The “programming is an act of externalizing a mental model” vs “a code review is reverse engineering the model, then verifying its reasoning” really hit home. Even before AI code reviews required a lot of mental effort for me. AI has made an already difficult process much more prevalent.

> the concept of getting a good grade on a test as a happier concept than kissing a girl for the first time.

Were the concepts weighted by response counts? I’d imagine a good grade is a happy concept for everyone, but kissing a girl for the first time might only be good for about 50% of people.

It definitely wasn't for me. Happened in front of my whole friend group.

I suppose by this logic, if someone was pressured by their parents to get good grades and struggled, it’s possible that “getting a good grade” would have a negative connotation / emotions response for them.

Oddest analogy i can imagine making here.

Idk…my personal experience says it’s probably closer to 100% :)

This is amazing, such a nice presentation. It reminds me of the Neural Network Zoo [1], which was also a nice visualization of different architectures.

[1] https://www.asimovinstitute.org/neural-network-zoo/

Thank you for this! I help teach a "CS enrichment course", and I'm having students play with Keras (with my own written scaffolding of course.) I'm struggling to find a resource to help me plan beyond "this is a perceptron/FFNN", and with my lack of experience (I'm a statistician) this is going to be extremely helpful.

For people that use Lisp extensively, do you find the chording requirements of parentheses (shift-9 or shift-0) annoying? It feels like very bad ergonomics, considering how frequently the characters are used.

Do you use a keyboard with mappings to make it easier? Rely on the editor to insert them for you?

It's pretty much the same number of bracket-type characters as other languages, and both () and {} require the use of the shift key. Only counting the parentheses and curly braces:

  (defun hello (name)
    (format t "Hello, ~A!" name)) ;; 6 parens, 6 shift keys

  def hello(name):
    print(f"Hello, {name}") # 4 parens, 2 curlies, 6 shift keys

  void hello(char* name) {
    printf("Hello, %s\n", name);
  } // 4 parens, 2 curlies, 6 shift keys

No real difference for typing.

It is bad ergonomics only on modern keyboards. Back in the day, there were keyboards with "lower case parentheses"[1].

Same case for vi - the : key was in a different place, and no Shift necessary[2].

Nowadays, I use a bespoke layout (in software) that solves the above two problems, among others. My number row is inverted, so parentheses become lower case, and I put the colon key next to 0 and Enter next to P.

[1]: http://xahlee.info/kbd/lisp_keyboards.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#Hardware

A civilized language deserves a civilized layout[1]:

     [{ 1| 2= 3~ 4+  5<  6>  7^ 8& 9% 0* ]} /\
        bB yY oO uU  '(  ")  dD nN gG vV qQ #$ @`
        hH iI aA eE  ,;  .:  tT rR sS cC zZ 
        kK jJ xX wW  -_  ?!  mM lL fF pP

[1]: https://github.com/binarybottle/engram

See also:

  Parinfer: Simpler Lisp Editing (shaunlebron.github.io)
  168 points by harperlee on Jan 20, 2025 | hide | past | favorite | 32 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766205

probably not worse ergonomic because i type '(' with left pinky and right ring finger and ')' with left pinky and right pinky whereas {} [] etc, i have to use the very same overworked right pinky to distinguish two keys next to each other.

i always have problems with keys that have no obvious dedicated finger position like the middle vertical columns especially 6 and b and of course keys reachable on the right pinky, especially \ and =

I mean, double quotes and curly brackets also require using the Shift key, as do the at sign, number sign, dollar sign, and ampersand. The brackets are a small enough part of the code that it doesn't matter.

And besides:

  print("Hello World");

requires just as much chording as:

  (print "Hello World")

Mostly these days it just requires that you start to type "print" and then press tab when appropriate, though. I feel like I relatively rarely type brackets manually for function calls. Lisp syntax doesn't seem amenable to this particular affordance?

Why not? Could just type 'print', TAB, and have it put brackets and spaces in the right positions and leave the cursor in place for the first argument.

> That’s true, but the travel distance of the braces or the double quotes from the home row is much less than the travel distance from the parentheses.

That... depends on your keyboard maybe? On Dvorak the curly brackets are harder to reach than the round brackets. The open round bracket is also hit with the ring finger instead of the little finger, which is weaker.

My ring finger is always slightly sore due to typing ( so often. Not just in LISP but any programming language. I've been experimenting with mapping l; to () when the caps lock key is pressed. So far so good, but I haven't used it long enough to develop muscle memory.

+1 for vim slime. It’s not only amazing for programming in REPL languages. Since you can send anything from the buffer to another pane, it can be used to execute commands (send some rows from a cookbook to a remote shell), copy and paste segments of a local file to a remote source, and lots of other things. It’s a great example of doing something simple (send selections to another tmux/screen pane) that can be used in all kinds of useful ways. Very much the unix philosophy.

I think this case was the browser was active, but not the tab, so the browser reports that.

