beka valentine

trans dyke hacking on @[email protected] . she/her (xey/xem or ey/em if you're bored with binaries); no child zone, 18+ only 

current twitter handle: @[email protected] 

former twitter handles: @beka_valentine @illegally_beka

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Last Notes

2026-08-20 21:39:06 GMT

@nprofile…t47w in relistening to the repenning episode and i think you'd enjoy/hate these two things:
the first is magic haskeller (https://nautilus.cs.miyazaki-u.ac.jp/~skata/MagicHaskeller.html), which lets you do exploratory example driven programming (the live demo in the site no longer works, sadly)
the second is exemplar, which generates example input output pairs for a haskell function of your choosing https://github.com/matt-noonan/exemplar/tree/master

2026-08-17 02:37:02 GMT

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@nprofile…t47w i think he gave some talks a few years ago about his design philosophy that also discusses his views in more precise terms. i'll try to find them
its kind of difficult to properly suggest this for a FOC topic tho because its 1) videos, and 2) many of them lol

2026-08-16 22:09:41 GMT

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@nprofile…t47w i'd take this further in a way that relates to your comments about exploring economic policy, and say that computers as a medium allow people to explore possibilities of their own choosing in a way that the real world can't, namely, without consequence
games, simulations, pseudonymity, all offer the user a way of exploring a possibility, to kind of manifest an imagination, but not purely imagination because it can be systemically constrained to match some expectations about the world
so people can express and explore and learn in a way that is safe, compared to the real world
and this to mean is quite uniquely computer-y, and i think is fundamental to the immersive sims that Spector makes, even if he's only consciously cued in on the part where players can express themselves. it's all there in the good ImSims, and is imo the core distinctiveness to computers

2026-08-16 22:05:51 GMT

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@nprofile…t47w Spector has very strong opinions on what makes computer games as a medium distinctive. im not sure he talks about it in the postmortem tho. his take is that computers offer something quite unique compared to films or novels, in that computer games let you tell a story where the player also participates in making the story
you can't really make a film where the viewer is involved somehow, not meaningful. but with a computer game, the player can in principle imbue their character with a bit of themselves, and express their views, ideas, morals, politics, etc. through their actions, which contribute to how the story unfolds, so that their experience of the game is uniquely theirs in a way that no movie viewing can be

2026-08-16 22:02:28 GMT

@nprofile…t47w relistening to the Elephant in the Room ep, and really thinking a relevant topic is Warren Spector's take on video games
im not sure I can point to any one thing that's relevant here, but maybe his Deus Ex Post Mortem from GDC 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tffX3VljTtI

2026-08-12 02:54:19 GMT

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@nprofile…t8cz @nprofile…kj4x what i can glean from this is not shocking, unfortunately

2026-08-12 02:39:50 GMT

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@nprofile…t8cz @nprofile…kj4x it's hard to make heads or tails of this but it looks like a fairly typical attempt at ontology work

2026-08-12 01:56:41 GMT

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@nprofile…t8cz @nprofile…kj4x absolutely!

2026-08-12 01:54:55 GMT

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@nprofile…t8cz @nprofile…kj4x i know a small amount about NASA's standards for software, but I know absolutely nothing about ESA's, so maybe ESA is doing something I would consider to be engineering, but I doubt it on the grounds that I think we as a species do not actually know what it would for real
i would be shocked to find that ESA has developed a discipline and body of research wholly divorced from the rest of the software world

2026-08-12 00:12:57 GMT

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@nprofile…c9kz i mean C's been around since the 1970s, there's been plenty of time for serious tools to develop that let us do this kind of engineering level tradeoff and analysis stuff, right?
SURELY we're not all just doing this in our heads and in comments
oh, it doesn't exist?
oh, often we're not EVEN doing in our heads and comments, we're just sort of waiting until its a problem and then MAYBE doing it when we're desperate to figure out why its hanging?? oh.

