wake me up when Rust fixes its’ supply chain attacks susceptibility (solid stdlib and rejecting external crates, including transitive deps

Notesnook ftw

In Clojure, -> is used for inserting the piped argument at the head position in the arguments of whatever it is passed to, while ->> is used for inserting it at the tail. This approach is great for working with immutable data in a series of approachable transformations, which I believe is one reason why so many Domain-Specific Languages for generative programming are written in that language, aside from its interactive REPL. Additionally, there is no need to worry about excessive copying, as this is generally well optimized.

This can be particularly useful with HoneySQL, which is more of a DSL for SQL rather than a typical ORM tool. For example:

(defn apply-filters [query filters]
"applies WHERE clauses to a query"
  (reduce (fn [q [column value]]
            (helpers/where q [:= column value]))
          query
          filters))

(defn build-dynamic-query [{:keys [table columns filters sort-by limit]}]
  (-> {}
      (helpers/select columns)
      (helpers/from table)
      (apply-filters filters)
      (helpers/order-by sort-by)
      (helpers/limit limit)
      sql/format))

;; Result - a super readable function call that resembles a natural language 
(build-dynamic-query 
  {:table :products 
   :columns [:id :name :price] 
   :filters {:category "electronics" :in-stock true}
   :sort-by [:price :desc]
   :limit 20})

Lenin was 47 in 1917

(\r (frequencies “strawberry”))

lots of onions cut in rings as they resemble parentheses the most

Funny how he is actually now a fan of Clojure yet the examples in his book are actually full of mutating data and side effects. And Rich Hickey also stressed that tests are no silver bullet.

Removed by mod

we had a plenty of more deterministic tools for parsing human readable text to machine-readable long before llms

…you mean doxxbin 2.0? :-D

fr the system is in such a deep terminal crisis that talking to people in their 20s feels like talking to pensioners since in countries like the US or UK the life expectancy is declining due to not being able to afford healthy food, stressful and precarious work, mental health crisis and addictions, worsening healthcare, climate change, moldy cramped housing, proliferation of larger and thus more dangerous cars, new zoonoses etc. etc.

Trump says you won’t need to vote if he wins. But here’s the thing: It’s not just Democrats who should worry. Trump’s chaos could destroy the whole rigged system - Republican and Democrat. He might seem like an undertaker of the American democracy, but in doing so he will drown his own ship, too. But we need to help him steer it into the iceberg of organized social anger instead of isolated floes made of any expectations his mostly temporarily deluded and desperate voters may have or some single-cause activisms or culture wars that will only benefit him. Those will be shattered within the first few months of his term, as he won’t have COVID to use as a convenient excuse for his failures to not only address, but at least not make worse the organic crisis of the system, like Genocide Joe has had.

EDIT: I’m not saying this to fucking endorse him or passivity. What I mean is that the world does not end at the ballot box and we need to reckon with the possibility of his victory and that there are countless other means of resisting him other than just depositing all our hopes in the Democrats. And that even though resisting Trumpism will not be an easy task, the instability and disappointment that a presidency of establishment’s populist enfant terrible, in an era that breeds virtually no statesmen of great stature, is bound to engender, has the potential actually make it easier.

Good luck to AI-based legal “solutions” startups, hope they and their customers are generously insured to cover for the fallout of such blatantly ignorant stupidity that completely discards our current subject matter expertise, which clearly shows that the error rate is too high, while you’re either right about the law or you’re not.

…made using the arguably the most criminally environmentally disastrous tech we’ve invented in the past few decades. How ironic!

Why does it have to always be a hype that is a literal kick in the eye of gamers? Previously it was shitcoins, now it’s hallucination engines… I’m afraid what’s up next.

a webpage that simulates a systemd shutdown when that one stupid service won’t stop?

someone else’s computer*

I need to disagree with you on AI. We did not fail at it. Not because LLMs are good. But because any program processing arbitrary data, even a stupid simple calculator is AI – a machine performing work that human brain can do, ideally with the added benefit of maximized determinism and greater speed. If you reduce this generalistic term I believe is so overly broad we should cease to use it to LLMs, then these criteria seem to have been thrown out of the window since they are usually heuristic balls of python mud.
So having established that it is all just software that processes arbitrary data, let’s go back to the basics of software design. Huge amounts of money and working hours have been thrown into the erratic attempts to create a software that can do everything at once. GPT extensions are fucking dystopian and here is why – we had a tool for that for decades that does it much more better, without imposing digital handcuffs on the user and burning the planet – IT’S CALLED AN OPERATING SYSTEM AND PROGRAMS.

General-purpose AI is a lie sold to you by monopolistic surveillance capitalists for whom it is a dream come true since making a decently reliable LLM requires prohibitively large resources but the endless stream of data much larger and contextualized than was the case for search engines thrown at it compensates that quite well, a pipe dream in terms of achieving what it is aimed to achieve with it’s current design and a nightmare to build and test.

So if we discard this term as a meaningless overly broad buzzword it is since computation on non hardcoded data is what we’ve designed computers that are not just state machines for, let’s talk about what makes Lisp is so good at data-driven programming:

1. Functional programming is generally more deterministic since you have immutable persistent data structures everywhere. This also makes it quite good at implementing safe, reliable concurrency.
2. This determinism is furthered by the homoiconicity – the fact that the boundary between code and data is the outcome of using S-expressions and has powerful implications for eliminating so many data conversion bugs and complexities, all while usually not using static typing (!) and also for the language’s extensivity and building DSLs
3. Very simple syntax, again thanks to S-expressions - just (function arguments...) basically.

I think Eich understood that when he initially wanted to port Scheme to the web browser, after all html does have lispy semantics, but office politics in the heyday of Java forced him to give up on this idea and we’ve ended up with this goofy counterintuitive mess that bred hacky workarounds instead of the extensivity we could’ve had if he did so - take a look at Hiccup templating DSL and decide for yourself if this or jsx are simpler ways of writing out stuff to the DOM.

Yes, fix the shit by kicking out the triumvirate of policians, corporations and military altogether, not by voting for lesser evil and dealing with shame after legitizming brazen, out of touch geriatric fucks; hoping that just one more legal act will prevent business from torching the planet, manipulating prices, avoiding taxation, eliminating competition, trampling down consumer rights and exploiting workers; or that there might ever be a good war and a bad peace and gaslighting yourself that it’s for a just cause and not spheres of influence and profits off the backs of countries treated like the disputed territories of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’.

American bourgeois democracy is not only a sham; it is rotten to its core. All that is missing is a force strong enough to kick it and watch it come collapsing down.