Many, many telemetry metrics have been added in the name of power and efficiency. If a page refreshes every 30 seconds, is it still worthwhile doing it when the tab isn’t active? It would be better to wait until the tab is active again, then refresh immediately.

That being said, all of these capabilities are a privacy nightmare, only increasing the precision of browser fingerprinting and user monitoring. Firefox could have taken a stance on refusing to implement them, but I don’t think it has an easy opt out.

Disable Page Visibility extension is available for Chrome and Firefox. And StopTheMadness for macOS Safari.

I suspect the author is assuming that users don’t want to have to learn a substantially different way to manage their code. Fossil and pijul are both interesting alternatives, but quite different from git.

I don’t think coding is dead, but I do find AI deeply demotivating. It feels like continuing to play a game after the cheat codes have been enabled.

You could be an amazing player, but everyone will point out the cheat codes are on. The last refuge will be deeply niche programming or areas not well represented in, or not generalizable from, the vast training corpus.

The Children of (insert adjective) series by Adrian Tchaikovsky is really, really good, especially the second in the series. Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.

I concur on "really good" but have to disagree on the "series" part. Children of Time is a remarkable book, one of the best science fiction stories in a very long time.

Children of Ruin is ... okay. Children of Memory is not a good book, IMO. Both of these suffer from the same mysticism-used-to-spin-up-a-red-reset-button plot device plague that fundamentally guts Xenocide. Nowhere as bad as that, of course, but the unpleasant echoes are there.

As it happens I'm in the middle of the Architects series and while it has its distant whiff of Stainless Steel Rat[ß], on the whole the series and its universe have so far remained consistent.

ß: Stainless Steel Rat was notorious for repeatedly putting the protagonist into impossible situations and then whipping up near-magical pieces of technomancy that just happened to solve the problem of the moment.

For me, Children of Ruin had more of a horror focus to it and left me with much more icky feelings than the brilliant positivity I felt at the end of the first book. It was still well done, though.

I agree that Children of Memory is not very good, mostly because it repeats itself so much. That could've been handled differently while still advancing the plot. I LOVE the overall concept, and the author's skills describing Gothi and Gethli's unique kind of intelligence was great, so I was okay with it overall... but too much of it was just a slog. First book is by far the best in my opinion as well.

I always took the Deus Ex Machina in Harrison's books to be just more of the satire. He never really takes his settings or characters lightly, but the presentation is almost always aimed at comedic effect.

> Stainless Steel Rat[ß]

I read this as Stainless Steel Rat[ss], and was befuddled until I read the end of your comment.

I loved Children of Ruin, but Children of Memory did nothing for me.

I was not particularly a fan of them - the plot seemed to find overly easy solutions to all the actual messiness that comes when dealing with others very unlike yourself, which given the rest of the stories, feels like it undercuts the entire point of them.

The Tchaikovsky novella I really like is Elder Race. Technology-as-magic is done in so many places (Ventus is another favourite), and I usually enjoy it, but I felt that in Elder Race it was pulled off in an unusually elegant way.

It'd be (insert noun) and the first one is far and away the best but on the big picture you are absolutely correct that it is fantastic. Children of Time (first one) is maybe my favorite book ever.

Yes Children of Time is very good. Tchaikovsky is excellent at portraying alien/non-human minds. You can tell he studied zoology and psychology at university.

I just get all excited whenever anyone brings these books up, remembering the first time I read them.

Children of Time so very good, it is in the top 5 of my favorite books of all time. I enjoyed the second one as well, and found the third one to be a bit inconsequential and I didn't re-read it when I re-read part 1 and 2.

If you've enjoyed these, give a go for Dogs of War too.

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.

Apart from "Solaris", which many probably know because there's been a reasonably well-known movie, I recommend "Fiasco" by the same author, Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by Stanisław Lem. Spoiler: It does not end well. The aliens are too alien, and the humans do what humans often do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by

I feel this is one of the reasons I liked Fire upon the Deep with the group mind based Tines

Roadside Picnic I believe would also fall into this category. Though the aliens are just theoretical in the book and the characters deal with what is speculated to be the aftermath of an alien visit.

> Roadside Picnic I believe would also fall into this category. Though the aliens are just theoretical in the book and the characters deal with what is speculated to be the aftermath of an alien visit.

Another sci-fi classic sorta made into a movie (Stalker).

In Shroud, Tchaikovsky does very alien (“real” aliens, not “uplifts”) very well. Anthropocentrically, it does not “end well.” Literarily, it vies for my favorite SciFi read of ‘25. Technically, I read “There Is No Antimemetics Division” last year, but I’d already kind of read it... or at least I think I thought I had.

uh uh, uh

Wang’s Carpets usually comes up alongside Solaris as another example of deliberately alien aliens.

I have a spider phobia, and struggled not to put the book down at first!

But the concepts and writing are excellent... really engaging stuff. And by the end of the book I'd learned so much about spiders that I honestly felt less scared of them! Definitely not cured by any means, but a year on and I still fear them less than I used to.