2026-08-12 00:09:17 GMT

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@nprofile…c9kz SURELY i should be able to compile with -Wcomplex and have it warn me when any O(n^3) or larger function is used
SURELY i should be able to use -Wlargeconstantfactors and have it warn me when my nice little O(log n) function actually has enormous constant factors that make it useless on the most likely range of inputs
SURELY
right?

2026-08-11 23:51:31 GMT

imagine saying you're a certified scrum master and then expecting people to take your opinions on engineering serious lol

2026-08-11 23:22:43 GMT

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@nprofile…kj4x i think that NASA methodology has the best shot at being considered actual engineering but I do think that there is a debate to be had there
and I think it's obvioiusly the case that the stuff people do at random tech companies is not even remotely similar to what NASA does and is just very definitely not engineering

2026-08-11 19:27:46 GMT

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and i think that the main reason Vibe Coding is such a hot thing right now among professional coders, aside from like, you know, corporate mandates, is that we never actually developed real Software Engineering, and so the weight of not knowing what you're doing is heavy

2026-08-11 19:26:15 GMT

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but if we DO want to ACTUALLY have a discipline of Software Engineering, then there's a lot of work that has to happen to develop the techniques and tools

2026-08-11 19:25:14 GMT

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its also important to understand that im not saying that we need actual engineering levels of work for software
that's a separate thing, and i think is very debatable!
i think for a lot of things, you just dont need it, its fine to just be a programmer not an engineer

2026-08-11 19:16:26 GMT

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not being engineering is not some insult, but a lot of programmers like to elevate themselves and stroke their egos. calling yourself a Software Engineer makes you feel good and smart
but real engineers would be horrified by the suggestion of Vibe Engineering a bridge or engine

2026-08-11 19:08:28 GMT

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there's entire episodes of coding podcasts like Greater Than Code that talk about the history of the change, and how radically different things are now compared to just a short time ago!
we're moving kind of in the right direction maybe, MAYBE, but its not engineering YET

2026-08-11 19:06:45 GMT

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even the idea of unit testing code as we do today is quite new, since about 2010 maybe a little earlier
it used to be that programmers didn't even really write the tests themselves, they left that to QA teams. this was an entire revolution in the software world!

2026-08-11 19:04:58 GMT

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and its not our fault, because there is no education you can get anywhere that will teach you how to do real engineering
the absolute closest you will ever get in the standard academic CS track is doing complexity analysis, which is then rarely if ever used

2026-08-11 18:58:43 GMT

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you may make those guesses based on years and years of experience, but there is little explicit knowledge that goes into design choices
engineers, by contrast, are highly skilled professionals who make active use of explicit knowledge backed by decades and centuries of science

2026-08-11 18:53:41 GMT

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you dont know what works, you don't know why it works, you have a bunch of rules of thumb but no principles to guy your decisions, and no techniques to deploy on paper to arrive at conclusions
you make guesses and you check them

2026-08-11 18:52:45 GMT

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imagine trying to design a mechanism, or a circuit, or a bridge and doing it by hunch and by test and nothing else
no calculations, no specifications, just make some hunch of a design, test it, then iterate
that's what people did before engineering developed historically

2026-08-11 18:50:50 GMT

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a lot of folx will point to tests as an example of engineering but anyone who knows anything about actual engineering knows that tests are quality control, as a practice of manufacturing, not engineering
engineering happens long before you test

2026-08-11 17:20:47 GMT

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agile fits VERY WELL with vibe coding. they're made for each other. just crank stuff out in response to customer desires, don't worry about code quality, all that matters is what the customer's saying in feedback. if they cant see a problem, there is no problem

2026-08-11 17:19:40 GMT

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there's a whole host of reasons for this absence in software, but one recent contributing factor in the rise of vibe coding, I believe, is the obsession with ~agile~
which is both widely misunderstood, widely misused, and widely pushed in industry

