Mr Trump:

We have seen the results of your "renovations" of the Oval Office, the Rose Garden, the East Wing of the White House, the South Lawn and the Lincoln Reflecting Pool.

Keep your tiny, money-grubbing paws off the Kennedy Center. You've already been told once.

We're all agreed this latest scandal should be called Operation Catering to Trump, right?

Well, it's 5PM, and I managed to get a little code done on my own project, but not too much. I'm still quite proud of what I did though.

New household budget spreadsheet? Totally ready for prime-time, Google-free.

That thread about being able to trace problems deeply through the stack, that was good culture work for #pronelang and more generally for the software industry. Pushing back against the exploiters demanding we lobotomize ourselves is praxis, if a bit self-serving in this case.

I invested a couple hours into reviewing something really cool and promising that @siwek has been working on, which really was a privilege. Effort-intense but rewarding. Won't say more than that, except... maybe follow this guy and pay attention for announcements at some point in the future.

All that and I still managed to get tests and implementation done for `prn_vm_pshblk` in Prone. A bit silly to get the push half done and the pop half not, but it should be quick work tomorrow/soon, lol.

RE: https://raphus.social/@MaddieM4/117094778861882281

I love how I managed to do this just long enough to get my new budget spreadsheet into a viable state, came back for "a quick check of my notifications," and ended up writing a nine-part thread explaining the depth of stupidity in an Elon tweet (which someone sensible had posted a screenshot of here, for critique). Sigh.

How's everybody else's Friday going? Good freaking god.

That's why Claude spends your tokens on so many source code comments. It's not for your benefit - heck, if anything, it gives you more power to cancel your plan and pick up where the robot left off. It's because a couple lines of /* reasoning */ before a function makes a better function, when all you have is a predictive hammer and all source code looks like a predictable nail. The extra token spend is a nice side benefit.

Even within the machine cult, nobody in their right mind would demolish this well-known load-bearing pillar. Which says something about what kind of mind Dr. Ket is in.

As the cherry on top? I write C and I look at the generated assembly on a regular basis. Not just to keep my skills sharp, but also because I'm often writing code with some assumptions/intent about the instructions I want to see in performance critical code, so I need to be able to form hypotheses and check them, which is a form of literacy. I don't want to be lost when reading `perf` output, so I put in the work!

9/9

This goes a little deeper and a shade more offensive, because of the second claim - that AI will generate binaries directly with no source code. This claim is mostly being made for sensational hypewank reasons, like many big claims Elon makes, but I also think he genuinely does not understand why source code is the thing allowing LLMs to cling to life as a technology that doesn't always entirely fuck up.

Source code makes such great training material because it's full of recorded intent, and can be cross-referenced with documentation that is ALSO full of recorded intent. Sloppers learned early that having the LLM "plan" first (fill the context window with prediction-generated intent material) improves code gen quality.

Binaries, as generated artifacts, make crappy training material, because the intent is all stripped out - quite aggressively on release builds. They are unconstrained by even the simulation of meaning. That's why nobody does this, even in Slopper Culture.

8/9

We know by repeated demonstration that LLM vendors prefer for their customers to be addicted. Helpless without the product. A little thing called inelastic demand, which we normally hear about in the context of the broken and extortionate USAmerican health care system. If you can't live without it, you'll pay for it at any price point. For LLMs in particular, which are notoriously expensive in both initial capital outlay and ongoing operational cost (with massive debt to pay back), there really isn't a business model other than taking off your customers' limbs and renting them back at unfathomable subscription prices.

Within that context, when a man like Elon says you don't need to know how what the source code means anymore, do you take him at his word? Do you turn off your backups and ride lean?

7/n

In fact, some of the documentation nudges you to learn these skills proactively, so you can optimize this or that, or better understand how systems work, because saving all your learning for the bad day is another thing that makes bad into worse. If you're not new to diving the layers under good conditions, you won't be totally lost when you have to in panic mode. There is a cultural value being placed intentionally on insulating yourself from nightmare scenarios through the power of learning, and by none of the automation layers writing off human readability.

So now we finally have to circle back to Elon, and I have to expose you to the cognitohazard of his tweets. Does a man who wants you to atrophy your skills at even reading high-level source code have your best interest at heart?

6/n

And on that kind of highly plausible, arguably inevitable bad day, you are going to have to say something like "yeah, I'm a Pythonista, but I'm going to have to read a bunch of C code today" and grow as a person while under time pressure. I have had to do this... quite a few times in my career. You do this stuff long enough, it's not an anomaly, it's a rite of passage. Like bad days more generally, you have to assume this is coming.

So, this is something I took for granted with Prone. It is assumed that 90% of the time you don't need to look at the generated C code, but in the remaining 10%, it should be readable, and possible to cross-reference with the Prone source code that was transformed. No minified webpack soup. I have less control over how easy it is to follow the white rabbit one layer lower into assembly, but that's thankfully documented by other people and a transferable skill. Prone also has great FFI because it's transpiled, so if you need more control, you can write specific parts in C.

5/n

But the thing about the work being done is, as a shoddy rule of thumb, it's all about equally as likely to have a bug that ruins your day. So a language that allows you to do a high work-to-word ratio is also concentrating risk (which you can see in the type systems of some languages, in how many types of exceptions or errors can come out of a deceptively simple function call).

Most of that work is not happening within the line of your app, it's on behalf of that line, right? Like, it's kind of a miracle if the bug is in your own code, although we make that miracle happen by collaborating to polish our upstream deps. Still, some percentage of the time, when things break, the only way to make sense of the breakage is to dive... and dive... and dive.

