In this case, we don't have good data representations for code which produces or consumes structured data, where the structure of that data changes over time. We have some pieces figured out for certain domains, such as database schemas, but we do not have a "theory-of-everything" for enforcing types/structure across all domains of our systems. The domain addressed by GraphQL, HTTP APIs, is another instance of this same problem.
There are experimental systems like Unison that keep old versions of your code alive as data, which are fascinating solutions to the underlying problem.
Did you read the article? The issue isn’t code vs. data, it’s code vs. system state. The system can be in states not model-able by code, e.g. versions 1 and 2 of a piece of software running concurrently. Other examples I can think of are things like nodes going down, database consistency, etc.
Technically, not "not model-able" but "not modeled". As in, the effort was not done, and is easy to omit. And doing it in the general case is a lot of work, hence the expand-contract and only-two-versions designs.
I wonder what would have happened if he just let them finish; seems like he asked them to deliver $something immediately, and all they had was an outline. I also can’t help but feel the video is sped up quite a bit.
> If countless people are “using it wrong” then maybe there’s something wrong with the tool.
Not really. Every tool in existence has people that use it incorrectly. The fact that countless people find value in the tool means it probably is valuable.
We know. But it's a problem because alcohol is one of the most dangerous and damaging drugs. It's basically just society grandfathering it in and all of us living in a state of cognitive dissonance.
re: the article itself, they concentrate only on brain regions which have high density of CB1 expression and that's reasonable. But CB1 is not the only CNS cannabinoid receptor (CB2 mostly expressed peripherally). There's also GPR55 which is activated by cannabinoids like THC. A little issue which could be addressed in future work.
I've gone to numerous tasting events where I spit out all of the wine. There may be hundreds of bottles being poured at a trade show and you can't really taste more than a handful if you are swallowing.
Patently false on both counts. There is always some level of intoxication and many people use pot to manage anxiety, pain, nausea and lack of appetite, while avoiding the high.
Wittgenstein has an example, imagine you are on a construction site and someone says 'Slab!'
Do they mean 'That is a slab.' or 'Hand me that slab.'?
Context matters. There is no correct answer. There are no metaphysical truth particles that shake 'True!'. Expressivism, how you feel about the statement, is going to decide what you think.
Anyway, I used to intentionally say things like "I love drugs, although its specifically Caffeine."
Knowledge is being aware of the analogy of tomatoes not being treated like fruits even though they technically are.
Wisdom is understanding that if there was legislation on the matter, and people who ate, produced, or sold non-tomato fruits were hunted and deprived of their freedoms by the state on the basis that fruits are bad for society, then you would likely see similar frustrations expressed about an article title that includes the phrase "tomatoes and fruits" to distinguish them.
Alcohol in moderation is relaxing. Most drugs, OTOH, when used at the doses that make them attractive to recreational drug users, impair reason, and impairing reason is not just stupid, but immoral. We can debate the particular methods by which the state regulates or otherwise deals with drug use, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the criminalization of such drugs as such. No one has a right to take drugs (there is no right to immorality). This may seem alien to a culture whose emaciated understanding of morality is exhausted by the concept of consent. The law is a teacher, and it is good to teach people that recreational drug use (and drunkenness) is a bad thing. Like all immorality, it is an insult to one's dignity and humanity.
We can tolerate the impairment of reason as a proportionate side effect [0] (for instance, high doses of morphine given to terminally ill patients in extreme pain), but this is not recreational use.
It really depends on how well your home is insulated. Heat pumps don’t work well on old, poorly insulated houses in cold climates. If they can keep up, which is a big if, the price of electricity generally dwarfs natural gas, even if the heat pump is running at 250-300% efficiency.
> Heat pumps don’t work well on old, poorly insulated houses in cold climates. If they can keep up, which is a big if, the price of electricity generally dwarfs natural gas, even if the heat pump is running at 250-300% efficiency.
I've got a 1930s semi-detached house (UK, north of England) - heated solely by a ASHP for both heating and hot water.