2026-08-11 17:18:12 GMT

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there are a few places where the practices get closer to what one might call engineering, but even then it's rather unlike most engineering
NASA's methodology, for instance, is not comparable to any other form of engineering

2026-08-11 17:17:00 GMT

vibe coding has become such a popular thing, even among programmers, because most people who write software never actually learned how to _engineer_ software
and to be fair, no one really knows how to do that. the skills and techniques were never really developed anywhere

2026-08-07 07:46:37 GMT

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if i decide to use one tho, its gonna be e16, so that i can run some absolutely whacked out retro themes

2026-07-07 16:08:25 GMT

you used to be able to sort youtube videos by age, but not anymore
i guess people were using it to avoid watching AI trash and they didn't like that

2026-07-06 18:19:13 GMT

age verification laws being written in a way that impacts social media websites specifically, including federated ones, and basically has no impact on peer to peer systems, is pretty fantastic, assuming people pick up the slack and build p2p alternatives

2026-07-04 22:46:54 GMT

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@nprofile…wmy9 its not that its not the point. it's that you've misunderstood what i was saying.

2026-07-04 22:42:31 GMT

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@nprofile…wmy9 you've definitely missed the point if youre thinking like this about what i said

2026-07-04 18:25:17 GMT

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@nprofile…wmy9 completely not understanding anything i said

2026-07-03 07:22:24 GMT

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@nprofile…v2v2 indeed. escaping this tendency requires thinking consciously about how software can easily become a trap, and how replicating trap software is just making another trap

2026-07-03 04:28:02 GMT

moonfall was such a stupid movie omg
still better than section 31

2026-07-03 00:41:13 GMT

almost every programming language has a way to compute new terms/expressions
afaik none have a way to compute new statements
and many people hack solutions to this. this is quite common in JS actually

2026-07-01 18:27:57 GMT

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and while you might use FreeCAD and then manage to export to some other program successful, you now have to learn that other program
whereas, when you pick up a shitty Bic pen to do your drafting, constructing tangent circles is the same geometry Euclid was using 2500 years ago

2026-07-01 18:26:37 GMT

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the most open source un-corporate un-malicious-intent CAD programs out there, like FreeCAD, are VERY convenient but also in a way completely incapable of replicating the end-user-power of pen and paper

2026-07-01 18:24:55 GMT

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or even Freecad
sure you MIGHT technically IN THEORY be able to export files that other programs MIGHT in THEORY be able to make use of
but in practice, you're stuck in that one program unless you want to completely re-implement the design

2026-07-01 18:23:37 GMT

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you draw a line on a document using an Esterbrook pen and anyone can read it, and if you need to modify the document later, you can use shitty Bic ballpoint for all anyone cares!
now try doing that with a design made in Fusion 360

2026-07-01 18:21:40 GMT

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i mean like, take a completely out of left field example: drafting/CAD
now, CAD is an absolute boon, don't get me wrong!
but no drafter 100 years ago was trained to only use Esterbrook dip pens and stuck using them for all their projects once they used it once

2026-07-01 18:18:20 GMT

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to some degree this is a uniquely software-driven problem, because software is SO powerful and SO capable, that it's capable of supplementing what used to be whole personal skillsets while ALSO being capable of preventing you from leaving the software behind

2026-07-01 18:16:42 GMT

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as the support for doing the learning, skill development, and so forth has vanished, people have come more and more to accept tools that completely paper over their lack of skills, and the lack of support
tools which "solve the problem" in a way that make their users worse off

2026-07-01 18:13:42 GMT

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... you just pay SquareSpace-like companies to get something good enough
few people use skills and tools to augment their programming to get more efficiency, reduce boiler plate, etc. they just ask an LLM to do it

2026-07-01 18:11:53 GMT

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and so lots and lots of things which COULD be done are simply replaced by things that mask over the problem
few people write their own software these days, you just buy a million apps until you find one that suffices
few people make their own websites these days, ...