4/n

Now the double-edged sword of higher-level languages is that they have more going on. Not only more layers (but put a pin in that), you also have *will amplification* as a core reason to use them in the first place.

`conn = db.connect("psql://some-connection-string")`

Think about how much work you ask the computer to do in a line like that. That starts with parsing the connection string into some internal structure. There's probably going to be DNS involved, which itself is caches and a UDP stack and TCP fallback... look, I have a character limit, and you can play this out yourself.

The point is you invoked all that machinery with a pretty concise expression of what you wanted. That simple expression of will was expanded into an enormous fractal of detail, implied asks, on your behalf. That's beautiful and terrifying and productive. High level: You're Welcome! (tm)

3/n

So to have any longevity aspirations higher than fly-by-night Ponzi scheming, you need to internalize that the bad days will happen, and that you need to think about them and prepare for them *before* they happen. Ideally with as much lead time as you can muster. A bad day shouldn't be a last day.

Understanding software becomes REALLY IMPORTANT on a bad day. This is one of the issues with AI, see my thread the other day about the way it sabotages post-mortems, etc. You want to be able to narrow down on the offending code quickly, and easily see why it's doing what it's doing, and how that thing is wrong, even if there are layers and layers of secondary effects meshing poorly with each other as part of the pathology. Not being able to understand a bug that's taking down production is an existential risk. Addressing that up-front isn't optional. That includes the trickiest, most hellish of bugs.

EDIT: Post-mortem thread here! https://raphus.social/@MaddieM4/117082412027109766

2/n

Since Elon is spitting bad takes about AI again as part of blatant pump-n-dumping (a thing he has practice with after many exes), I'm going to take a second to talk about how the design of #pronelang went the exact opposite direction before it was even controversial.

Let's start with the actual "engineering compassionately" part of things first. In software, there's a lot of stuff you can get away with on a streak of good days. What matters for your long-term fate is how you handle *bad* days.

The most clear example of this is backups. You can have a very successful business, even holding other people's money, with no backups! ... for awhile. No sane person would recommend this approach, because we all understand the weight of that "for awhile."

1/n

I am so annoyed I can't really share screenshots (private info, c'est la vie), but I have future projections sorted out. I leave regions of blank rows in the transaction history between sections, so I can have a copy-pasteable month of expenses ready to go at all times.

This approach works because the core math heavy-lifter in this spreadsheet design is `SUMIF`, either used to get all transaction deltas <= a target date, or = it. Transactions can be spatially in any random order, and the analytical math doesn't care.

Well, today's budgeting was a bit late - didn't wake up early this morning - and I found myself so disgusted by the prospect of maintaining two budget spreadsheets that I just figured out a good workflow and finished my local one. It's entirely caught up. I retroactively know the exact dollar and cent amounts in my accounts on August 1st. I figured out date formatting so it would include the short weekday. I can focus on one account at a time and entirely transcribe history. All of this is going to pay off for incremental updates, too.

I'm still figuring out how best to do future projected expenses, but I have some ideas. Will pursue next.

I really gotta close the tab on Mastodon and get coding this morning. I can *not* believe how crotchety I feel right now. It's just a real firehose of disorienting foolishness being platformed on the socials today - generally as critique since I follow sensible people, but GO-LLY WILLICKERS! The world is not accurately represented by the most eye-catching ragebait that floats to the top of the bucket, I'm not getting fooled into pessimism here, but I do want to spend my morning in a better headspace than paying attention to ragebait affords.

I don't post enough 2010-ish era RuN RiOT, from back when I was heavily uploading to Soundcloud, and downloading stuff I liked. I still have a decent collection, and I was in that kind of mood today, so that's what I had pumping in my headphones as I biked around town.

You'll probably hear me highlight some other stuff from this era here and there - Time and Knock You Out were both contenders. The latter is very dear to my heart as someone who got out of an abusive relationship and eventually found herself as a dom - two totally opposite sides of the integration of love and venom. But I've had Street Soul Music stuck in my head since last night, it's the thing that prompted me to put this on today, and god damn does it make a nice soundtrack for hauling up a hill in second gear like it's nothing.

https://soundcloud.com/officialrunriot/subsource-street-soul-music-run-riot-remix

Not a bad bike ride today! It didn't end up raining yesterday, at least not that I noticed while indoors, but it sure rained early this morning before sunrise. It's so surreal to me to see this part of the country with reflective rain puddles on the ground. I haven't spent a full year here, haven't seen all the seasons - almost entirely summer, really - so I just kinda went nuts trying to capture the novel beauty of it all.

Related idea, and maybe an alternative metaphor: funerals are for the living. If there's something you want to make sure someone hears from you, you call them and tell them while they're alive.

Oh, while I'm remarking on symbolic mysticism tonight. It was common for many ancient cultures, the Greeks and Romans being easy examples for my own western mind to point to, to try to appease the natural forces of the world with sacrifices and offerings. It is very easy, and incorrect, to laugh at these people for drawing an epistemologically soggy line between burning some grapes on an altar, and your wine fermenting correctly and safety (harder than you'd think without modern sanitation and such! High stakes if it's a lot of your income!).

There are two things to point out. First, that these rituals were often about addressing a feeling of helplessness, and second, that the pain of sacrifice was an important ingredient for the gods (and humans) to take them seriously.

I think about that when I hear about carbon credits or gimmicky eco projects as the planet burns. If Poppy is to be believed, and Gaia says our time is up, these sacrifices are a desperate, symbolic apology to a deaf goddess.