chamomeal

> This is why "is my testing comprehensive?" is actually an open-ended problem that, in the limit, is just as hard as formal verification.

Well said! I learned about PBT in the first place because I watched a talk where the speaker referenced the story of foundationDB. Super interesting stuff. If anybody wants a link I can dig it up

What do people think of property based testing? I’ve set up a few property based tests and it feels almost like formal verification.

I know it’s not the same thing, but PBT’s can catch all sorts of absolutely crazy bugs that I never would think to check for. Stateful stuff, cross-service stuff. My only gripe with PBTs has always been the tedious setup, but LLMs solve that.

I haven’t seen much discussion around PBTs lately, but you get a ton of bang for your buck in the LLM age

Been sayin this for years. Everybody in the world world: just BE COOL. Solves like every internet problem at once.

I was 10 when it came out. I remember the hype being so crazy. It’s all anybody talked about at school. Wii was going to bring us into the future and make all of our dreams come true.

It was totally awesome. But the advertised promise of motion controls didn’t really land until Wii motion+ controllers. When I played skyward sword I thought “ok THIS looks like the ads”

They passed 6 billion through a tumbler service?? Like what bitcoin fog used to do, back in the day? You’d think a tumbler service would just exit scam with that kinda money.

Also I thought tumblers didn’t work anymore? Didn’t they figure out how to trace btc anyway?

That’s wild. It’s possible that Google shows me relevant ads. But if it’s formatted anything like a sponsored result, I think my eyes just skip past it. Like after so many years I just have ad block built in to my retinas.

I wonder if one was actually useful, maybe I’d notice it?

So what you’re saying is there could be tons of ricin in my water system right now and I wouldn’t know…

Or, you don’t even realize it’s not really what you wanted. Once you have a nicely polished product, it’s hard to compare it to the fuzzy idea that you had in the first place.

I feel like going slower gives you time to let the details form the solution. You think “hm maybe that doesn’t make as much sense as I thought, maybe there’s a better way to frame the issue…”. If you don’t let a problem really soak in, you don’t get the “hammock driven development” that Rich Hickey talks about.

Of course some problems don’t need to soak in. A lot of problems just need code to be cranked out. I love slopping together a monster script that solves exactly one problem perfectly

Absolute legend, I’m going to slap these all over my site

Yeah but it’s okay if overwatch takes all of your computer’s effort to run. Imagine if postman used 13 gb of vram

What a crazy and fun idea. Good Wikipedia article. Everything in the Feynman cinematic universe is awesome

I am also not totally stoked about this whole LLM thing. But it's still hard for me to imagine all of the programming jobs going away. Even with all of the advancements they've made, I really cannot imagine a non-programmer doing my job.

Even though opus 5.5 is like a goddamn genius, and I don't really even feel like I need to check the code, I still absolutely could not imagine a PM taking over most of my tasks. Not even close

Thank you for articulating this!! This idea has been rolling around for a while but I haven't been able to put it into words.

I think "I'm working in a higher level of abstraction" is easier for some devs to say than "I asked somebody else to do the thinking and the work." I don't think there's anything wrong with asking an LLM to do the work. But pasting jira tickets into claude is not abstraction lmao.

I guess arguments on either side of this can get difficult for a reason that another commenter already mentioned: you can use LLMs on a wide spectrum of granularity. You can one-shot a whole project, or you can tell it to rename some vars in a single file. I guess there are uses that are probably closer to programming. But if you're not even looking at the code, I'd say that's closer to somebody else doing the work

I don’t disagree with you and I lurve frameworks. Yes, I love react. It is so awesome.

But it is SO nice to not have any build step. All of my new projects start as a single babashka script now. You got html templating, throw in a stylesheet. Slap a datastar script tag in there for everything else. It’s just easy peasy.

A while ago (years ago?) I read something about how carbon capture is so energy intensive that it doesn’t really help much. Is that still true?

I guess if you powered it with green energy, that’d be a net positive?