I’ve only read the first one. My main thought was ‘I wish he could write people as well as he could write spiders’ :)

I think humans and spiders and octopus and viruses are for him just a background for the object he wants to narrate. In difference to many other fiction where the persons are the objects. I also missed a human part of it.

If you want more spiders from him (actually, a spider-man), in a fantasy setting, I recommend Spiderlight. Just a fun novella that feels like a D&D campaign, works great as a palate cleanser.

I find his writing style really enjoyable, to the point that I really need to dive into his entire repertoire now.

Unsurprisingly, Tchaikovsky is a tabletop gamer and his first series, Shadows of the Apt, was derived from a game he GMed in college.

And I agree, everything hes written has been worth reading.

I had much the same experience, coming out of it with much less fear about jumping spiders in particular. Now they don't really bother me.

Didn't really do much for all the other species though!

Children of Time sparked more comments from strangers in NYC than anything else I’ve read. I came almost to expect them when reading it.

Alien Clay is also fantastic. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I think it gives the best intuition I’ve seen for a scientific concept that can be difficult to really grok otherwise.

Just finished it, and while I loved the whole plot, the adventurous expeditions away from the base, somehow this one with the waaay too long paragraphs seemed... Unnecessarily boring?

My first Tchaikovsky was children of time and TBH none of the sequels nor his other space operas were as captivating as that one for me.

Yet, I will read this one too. I believe that his ideas and stories are great in books and would never be able to make them into movies. So unique.

The elephant's dad was such a fascinating creature, and the way he described it keening in the distance at night reminded me of the amalgamation creatures from Annihilation. I loved Alien Clay – I hope we get a sequel because the world was so interesting.

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Reach_Series ?

I'm not sure it meets the criteria of "good."

The "aliens" are just spiders. With a lot of magical thinking. It's more like fantasy than science fiction. And character development is terrible. Only one or two are interesting and they get killed too early.

I can take SciFi that's at least either good story or good science. To this day I don't know why people recommend this author so much, even more than Watt's Rifters trilogy or Firefall. He is a "legal executive" who dropped out of zoology/biology. Explanations are just "nanovirus!" or "bioengineering!" and left at that.

Spoiler: the spiders make a space elevator and an asteroid catcher out of spiderweb; really. Stuff like this doesn't pass the suspension of disbelief for me. Reading it was quite annoying.

Feel free to downvote me, but if you do, I ask you the minor kindness to refute my points.

Edit: also "nanovirus!", what? All viruses are nano. And this virus being so complex it can't be too short, either.

This was a great read, and perfectly conveyed the combination of passion and anger of every WH player I’ve ever met has had.

Given the time, it’s hard not to view this same argument through the lens of AI. People who love crafting their creative works will still do it, even when AI can do it. They will still inspire others because they demonstrate what humans can do, and what we can aspire to.

This. As with all creative endeavours, part or even most of the enjoyment is the creative process, not the result.

Learning a skill and practicing it is still extremely enjoyable, even if a machine (or a factory) could do it better, faster, cheaper. The point is not the product, but the process.

Great point. Also, nobody would go to a cafe where the coffee comes from a fully automated machine instead of a barista.

Coffee vending machines have existed since the, what, 1950's maybe?

AI will fill a similar niche when it settles down, I think. Cheap, and mostly what you asked for, but you know you're not going to love the output.

Yes, agree. Cafes and baristas still exist even though the are coffee vending machines.

Unfortunately, I've been to many coffee shops where the coffee tasted much worse than what a modern fully automated machine can produce.

And perhaps you have to be more nuanced - when TV's first hit the market, a wide-spread concern among film-makers was that it would kill movie theaters. The fear was that people would now only watch movies in the comfort of their homes. That didn't happen back then, but it pretty much did with the combination of big, flat-screen TVs and streaming services.

Why did you go to coffee shops even though the coffee tasted worse? That's my point.

If you think people care about coffee quality you must never have been to a Starbucks.

Not about quality. They want the experience of going to a cafe where the coffee is made and served by humans. These cafes exist along side automated coffee.

If it was 90% as good and 50% of the price (no tipping hopefully) I’d do it.

I don’t quite understand this comment, is it sarcastic? Drip coffee is already pretty automatic. Heck, I’ve been places where you just buy the cup and pump the coffee thingy yourself.

Compared to my home setup, (manual flair espresso press), most coffee shop espresso machines are quite a bit more automated. But I don’t begrudge them that automation, their arms would get too sore. And nobody is paying me to manually press my lever.

It doesn’t seem like a neat mapping.

There are several robot cafes in major cities across the world

There are orders of magnitude more cafes where humans make and serve the coffee.

You said nobody. The presence of successful robotic coffee shops disproves that premise

I mean "nobody" in the statistical sense. The number of people going to robot cafes is a rounding error compared with real cafe attendance. The fact that there are robot cafes and everybody (statistically speaking) is still going to cafes, proves the point exactly.

Or you could just buy a machine and learn to make coffee?

Yes. Yet people still go to cafes where humans make the coffee.