Our Seasonal Coefficient of Performance is currently 3.47 (347% efficient) - even if limit that to just last month (coldest month of the winter so far in the UK) our COP was 3.25 (325% efficiency).
Roughly speaking if you can achieve a COP over 3.2x in the UK it should be roughly on a par with gas, assuming you go 'gas free' (i.e. you can make the saving on the gas standing charge).
Personally we're running at ~£200 annual saving vs. my estimate of what costs would be for equivalent gas boiler - that's thanks in part to being able to do all our hot-water heating at night rates.
House wise - we don't have cavity wall insulation, have 15+ year old double-glazing and probably should have more insulation in the loft (it fills the rafters but I think these days that's considered not enough).
Also with changes to ECO (energy company obligations) and RO (renewables obligations) the differential between gas and electric will reduce further
Anyhoo - added my example to show that ASHP can work perfectly fine in old, poorly insulated homes in (moderately) cold climates.
The issue with poorly insulated houses in cold climates is not about efficiency. The issue is that the thaw cycle makes it impossible to actually come up to temp because too much heat is lost during thawing. Most of the UK isn’t really considered “cold”, which is probably why you don’t have this issue.
Yeah the UK isn't really very 'cold', but figured would include my example to show that not a problem in UK-equivalent of cold climates.
From a quick skim around it appears ASHPs can continue to work at -20c even -30c IF they are units that were designed for cold climate operation, albeit they can't secure the same SCOP/efficiency as they can with warmer temps.
It also looks like homes in these colder areas will often install the ASHP + have some form of additional heating as a back-up (e.g. electric heating) to compensate for the limitations of the ASHP in the coldest weather.
It's not really correct to say that heat pumps don't work well on old, poorly insulated houses in cold climates. That it's a heat pump is not the issue, that it's cold is not the issue, the problem is only that with poor or no insulation in a cold climate you'll need a huge heater (say, 10-15kW just for the living room). And domestic heat pumps are not designed for that range. If you could get one that big then it would work very well indeed.
If you have a poorly insulated house then the fix is to insulate it, which is what a lot of people are doing around here, with very hold houses. My house is less than 60 years old and very well insulated for the time, and it holds up even today - it's always warm, with the heat pump not even close to its max power.
The issue with “just” insulating your home is that many homes weren’t designed with insulation in mind and thus it’s not a straightforward proposition.
For instance, masonry was a common building material and that is not easy to insulate. You need to add many inches of insulation on either the outside or the inside, both of which have complications.
Even in a basic stick framed house, you’re still talking about taking down all the exterior walls, likely involving removing plaster and replacing it with drywall. Plaster has a number of nice properties, so it’s sad to remove. And that’s not to mention the price of this work.
Finally, roofs need special consideration. Most roofs today need to be properly vented, which was not as much of a consideration when the houses naturally breathed. Venting today is often done with soffit vents. Yet on historic houses, soffits are typically one of the nicer details. It’s not trivial or cheap to install venting in such cases.
To clarify my parent post: My house is also 7 (now 8) years old and has 6 inch (15cm) walls with air-tight walls. We built with solar, which got the cost of electricity down to an estimated 4-5 cents per kilowatt hour.
At that price, resistive heating cost about as much as what I paid for gas at my old house.
I went with a heat pump to hedge the bet. (I was also pointed away from geothermal.)
If the insulation wasn't as good, or electricity more expensive, I would have used a different heat source. I was looking at pellet furnaces at the time, but never seriously got into the research before the solar proposal came in.
I agree it will hold back new technologies, but, at the same time, I'm not sure what the value add of new technologies will be going forward. Often, as is the case with git vs. jj, the value add of a new technology is mostly ergonomic. As AI becomes more ingrained in the development flow, engineers won't engage with the underlying tech directly, and so ergonomic benefits will be diminished. New technologies that emerge will need to provide benefits to AI-agents, not to engineers. Should such a technology emerge, agent developers will likely adopt it.
