dabeaz

dabeaz, 22 days ago to random

If you're not writing bad code, you're not learning anything.

dabeaz, 26 days ago to random

I sometimes wonder if I should teach a project course (like raft or compilers) where you don't even know what programming language will be used until you show up. That would certainly be one way to make things even more exciting.

dabeaz, 25 days ago to random

As far as I can tell, the primary use of RAII is to sound smart.

dabeaz, 27 days ago to random

Kid: "How do I play a blues solo?"

Me: "Play almost nothing."

AlSweigart, 12 days ago to random

Silly project idea: Build a robot to move chess pieces around a board and take photos of common configurations, then open it to let people play chess that shows a photographed board instead of computer graphics. I'd build up a cache of openings, and have the robot take more photos as needed.

dabeaz, 30 days ago to random

Random thought: Something sort of like cicadas, but not cicadas. Instead, squirrels.

dabeaz, 21 days ago to random

Clearly I should stop digging.

foone, 9 days ago to random

I could go down the long rabbithole of figuring out how to call g*mp's image manipulation tools from a commandline or API, or getting imagemagick installed on this PC and figuring out how to port it over there...

or I could be silly and take advantage of the fact that I'm applying gamma ramps to an 8-bit greyscale image. What's the difference between the "before" and "after" images? a different palette.

AlSweigart, 13 days ago to random

If you could lay out bad statistics end to end, they would stretch across the Milky Way Galaxy over a million times.

dabeaz, 14 days ago to random

I feel like this Mission Impossible movie would be a lot more interesting if they were trying to do something like send a fax of some document stored on an old Zip drive or some shit.

dabeaz, 13 days ago to random

I honestly don't know if SICP has a place in the modern world of programming, but I still like it and I have a few spots in my July course if you want to warp your brain. I teach it in Scheme (via Racket). https://www.dabeaz.com/sicp.html.

dabeaz, 18 days ago to random

Trying to think about why I rather enjoyed the Furiosa Mad Max movie as opposed to all of the hate I had towards the Dune movie. Maybe it's the fact that Mad Max just leaned into it and said "let's actually not explain the insanity of what's happening by making it even more insane" whereas Dune tried to explain what was happening with a bunch of inaudible whispering and mystical mumble jumble. Should have just had war rigs battling sandworms or something...

dabeaz, 29 days ago to random

Thought: "Superstition" would be a good name for a programming language.

dabeaz, 14 days ago to random

Getting ready for the sixth Raft course of the year. Pondering what kind of different thing I'll attempt in this go-round. I often experiment with "boundaries" in this course--basically thinking about where to put various bits of functionality in relation to the greater whole.

dabeaz, 28 days ago to random

Recovering from last week's compilers course, working on various improvements. I've been experimenting with the whole approach of writing a "nanopass" compiler (basically, having a lot of very small compiler phases).

I'm struck by how much this approach really leans into issues of the type-system, but with respect to the implementation of the compiler itself. Wasn't fully anticipating the scale of it, but it's great.

dabeaz, 24 days ago to random

The end of an era tomorrow. Every year, the kids' K-8 school has had every grade from 1st grade up run a 5K at the end of the year. I'm no runner, but so far as I can tell, I might be the only parent to have run/walked it every year for 10 years in a row. Youngest kid graduates out next week so that's it!

dabeaz, 20 days ago to random

Thought: It'd be kind of interesting if your editor made some kind of droning sound, the intensity of which was proportional to the number of bugs present.

dabeaz, 9 days ago to random

I don't know if dependency avoidance is the name of a design pattern, but it sounds like it could be.

dabeaz, 9 days ago to random

Took a different implementation/testing approach in this week's Raft course and managed to surface a coding bug I've probably made about 20 times in the past without even knowing it. Needless to say, I'm going to call this a huge success.

dabeaz, 13 days ago to random

Thought: It'd be kind of interesting if cicadas and red-wing blackbirds could mate.

dabeaz, 10 days ago to random

Thought: After AI has finished destroying all information on the internet, the owners of all of those Time-Life books are going to be sitting pretty.

dabeaz, 9 days ago to random

Still super geeked out about unintentionally writing a test that unearthed a previously unknown bug in my Raft implementation from last week's course. I went back through all of my GitHub repos and I have made a similar (or other) mistake in this one line of code at least 23 times in a row (probably more). I've very likely made it in every implementation up to now.

Attention to small details, indeed.

And fuzzing for the win.