What are you doing this week?
16 points by caius
16 points by caius
What are you doing this week? Feel free to share!
Keep in mind it’s OK to do nothing at all, too.
I've been working on a paper inspired by the Naur's programming as theory building. This is effectively a first draft, and I really want feedback on it.
Abstract: Using AI models to write programs (the practice of vibe coding) reduces our understanding of the resultant program, and harms the training process of new software engineers, reducing their ability to sufficiently judge the correctness and adequacy of the AI model's output. Programs are more than their mere textual representation, having unstated implicit conditions and require human evaluation of their output. We must be careful in how we use AI models; they may cause increased stress, reduce critical thinking, impede learning, inhibit communication in teams, and the use of AI models has ethical issues stemming from their training and the method of their use. A brief history of the problems in software engineering is given. The problems of AI use in software engineering are reviewed, and an overview of engineering culture and discipline is provided.
https://codeberg.org/libfud/software-engineering-notes
https://codeberg.org/libfud/software-engineering-notes/src/branch/main/modern_software_crisis.pdf
I love this subject, and agree with your thesis! Engineering culture is something I'm passionate about, having had my upbringing in a highly-regulated industry as well (med device). What kind of feedback are you looking for?
Writing flow, unsubstantiated claims, places that I could expand, missing threads or points, places where I should add emphasis... anything you feel like criticizing, or that you feel is well done and should be preserved as I edit it further.
I also wouldn't mind just having discussion on it based on your thoughts reading it and how it relates to your own experiences. Thanks!
I'm half considering a spike where I re-implement the marginalia index in C++ as I think we're approaching the limits of what can be done with Java and I feel there's maybe a tiny amount of meat on the bone that's hard to get at without more explicit control over the memory layouts and with the small annoying FFM call tax you get with Java.
Usually not a big fan of language rewrites in general but, it's tempting to at least see where it lands. I think in any other scenario I wouldn't be looking at this, but since index performance is the same as recall for web search it can be motivated.
It's a relatively limited amount of code in all, and since most of the designs will translate over fairly 1:1 and come with extensive test batteries, it shouldn't be that much effort I hope... If I get severely humbled by the scope of the undertaking, my will is that this post be my epitaph.
I'm a student and during our first year we have exams which require you to code in a tty console. It's honestly a nightmare for people (like me) who haven't configured a terminal code/text editor (by terminal i mean tools such as nano, vim, emacs, etc..). I've hated this so much i decided to code a small basic IDE to help future students get through those exams and make their life easier, so i'll be working on it.
exams which require you to code in a tty console
Seems like an odd requirement if they then let you build and use arbitrary tools. I'd understand if the goal was "do everything in a simple editor without any IDE features" or even just "ensure everyone is on equal footing with the same tools" but if you can just use your own TUI IDE it seems like that's not the goal. Do you know why they require that?
I'm not 100% sure of the exact requirements, but i think what my school is mainly trying to avoid is cheating in any possible way (Use of AI, etc..). I forgot to mention i'm coding this mainly to have fun, i simply happen to enjoy coding "useful" things. In order for my TUI IDE to be used by students, it would require an approval first, which is only possible if the IDE is as minimal as possible. The thing is, a lot of people in my school are not from a "coding enjoyer" background, they're pretty new to the subject and i thought having a ready-to-use IDE would be something nice and would make their life easier, instead of having to configure one or learn lots of keyboard shortcuts/Keybindings. Its a fairly new project now so i'm not 100% sure of what features i want to include, to me a simple TUI IDE with autocomplete and a pretty easy file navigation would be already a great quality of life improvement. Sorry if my grammar is not that good or if i made spelling mistakes, etc.. english is not my first language
It has to make screen-recording to make sure nobody uses disallowed parts of the Web quite a bit cheaper than recording a video of a graphical session…
It is not clear about arbitrariness of tools: if the IDE ends up small enough, it might be possible to convince people to do a cursory review, find volunteer students to make a more detailed review / test for basic bugs losing too much data, declare the tool weaker than maximum allowed Vim configuration, and officially allow some frozen version of it. Some universities do have exotic local tooling added to the allowed list.
