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When I write like I talk, I use a lot of commas. Replacing some of my commas with em dashies, so long as it was done judiciously, would probably make things easier to chunk.

I’ve seen people use colons where em dashes are effective. I use em dashes. AI leans heavily on them for same reason

It’s become the exclamation mark of mid-sentence punctuation. It connotes fragmented or interrupted speech in my opinion. The problem is that writing is not speech, that’s why it is more often seen in written dialogue.

I really look forward to the day AI-driven algorithm design + formal verification becomes the norm for performance critical computing.

A programmer translates a natural-language spec into a machine-readable spec, feeds it to an AI-assisted compiler, and out pops an implementation that's more optimized than any human could ever hope to write, along with a lean proof of its correctness.


>A programmer

It won't be a programmer doing this work, because they will have gone the way of the dodo.

It'll be workers specific to a certain domain (e.g. engineer, architect, accountant) doing this on top of their usual work.

The software industry will collapse.


The architect/accountant won't be doing it either, they'll just be a liability lightning rod for people who are closer to devs than architects doing the actual day to day work. Sort of like a doctor will "manage" a team of nurse practitioners.

Except medicine is 1000x older than software engineering as a field

You can look forward to that, but today I’m already experiencing something worse but close enough for all but the most critical code: AI-driven algorithm design + tests in your favorite property-based testing library (like OG QuickCheck in Haskell or hypothesis in Python).

Of course problems remain in both approaches: a human or AI needs to make sure the lean proof is proving the correct translation from natural language spec to a formal theorem, or the PBT is testing the right properties translated from natural language.


> A programmer translates a natural-language spec into a machine-readable spec

Why do we need a human for this?


...and no human will be able to understand the algorithm either.

I'm sure a system that could do this is economically optimal.

Why are you looking forward to this, though?


Not the OP but for me it’s:

more optimized than any human could ever hope to write, along with a lean proof of its correctness.


How would you even be able to recognize the proof is valid? Or its own proof that it understands its own proof.... This ain't the future

The cover does not matter for a textbook.

Most textbooks sold are bought by students because they were required for a course. Students are not choosing a textbook by cover because they're not choosing a textbook at all. Professors choosing which textbook to assign are doing so based on the content, because that's what they'll be teaching. Professors also get a lot of free sample copies, and are probably choosing between those instead of purchasing their own set of candidates based on the cover.


12,060 pieces

In one of the essays posted here, which was, ironically, about AI in education, a sentence, that an AI could not possibly write, that I could possibly write, because of its length and unusual structure, before finally reaching the verb, went on for 25 words.

I don't know if it was written that way to show trust in the reader's intelligence, show disregard for reaching a wide audience, show a demonstration of skill, or was artifact of someone just thinking at that level.


The robot can be made to write any such thing

In the interest of not occupying significant page/screen height with LLM output, example prompts+responses here: https://dpaste.com/H9DXKNYQH.txt



Your first sentence is 45 words and contains 9 commas.

> I don't know if it was written that way to show trust in the reader's intelligence, show disregard for reaching a wide audience, show a demonstration of skill, or was artifact of someone just thinking at that level.


It's been a while since I've seen such a whoosh worthy comment.

A sudden switch to depreciation makes housing more expensive, even though prices are going down.

Say you buy a house with a loan, and sell it after x years. The total cost of ownership is interest paid to the bank + buy price - sell price. If you bought a house at $600k expecting to sell it in a few years at $700k, but it'll actually sell for $500k, your TCO went up by $200k. The sudden switch to depreciation made the same house much more expensive to own. Prices have to slowly go from rising to steady and then to falling, otherwisw everyone is suddenly living way beyond their means.


A cleaning station is a location where aquatic wildlife congregate to be cleaned by smaller organisms. Such stations exist in both freshwater and marine environments, and are used by animals including fish, sea turtles and hippopotamuses.


Nobody cares that a browser's navigation buttons, address bar, tabs, or window controls don't match the current website. Probably because these things are obviously outside the extents of the web page.

However, scrollbars, context menus, modal windows, and date pickers are rendered within the extents of the web page, and get replaced all the time.

It is my opinion that these controls don't need to be styled to match the website, because they're not part of the website. They're part of the browser. Non-diegetic. Outside the fourth wall.


I found joy making sdf2stl.saej.in. It's similar to a bunch of things that already exist, but I was able to make a set of requirements that made mine technically unique.

It was too complex for me to create when I started, so I learned as I went.

In personal projects, I only use LLMs for when I don't care and I don't want to learn. For example, all the WebGL APIs. I am perfectly fine not knowing how to allocate, initialize, and bind a shaderbufferindexobjectstoragehandlepointerarray. But I'll do the fun parts, the interface design and algorithms, by myself.


I remade the hero GIF in HD

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/sXsGDl


Thanks! Perfect match as far as I can see, nice one! How did you learn/know how to do this?

The code was really interesting to read and tinker with! I made a version where the symmetry (7 originally) can be other numbers, and that was fascinating to see!

ShaderToy forever!!


Ah silly me, you put the sources in the comment!! Thanks for that I will have a read for sure!

It struck me as looking a bit like a demoscene plasma effect but with a radial/angular aspect! (also reminds me of cymatics diagrams a bit!)

I experimented with non-integer symmetries and it seemed not to introduce discontinuities, and I made it produce an RGB value for fun too:

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/7XsGWs


Wow this is too much fun for simple sum-of-cosines but I shouldn't be surprised (have played with FFT a bit, and I know of Reimann Zeta Function.. sines are amazing!)

I doubled the angle so that it doesn't drift to the side any more.. and put it back to 7-symmetry, but left it with the coloring I added (now adjustable via consts):

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/7Xl3Ws

And a small tweak:

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/73lGDs

If you squint with it on fullscreen on that last one there's a wonderful mixture of things feeling like they are rotating vs flowing inward-and-outward from 'centers' (like it's ambiguous whether it's curl or divergence somehow for my eyes/brain at least!).

Hooray for sines and cosines and shaders and thanks for motivating me to play!


So cool! It reminds me of the kaleidoscope I played with as a kid. Truly mesmerizing.

FYI your second link is not working


Ah thanks for letting me know! I had not set it to public. It's public now though! Glad you enjoyed it!


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