2026-07-01 18:10:18 GMT

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the broad trend here in all of this is that there's a general lower regard for things that make users more capable and more skilled
from the person who isn't a programmer, to the programmer who isn't a language dev, the things that cause them frustrations go ignored

2026-07-01 17:54:56 GMT

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but instead of making languages more useful, there's a non-stop stream of trash
i mean, consider Go, a language that came out in 2009, and which ignores around 41 years of language design progress and research, to create a thin reimplementation of Algol 68

2026-07-01 17:52:50 GMT

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but, well.. people have been talking about Boilerplate Code since at LEAST 1981, with a popularization happening in 1990
the programming world has known about boilerplate for a while, and had ample opportunity to try to address it. there are even some great ideas!

2026-07-01 17:49:41 GMT

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lets consider a common explanation for what professional coders use LLMs for: boiler plate
i often hear coders say "oh yeah, LLMs suck overall, but they're REALLY GOOD for boilerplate"
and this is pretty true!

2026-07-01 17:48:01 GMT

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what about more professional uses of LLMs tho? is this ALSO true in the context of professional programmers?
i think so!

2026-07-01 17:44:41 GMT

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making a website is not just about making some HTML and CSS and JavaScript
you have to find hosting, a domain name, etc.
Apple had easy solutions with iCloud, but everyone else making these tools just said nah that's ok
and so web-based complete solutions took over

2026-07-01 17:43:29 GMT

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partially its because they were often just kind of terrible to begin with, and didn't help people become more capable web programmers
and partially its because the people behind these apps didn't want to address the problem of how to make the whole problem easier

2026-07-01 17:41:58 GMT

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or take the various WYSIWYG webpage making programs out there. there's a long history of them producing terrible code, except for a handful of them. iWeb was pretty decent IMO
but as blog engines and then various SquareSpace-like web apps became popular, these apps REALLY faded

2026-07-01 17:30:10 GMT

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very little consideration has been given toward ensuring that end users can relatively easily take up the task of programming their own computers. historically, more attention was given to this, in fact

2026-07-01 17:29:41 GMT

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in particular, there are a lot of software-related skills which were either never properly developed into novice-friendly forms, or which were left to languish and complexity and die over the last 20 years as the idea of the novice ceased to be widely recognized as real

2026-07-01 17:29:33 GMT

personally i'm ok with AI techniques being less well known but there's a deeper thing going on here which is far more important IMO, because it's also partially why LLMs have taken over
== this thread is in response to this tweet: ==
https://x.com/krismicinski/status/2072303376629444764

2026-06-28 04:12:44 GMT

if the co-CEO of Mullvad is donating money to far right whack jobs, can you really trust that the company isn't storing your activity? what trust can you have when your VPN activity data is a great weapon for the right wing? none.
https://det.social/@lostgen/116820546568940358

2026-06-19 20:48:45 GMT

listening to a book on Champollion's work on the Rosetta Stone and the narrator seems kind of inappropriate. he lacks the necessary literacy to read it and no one helped fix this problem. dude doesn't even know that ms/mss means manuscript(s) and instead reads it as "em ess ess"

2026-06-01 05:30:25 GMT

pasta with margin and adobo or jamaican curry powder is way better than pasta with sauce tbh

2026-05-31 01:50:38 GMT

@nprofile…t47w do you use Godot at all btw? not sure if i've mentioned it before. the entire IDE is just a godot "game". im not sure if you can modify the base IDE itself while its running but you can at least write new things and glue them on while its running

2026-05-31 01:48:36 GMT

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@nprofile…t47w @nprofile…emd4 the whole book is about the PLATO computer system, but the first few chapters are about the origin of the idea and its early implementation, specifically in behaviorist education theory. a TLDR for that is that one of the driving principles of PLATO was that it must be possible to give feedback to users in under 0.1 seconds, and they went to great lengths to make this possible, including inventing the plasma display

2026-05-30 18:06:17 GMT

@nprofile…t47w @nprofile…emd4 i feel like FoC would really enjoy the early chapters of The Friendly Orange Glow, even if it's not deeply related to FoC specifically

2026-05-26 17:02:58 GMT

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@nprofile…hyh5 ?

