Do you recall universities going after the MOOCs? I do. Do you think students benefit from smaller class sizes and more one on one time with professors? If you ask a professor what qualifies them do they say their research or their pedagogical skills? Do people pursue higher education opportunities at the same rate when no degree or certificate is offered? What happened to MOOCs anyway? If Harvard is so great for the nation, why not 10x its enrollment? I’ve probably thought about this much longer than you have.
This is absolutely not the case in my experience. I am building a very large embedded domain specific language for describing distributed systems. It looks like a small subset of Elixir, but with object-oriented syntax in a lot of places. (It’s called a choreography; there exist many other choreographic programming languages.)
Even though this programming language is absolutely nowhere in any large language model’s training set, they have so far done extremely well at extrapolating from the small set of examples I’ve given it when I need an agent to generate some tests or whatever for me.
Also of interest: Herbie analyzes your math expressions and helps you figure out where FP error accumulates. https://herbie.uwplse.org/demo/
We use floats as a trade-off between speed and accuracy. IEEE 754 is a very reasonable trade-off for a wide range of applications, but if you can figure out where you need to trade speed to get more accuracy with e.g. one of the methods mentioned here, Herbie's gotcha covered.
I remember seeing some research about switching between formats, but I don't have anything to cite right now.
I'm glad the OP acknowledges that you have to have to do the writing yourself—though they say this more as a means to avoid getting pegged as having used an LLM, whereas I see the problem as being cognitive surrender.
I actually like this as a method for getting over writers block. The second the AI starts spitting out words I know it will be wrong and dumb and so I might as well do it myself. Enough activation energy to get started
Ah, fellow Butterick fonts enjoyer—Butterick's fonts have spoiled me: compared to pretty much every other professional font I've seen, they're the cheapest and most conveniently licensed fonts out there.
Someone has already mentioned Matthew Butterick's fonts and his online "book" Practical Typography [1]—absolutely fantastic material there.
Some concrete suggestions from me:
- Fira Sans [2] is a lovely, legible sans-serif font that's free and incredibly easy-to-read. This would make a fine body font.
- Source Sans [3] is another good sans-serif that might be closer to your current font. It's about as readable as Fira, but it's a little less warm imo.
- Make your line length a little narrower and your line spacing (i.e. leading) just a hair wider—that will do wonders for readability.
Definitely check out Practical Typography for more tips from a real professional.
Hey! I'm doing great, thanks. Kimball's class was a lot of fun. Nice you "see" you again. (Can't tell who you are by your username—feel free to email me at the address on my blog if you want.)
No shade on wgrep, mind you—I used that for a long time and it's been one of my favorite tools. But now I just… don't need it. It's so nice being able to do consult-ripgrep -> export results to a buffer -> change to edit mode -> search-and-replace project-wide.
I love Elpaca! The built-in package management story has gotten so much better in the past 10 years, but Elpaca is so, so good. My personal config is kinda the antithesis of Bedrock—it's bloated, slow, and uses over 100 packages. Elpaca handles installing/updating/managing those like a charm, however.
I kept Elpaca out of Bedrock because I wanted a strictly built-ins-first experience, but if anyone asks what I use when they outgrow package.el, Elpaca is my first and only recommendation.
I've done use-package, straight, quelpa, tried elpaca a few years back when the hype grew and it was a buggy mess, back to use-package when it was merged into core. I'm tired boss. There's a little too much churn I feel these days.
I dislike the default package management system, but until a better one is merged into core, I'll keep updating my packages manually once a year when I remember.
Every Emacs user eventually finds their rock bottom, er, Bedrock :D
Kidding kidding... Cool project, thanks for sharing and kind of validating the stuff I ended up doing [0]. Hooray, use-package! That meandering (floundering?) culminated in my Emacs, which is a single `init.el file` (hooray, use-package): https://github.com/adityaathalye/dotemacs
[0] The blow-by-blow of which is documented in this excessively long blog post series I ended up writing as I was..., well, the title says it all;
The linked post is the first in the series, and it enumerates what features / capabilities I was going for, and the key references I used while figuring out the configuration, from scratch.
> Students can and will learn better with ai “professors” than they do now.
No, that’s not true. You have no evidence to suggest that.
> The problem is that higher education is not about learning ultimately.
It is, actually, and many institutions do a good job of this. Some don’t, but they’re not all just degree mills.
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