At least they aren't making you code in an HTML textarea while also demanding your indentation is perfect.
CS education is fun in that it's divorced from actual programming.
I agree, CS education is tons of funs ! However i never completely understood the point of making us code through a tty console, i think it's completely useless and sort of "painful" for no reasons at all. During those exams we don't code in an HTML textarea however we do have a very strict coding style to follow, which is way harder in existing TUI IDE, so making one could also allow students to not think about it too much.
I've been doing some intensive cleaning. (Pulling out and rewiring everything two computers and networking gear from the two desks I use, plus the same thing on the TV furniture piece that held also quite a lot of hardware.)
I quit my job some weeks ago as I'm quite unhappy with the job market in general and I start the master's degree that's required here to teach secondary school.
However, an ex-colleague convinced me to apply to his company, which apparently would not be as horrible as most other jobs I'm seeing. I'm doing a third interview in 10 minutes.
I have a long list of stuff I'd be supposed to do with free time, yet the main thing I've worked on lately has been my minimalistic personal website and... starting to implement some kind of Nagios bizarre clone (toying with experimenting with DuckDB as a storage backend).
I'm also setting up a mini PC with AMD graphics for the TV. For now I configured Tvheadend so I can do some occasional TV recording (DVB-T public broadcast- they still air interesting movies and shows from time to time). Now I want to set up Steam Big Picture, but that's a bit more of a pain than I expected on Debian. I've recovered the original Steam Controller, which now seems to provide pointer control OOB, so perhaps I'll try with that with a quite-vanilla desktop setup.
I am reading Discourses by Epictetus. I’m really liking it so far.
I got addicted to Subnautica (original) over the weekend, so a bit of that too.
I love Epictetus! I've heard good things about Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full, which uses Epictetus (and the application of his teachings) as a major plot element, but I haven't got around to reading it yet.
I got tired of VS Code’s complexity and all the AI clutter, so I built Folune: https://www.chunqiuyiyu.com/folune/, a minimal, local-first text editor for reviewing agent-generated code and Markdown docs.
In the evenings I am going to work on gameplay for HexWalker, my terminal based game. I am already quite happy with the aesthetics of it (Unicode characters, colors, etc) but now it needs a reason to be played. HexWalker looks like a roguelike, but my plan to make it more like a "A Short Hike", a small low stakes exploration game.
More work on my federated git forge project, it's nearly ready to share. Reading The Rouse by China Mieville, it's amazing so far. Want to quit caffeine, hopefully starting tomorrow we'll see how that goes.
Also, the usual, learning bits of Zig, Ocaml and others so my brain isn't completely atrophied.
Finishing The Names by DeLillo and Herzog by Bellow. Bellow is fantastic which I didn't expect, I feel like he's been a little bit overshadowed by Roth in the American canon but he's really something.
Falling into the expected trap of doing something on my own instead of delegating to the team I manage. Therefore, I have a stupid deadline by Friday.
Getting ready to let partner and kid leave for 15 days, it will be the first time since he is born. Let see which heart-sized hole this will leave in my chest.
Looking back to learn Haskell for no reason while vibecoding a photographic film management local software in Swift. Based on the current discussion about FLOSS and vibecoding, I think I will probably not put it online, it is imperfect and for me only. I think I will stick more and more to such bespoke local tools for my own and only usage.
Giving a talk at a cool little 2-day conference on automatic differentiation (AD). Normally I speak with functional programming (FP) people and have to explain what AD even is; now I'm talking to people who have heard of FP and have a vague idea of what it is, but are mostly doing Real Science — as opposed to the not-science that we in computer science often do.
We'll see how it goes :P
Finishing up a breadcrumbs navigation feature for a web page header. Working on 3 different articles for my blog - 2 are writing up some talks I gave a while ago, and 1 is a new article about how to use htmx 4's hx-partial as a replacement for Django messaging framework when issuing in-app notifications.
Really trying to hold on, living two years in the future.
On the upside, this is has been one of my most stable weeks in the last two years I've been unemployed - on the downside, I still had to cop out with coping mechanisms, and I'm nowhere close to employment.