2026-05-26 16:54:10 GMT

sure, you complain about the AI cliche of "Not X, but Y"
but do you complain about "No X, just Y"?

2026-05-25 21:26:42 GMT

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and the cost of recycling is almost always born by local governments who pay for trash and recycling
those governments are themselves often quite cash strapped, and so they too want to avoid paying for things if they can
and so plastic typically does not get recycled

2026-05-24 03:22:48 GMT

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@nprofile…t47w you know, i had a dream like 4 days ago that you came out as trans and that motivated me to start listening the computer-is-a-feeling episode, so now im wondering if im fucking prophetic or what

2026-05-22 20:39:37 GMT

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@nprofile…ytg3 i mean, gravity is definitely not a social construct

2026-05-22 18:40:31 GMT

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gravity? thats real, we see it and feel it every day here, we witness it ourselves.
we do not see and feel and witness that gravity moves the heavens, we merely guess that it does, and its a great fucking guess

2026-05-22 18:39:28 GMT

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but alas, we've never seen the little angels pushing things, and the sameness of causes is not fact or observation, it's thesis, hypothesis, guess
its a damn good guess too, it works really well, but its guess, not observation

2026-05-22 18:38:26 GMT

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if thats how the world worked, we MIGHT have been able to observe the little angels pushing all the things, and then the statement "objects fall for the same reason planets move in circles" would not be a THESIS at all, it would be OBSERVATION, it would be FACT

2026-05-22 18:37:19 GMT

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we might well have been able to squint REALLY HARD and see the little angels pushing things!
and if we had built ships to the sky and squinted really hard up there, we could see the little angels pushing planets
who knows!

2026-05-22 18:36:10 GMT

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but could it have been an observation? well sure
i mean, suppose that people were right, that the WHY was answered with "little angels push things around"
so the planets move in circles because little angels push them
objects fall because little angels push them

2026-05-22 18:35:09 GMT

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now that is NOT an observation, it's NOT plain fact we see with our eyes, it's NOT a phenomenon in the same sense as gravity is
its a GUESS that works really well

2026-05-22 18:33:50 GMT

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gravity was still an observed FACT, not a thesis
the THESIS was that gravity was ALSO (partially) responsible for the circular motions of the objects in the sky

2026-05-22 18:32:49 GMT

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Newton did not provide an answer to the WHY question, not a complete answer
he just said "I don't know WHY, but I do propose that it's the same why for both, and here's how you get circular motion with gravity as we've observed it on earth"

2026-05-22 18:31:32 GMT

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when you ask "Why does the moon travel around the earth in a circle?"
you have no reason, a priori, to believe that the answer should be the same as the answer to why objects fall to the ground, ie why objects have gravity

2026-05-22 18:30:43 GMT

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it is not by any means OBVIOUS or OBSERVED with your eyes by just LOOKING that the circular motion of objects in the sky has the same origin as the obvious and eye-observed falling of objects on earth

2026-05-22 18:29:20 GMT

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quite the contrary, you say the object has a tendency to exist in the sky, away from the earth, and to move about the sky in circular ways around and around but never falling to earth

2026-05-22 18:28:20 GMT

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that was not by any means an observation, quite the contrary it was a rejection of an observation
when you look at an object in the sky, like the sun, the moon, planets, stars
you do not say "this object has a tendency to fall to the earth, this object has gravity"

2026-05-22 18:27:15 GMT

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the new THESIS that Newton gave us, which was not an observation but an attempt at answering a question, was the THESIS that the falling of objects on earth, and the non-falling circular motion of objects that are out in the sky, are actually the SAME THING

2026-05-22 18:26:15 GMT

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Newton's descriptions of gravity were great. the mathematics was great. they did not change the FACTS of gravity as we see it with our eyes, they just gave us a different tools
Newton did provide us with a new THESIS tho, not just a description