For this reason, programming languages, at least how we understand them today, have reached a terminal state. I could easily make a new language now, especially with the help of Claude Code et al, but there would never be any reason for any other engineer to use it.
I'm quite surprised to hear that "programming languages have reached a terminal state": there are (imo) at least four in-progress movements in the industry right now:
Even if LLMs become capable of writing all code, I think there's a good chance that we'd want those LLMs writing code in a language with memory safety and one amenable to some sort of verification.
I didn’t quite mean that programming languages have reached their terminal state, although I understand how my comment was interpreted like that. I meant that programming languages, as we known them today, have reached a terminal state.
Using Rust as an example: Rust aims to provide memory safety at the expensive of developer ergonomics. Personally, I shy away from Rust because I don’t like fighting the borrow checker.
However, with AI agents, Rust could make a lot more sense. Strict errors at compile time are helpful to an agent, which is more than happy to smash its head against the wall until it reaches a working solution.
Following this logic, we could see languages develop that are extremely impractical for humans to use yet provide benefits like memory safety or correctness. But these languages might not look anything like the languages we’re currently used to.
Even if you're not authoring changes as much, change management is likely still to be a very useful activity for a long while. Also note that not everyone is using AI today, and many that do only use it as glorified auto complete. It will take many more years for it's adoption to put us in a situation like your describing, why halt progress in the meantime? My personal productivity increased greatly by switching to jj, perhaps more than adding Gemini CLI to my workflow. I can more confidently work on several changes in parallel while waiting on things like code review. This was possible before but rebasing it and dealing with merge conflicts tended to limit me from doing it beyond a handful of commits. Now I can have 20+ outstanding commits (largely with no interdependencies) and not feel like I'm paying much management overhead while doing so. I can also get them reviewed in parallel more easily.
> For this reason, programming languages, at least how we understand them today, have reached a terminal state. I could easily make a new language now, especially with the help of Claude Code et al, but there would never be any reason for any other engineer to use it.
This is an interesting opinion.
I feel we are nowhere near the terminal state for programming languages. Just as we didn't stop inventing math after arithmetic, we will always need to invent higher abstractions to help us reason beyond what is concrete (for example, imaginary numbers). A lot of electrical engineering wouldn't be possible to reason about without imaginary numbers. So new higher abstractions -- always necessary, in my opinion.
That said, I feel your finer point resonates -- about how new languages might not need to be constrained to the limitations of human ergonomics. In fact, this opens up new space of languages that can transcend human intuition because they are not written for humans to comprehend (yet are provably "correct").
As engineers, we care about human intuition because we are concerned about failure modes. But what if we could evolve along a more theoretical direction, similar to the one Haskell took? Haskell is basically "executable category theory" with some allowances for humans. Even with those tradeoffs, Haskell remains hard for most humans to write, but what if we could create a better Haskell?
Then farther along, what if we created a LEAN-adjacent language, not for mathematical proofs, but for writing programs? We could throw in formal methods (TLA+) type thinking. Today formal methods give you a correctness proof, but are disconnected to implementation (AWS uses TLA+ for modeling distributed systems, but the final code was not generated from TLA+, so there's disconnect). What if one day we can write a spec, and it generates a TLA+ proof, which we can then use to generate code?
In this world, the code generator is simply a compiler -- from mathematically rigorous spec to machine code.
(that said, I have to check myself. I wonder what this would look like in a world full of exceptions, corner cases, and ambiguities that cannot be modeled well? Tukey's warning comes to mind: "Far better an approximate answer to the right question, than an exact answer to the wrong question")
Ah yes, the inevitable future where the only way we'll know to interact with the machine is through persuading a capricious LLM. We'll spend our days reciting litanies to the machine spirits like in 40k.
Praise and glory be to the Agentic gods. Accept this markdown file and bless this wretched body of flesh and bone with the light of working code. Long live the OpenssAIah
What is the lesson in the anecdote about film students? To me, it’s that people like the idea of studying film more than they like actually studying film. I fail to see the connection to social media or AI.
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