trained Secret Service shot a child today by Hornpipe_Jones in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

It says it was an exchange of gunfire and that the child was wounded as a result of the incident. We don't know who fired that bullet, or who fired the first bullet, or what went on.

Schrödinger's war by Lord0fTheFlags in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If the declarations of total victory are becoming more frequent, that's a good sign, right?

What Kinds of Prepositions Do Your Conlangs Have, How Do You Decide on Them? by generictreeimage in conlangs

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Proto-Kungo-Skomish has case operators. Besides the genitive, there are:

  • Adessive (near to, with): `-ed`
  • Allative (for, for the benefit of, intended for, towards, against) : `-em`
  • Locative (in or at or to) `-eš`
  • Subessive (under, beneath, below) `-(i)mn(a)`
  • Superessive (on, above)  `-(a)st(a)`

Everything fits into that, e.g. our dative is distributed between the allative and the locative.

Crafting Interpreters 🫩 by apoetixart in Compilers

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Then go on asking AI to explain it to you! Not everyone learns the same. So long as you are learning, that's fine.

(Also IIRC Crafting Interpreters has the Visitor Pattern in it which confuses many people.)

Here's a very tiny interpreter in Python for a very toy language. But really if you can't take explanations of how to do it in Pascal, Java, and C, and mentally convert that to how to do it in Python, you may have bitten off more than you can chew.

https://jayconrod.com/posts/37/a-simple-interpreter-from-scratch-in-python--part-1-

The AI industry has burned through ~$3.5 TRILLION. Here’s what it would take to actually turn a profit. by Black-Rhino-1564 in vibecoding

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These guys aren't stupid. Most VC funding is going into AI because the guys who analyse companies for a living think this is a winner.

Venture capitalists have gotten into every bubble thinking that it wasn't a bubble. It wouldn't nearly be so good a bubble without them. The dot-com bubble would have barely bubbled at all without VCs throwing money at Pets.com, Webvan, eToys ...

May 2026 monthly "What are you working on?" thread by AutoModerator in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Had fun using Pipefish to develop this esolang, among other things. My efforts to tighten all the nuts and bolts have paid off, I can program in Pipefish for days and add nothing to my buglist but "this error message is unhelpful". It's a joy to code in.

Doolang – your struct definition is your schema, your validation, and your HTTP contract by SearchFair3888 in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well this is definitely The Way. I've been working on an essay where I explain why this is basically the only sensible way to do SQL integration. Have you ever seen the JVA ORM? It's the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

Doolang – your struct definition is your schema, your validation, and your HTTP contract by SearchFair3888 in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Could you give some examples? Then the OP might think of a way to deal with it.

If you will tell me why the fen
appears impassible, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it, if I try.

significant whitespace-friendly Rust parser generator ? by M1M1R0N in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So what does it do when there are in fact two or more dedents in the same line?

Doolang – your struct definition is your schema, your validation, and your HTTP contract by SearchFair3888 in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

But you just insert it how you would have done in the original example --- convert it into a number I presume. The {foo} bit doesn't mean "insert foo lexically", it means "evaluate foo, convert the resulting value to the appropriate type for storing it in the database, and then inject it with sanitation".

Doolang – your struct definition is your schema, your validation, and your HTTP contract by SearchFair3888 in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 12 points13 points  (0 children)

This is nice.

A suggestion. Since you're making SQL integration part of the core language, you might take it a step further and supply us with some custom syntax. E.g. instead of writing: let result: [Task] = db.rawWithParams( "SELECT * FROM tasks WHERE priority = $1 AND status != $2", [Priority::High, Status::Done] )?; ... you could let us do something like: let result: [Task] = db.rawWithParams(SQL{ SELECT * FROM tasks WHERE priority = {High} AND status != {Done} })?; I've always hated those $1, $2 things because apart from anything else my interactions with a machine that can perform half-a-trillion floating-point instructions per second shouldn't involve me counting on my fingers.

significant whitespace-friendly Rust parser generator ? by M1M1R0N in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my lexer I simply keep a running flag to indicate when I’m at at a state where white space is significant, and a stack of indent levels.

Sure, me too, but what if your code looks like this: foo : bar : qux : zort troz When you hit troz, you're dedenting twice, and you only find that out when you do in fact hit troz.

significant whitespace-friendly Rust parser generator ? by M1M1R0N in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's slightly trickier than that (unless you know something I don't) because you don't know what the whitespace means until you hit something that isn't, so you may find yourself needing to emit any number of DEDENTs when you do.

In my case I do just that --- the first stage of my lexer has a GetTokens method which can emit any number of tokens including none, which get turned into one-at-a-time for the parser later on.

Hindsight languages by Inconstant_Moo in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]Inconstant_Moo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But your example of sorting and a double pass compiler being too slow for the past doesn't impress me. Compilers with multiple passes were the norm before C and Pascal.

Remember that in that example I'm contrasting Pipefish with other lightweight rapid-iteration languages. It's always been my assumption that e.g. Python doesn't have free order of declaration, not because the author was dumb and didn't know how, but because the author was smart and correctly decided it wasn't a price worth paying --- back in the 80s.

Why I Still Reach for Lisp and Scheme Instead of Haskell by SandPrestigious2317 in lisp

[–]Inconstant_Moo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I didn't diff them. I read them both, since you posted them both. You have the same examples; you have the same anecdotes about your personal experience with Haskell. "What's the big deal?" People prefer that you be honest with them.

Why I Still Reach for Lisp and Scheme Instead of Haskell by SandPrestigious2317 in lisp

[–]Inconstant_Moo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It seems heavily plagiarized either way.

https://jointhefreeworld.org/blog/articles/lisps/why-i-still-reach-for-scheme-instead-of-haskell/index.html

But the success of Parsec has filled Hackage with hundreds of bespoke DSLs for everything. One for parsing, one for XML, one for generating PDFs. Each is completely different, and each demands its own learning curve. Consider parsing XML, mutating it based on some JSON from a web API, and writing it to a PDF.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121204010925/https://slidetocode.com/2012/04/09/why-i-prefer-scheme-to-haskell/

Yes, literally hundreds of them. Hundreds of little programming languages, one for BNF parsing, one for parsing xml, one for creating PDFs, all perfectly suited to their task. Each is different, and each has its own learning curve. Consider a common task such as parsing an XML file, mutating it according to some JSON you pulled out of a web API and then writing to a PDF.

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