2026-05-22 18:24:47 GMT

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and around the same time as Newton you had other folx, like Descartes, who were looking for good answers to the WHY questions
Cartesian natural philosophy was full of attempts to actually answer the why of gravity, with little corkscrews flying through space pushing things down

2026-05-22 18:23:05 GMT

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in fact, it's erroneous to say that Newton gave us the good description of gravity, that was given to us by others like Galileo

2026-05-22 18:21:52 GMT

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some natural philosophers didn't much like Aristotle's thesis because it seemed to be incongruent with more detailed facts of gravity, and had long sought to abandon it, and did so readily

2026-05-22 18:20:38 GMT

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they said "great, you've given us a very useful description of the form of gravity, how things fall, etc. but you have not answered the WHY question! aristotle's answer, his thesis about gravity, is still necessary!"

2026-05-22 18:19:01 GMT

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in fact, when we finally moved beyond Aristotle, it was not by offering a new explanation at all. Newton famously provided a very rich and complete _description_ of gravity, but never any explanation for gravity
and other natural philosophers of his time disliked this

2026-05-12 21:43:56 GMT

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@nprofile…6g65 ive read stuff on CRDTs but ive never seen anything related to structured edits. just wholistic edits

2026-05-12 21:37:42 GMT

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@nprofile…6g65 i have not

2026-05-12 21:35:34 GMT

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from a UI perspective, we have an ambiguity here, in terms of what is intended by the user with the single keypress
this could be resolved with different modes selected prior to the keypress, or by offering up the different options with one selected as a default

2026-05-12 21:34:04 GMT

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so here we have a situation where a single key press can reasonably suggest edits that "insert" three different kinds of tree nodes:
an O node, that's like a string insertion
a T node with a gap on the right
a T node with a gap on the left

2026-05-12 21:32:21 GMT

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here i'm using ? to represent gaps that must be filled in eventually

2026-05-12 21:31:57 GMT

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well if we have a way of representing an as of yet un-filled portion of a tree (also called a "hole" but this type a different sort, so i'll just call it a "gap" for clarity), we can say this:
we can also add either of
T 'f' _ ?
and
T 'f' ? _
to the stack as well

2026-05-12 21:29:56 GMT

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but there's ALSO a constructor `T` that takes two recursive trees
we obviously can't use that right? i mean, which subtree gets the hole? and what do we put in for the other subtree?

2026-05-12 21:28:42 GMT

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for instance, i dunno, something like
data Tree = Z | O Char Tree | T Char Tree Tree
now when we press a single key, we look at step 3 and say, well, there is a unique constructor `O` that takes a char and a recursive tree, yes, indeed, so we can push `O 't' _` to the stack

2026-05-12 21:26:01 GMT

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i phrased the above sequence of operations the way i did because i want to consider the possibility that our tree structure isn't as simple as lists
instead, lets imagine that its some arbitrary tree type that has many constructors some of them with char args

2026-05-12 21:23:49 GMT

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now, we could view key presses as complex commands, which specifically mean that precise thing. and that's fine. but i want to generalize this and think about something a bit more eh.. rich?

2026-05-12 21:22:00 GMT

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4. we partially apply cons (`:`) to the single char 't', and form a one hole zipper 't':_
5. we push that onto the tube-y context stack

2026-05-12 21:20:48 GMT

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from this perspective, we can describe the insertion operation as follows:
1. we have a whole subtree "o" to operate on
2. we want to insert a single character 't'
3. we find the unique list/string constructor that has a single char arg and a single list arg: cons (`:`)

2026-05-12 21:19:20 GMT

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but when we view these tree contexts through McBride's tube view, where a one hole context is a stack of frames of local subtrees, we get this:
fo|o
is the tube-y zipper
"o" @ [ 'o':_, 'f':_ ]
and
fot|o
is
"o" @ [ 't':_, 'o':_, 'f':_ ]