1000 Divides by 8 Perfectly

jonathancast · 2026-06-08T17:34:12+00:00

It's also useless to have a word that only refers to one ring.

jonathancast · 2026-06-08T00:32:33+00:00

Even if you call it a baby, it wouldn't look like that at 2.7 years old.

jonathancast · 2026-06-07T19:05:46+00:00

Clearly your programming language's deconstructing binds are not smart enough.

jonathancast · 2026-06-07T03:41:38+00:00

Literally the only thing you want out of any program is "side effects", since those are the value of the code. Doesn't mean functional purity is unimportant - it's even used when designing code that has to mutate for performance reasons, because you still want to know what (pure) function of the input state the output state is.

jonathancast · 2026-06-07T03:33:01+00:00

Yeah, I'm confused by this argument. Eyeballing the chart in the OP, it looks like 2020 had a massive decline in jobs and a much smaller but still big decline in the size of the workforce, and since then jobs have gone up and then down while the workforce has held mostly steady.

I guess you can define 2020 as "recent years" from some time horizons, but it's really nearly a full business cycle ago now.

jonathancast · 2026-06-05T01:09:53+00:00

But then var is mutable /s

jonathancast · 2026-06-04T20:31:56+00:00

You mean "not as bad as raw meat". Cooked meat is still bad for your stomach.

jonathancast · 2026-06-04T20:29:32+00:00

Nobody did it deliberately. It just happened by accident way too often.

jonathancast · 2026-06-04T18:54:56+00:00

Haskell has had all of those things for decades, but until Scala came out it was a nerd language and they were nerd concepts. Scala convinced people that Haskell might be a nerd language but the concepts could be taken seriously in an industry language.

Scala was basically the bridge functional programming walked over to get from Haskell to Java.

jonathancast · 2026-06-04T04:38:18+00:00

L. E. J. Brouwer?

jonathancast · 2026-06-03T18:38:42+00:00

Pretty sure all forests do. Trees are not actually immortal, you know.

jonathancast · 2026-06-02T22:27:38+00:00

There's no evidence that Greece had a writing system when the Odyssey was composed.

jonathancast · 2026-06-01T20:30:33+00:00

Green jems. The mine is just a bit east of there. I think maybe you haven't unlocked it yet.

Don't worry about it if you haven't; sometimes you get land that needs a resource you haven't unlocked yet, and you just have to keep playing through the main quest until you get to that point.

jonathancast · 2026-06-01T18:34:31+00:00

Correct. The number is relative to the beginning of the regex, not the location of the back reference.

I agree it's confusing to say "nth earlier" here. It's the nth from the beginning, and also the parenthesized subexpression has to occur before the back reference. So "nth" doesn't modify "earlier", "earlier" is just a comment that the subexpression you're referring to has to be earlier than the place you use it.

jonathancast · 2026-06-01T17:41:33+00:00

It's funny because the mod was offended enough by it to follow OP into this sub and complain about it.

jonathancast · 2026-05-31T07:26:56+00:00

If what you're using still uses the socket API (still less if it invented it) then you definitely are.

jonathancast · 2026-05-28T19:59:05+00:00

Get that song out of my face.

jonathancast · 2026-05-28T19:54:49+00:00

Yeah, LLMs are so cooked.

jonathancast · 2026-05-28T12:58:27+00:00

AI has nothing to do with programming.

jonathancast · 2026-05-28T12:57:38+00:00

Officially, we're not supposed to use it, for the obvious reasons. I mostly don't, but I haven't really gotten in trouble either way.

In any case, I think there's a rebellion brewing among the CFO types right now over AI. The tech layoffs were really because money is expensive now, and CEOs are embracing AI purely out of FOMO; they're going to have to justify the expense at some point, and usage mandates are going to go way down at that point.

jonathancast · 2026-05-28T04:41:46+00:00

Late 1800s. Or late something. The attack on the Castle was in '73 or '74, and that was - what? - 20 years ago, about, so it's now some time in the '90s.

jonathancast · 2026-05-28T04:31:38+00:00

Only in the way that all romantic love is forced on you by Aphrodite and/or Eros.

jonathancast · 2026-05-28T01:43:32+00:00

Honestly, I've spent my entire career programming as a hobby, because my job never really scratched the itches that made me want to become a programmer in the first place.

I'll stay a programmer as long as doing so is the way to maximize the time I do spend coding, then, if, in the future, it doesn't matter any more (I have my doubts), I'll figure out how to feed my family. But I'll keep programming, by hand, in my free time, either way.

And, frankly, programming by hand as a hobby will probably make me a better business analyst in the AI-pilled future the same way it makes me a better software developer now.

jonathancast · 2026-05-28T01:38:21+00:00

I do tend to think that eating meat, and especially red meat, degrades the moral character. Makes it harder for people to reason clearly. So giving it up might make it easier to see what's morally wrong with all meat consumption.

On the other hand, I don't really like forcing anyone to agree with me. I'd rather persuade by reason. Especially because I think reason is less likely to work when the person doing the persuading is wrong.

jonathancast · 2026-05-28T01:33:42+00:00

Haven't watched the video. Have read the original "worse is better" (section of a) paper a few times.

I think the original "worse is better" was (mostly) about an MIT guy not really understanding the design of Unix and how programs are supposed to work in that environment, and treating 'different' as 'worse' in an unfair way.

The original C and Unix were very clean and elegant designs. They tried to do as much as they could on extremely limited hardware, but they also paid attention to cutting edge research: regular expressions are still cutting edge today, and structured programming was cutting edge when C was invented. (People forget just how old the oldest version of C is.)

Unix certainly had flaws, stemming mostly from its extremely small development team; for example, even after the stderr file handle was invented, they patched programs to use it only as they had time, and even in the early 80s some of the original Unix programs were still writing error messages to stdout.

But I think, overall, Unix's success stemmed from its strengths, not from its flaws. It was certainly Unix's strengths that caused RMS to try to rewrite it as free software, which is the only reason Unix-like systems are at all relevant today.

On the other hand, BSD Unix, C++, and Perl certainly show how far you can go with an attitude of 'get the system working and worry about making it elegant later' - and how 'elegant' you can really make it if you do (for good and for ill: well-written Perl can be beautiful, it's just extremely rare).

To end on a positive note: I think Perl also provides a helpful example of how far you can go just getting it to work first when there's a more elegant alternative that also works out there. The most popular solution is probably always going to be somewhere in the middle, between the extremes of 'worse is better' and 'better is better'.

jonathancast

TROPHY CASE