Regular Programming

About Being Wrong

Wherein polite gentlemen at gaming conventions explain how people didn't have their variables separate enough with regard to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Lars thinks Andreas has drawn the wrong learnings from this.

It's a good idea to be humble … but strong opinions loosely held may not be the perfect thing, either?

Also discussed is the curse of the expert - teaching across a large gap in experience, and how to actually go about changing systems and having better discussions. Have you considered being god's advocate instead of the devil's when in a discussion?

Links

• Gothcon
• The Dunning-Kruger effect
• Autocorrelation
• The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
• Golden ratio
• The curse of the expert
• The halting problem
• Linus Torvalds
• Strong opinions loosely held
• Steelmanning an argument
• Yes, and …
• Two's complement podcast

Quotes

• I attempted to make friends
• Hard to know what you don't know
• If you don't have your variables separate
• They fumbled on the input data
• I think you have the wrong takeaway
• The curse of the expert
• Have you looked at presidents recently?
• Exhaust the universe
• The halting problem of the universe
• Sons of pedagogy
• I feel comfortable, but I don't feel certain
• A really badass judo throw
• I can ignore many things
• A multitude of parts
• Bit by bit, you shift the system
• Taking small stands
• Very happy to be wrong
• God's advocate
• Random ideas, loosely shared
• A good crowd for this question

About Estimates

Estimates are a nasty subject, Andreas doesn't know how to handle it.

Fortunately, Lars has one weird trick, which doctors hate.

When you have plenty of control, estimates can be useful.

Not useful: unexplained deadlines.

Finally: when things get stuck. (Lars is usually available to blame.)

(In an alternate timeline, Andreas' tells us everything his relatives taught him about quark cake.)

Links

• Deadlines whooshing past
• The XKCD about determining if you're in a national park, and check if your photo is of a bird
• Basecamp
• Shape up
• Elm
• Zenos' paradoxes - you can't run past a tortoise
• The travelling salesman problem
• NP-complete problems
• CRUD
• Lean manufacturing

Quotes

• Their due dates, their deadlines
• I have this one weird trick, that doctors hate
• A constraint for the work
• The magnitude of the task
• Some real dumb things, and some very decent ideas
• Skate curve
• The smallest unit is always a day
• Not agile enough
• Slightly confused and maybe a little bit sad
• If you think that's a map (, I think you're using it wrong)
• Assorted concerns
• You can't run past a tortoise
• You can always split a cake in two
• Quark cake
• Accelerate a cake
• A fixed estimate on the travelling salesman problem
• Usually available to blame

Passing pandemics make it possible to meet developers in real life again. Elixir-Lars makes a splash, and tells about recent and coming real-life events he's enjoyed. Things learned from real-life events and the need - or not - of constant learning are mentioned.

(It's not bit rot, it's data composting!)

Finally, a deep dive into the art of arranging good events, including preparatory pre-event events.

Who wouldn't like a movie night with a bunch of developers and pizza?

Linkable matter

• Elixirconf EU 2023, in Lisbon
• Varberg
• Code BEAM - there are so many of them
• TDD - test-driven development
• Lettuce
• Cucumber
• NAND
• Nerves' Ramoopslogger
• Textalk
• Software craftsmanship Göteborg
• Event sourcing
• Redux
• Hackers
• Gleam
• Membrane
• Code BEAM Stockholm 2023
• Code BEAM Europe 2023 in Berlin

Title-like quotes

• Developers in my local area
• A splash as Elixir-Lars
• I guess I'm visible
• I met one developer
• I enjoy meeting developers
• Leads and future prosperity
• Composting becomes very natural
• Harness the entropy
• It's not bit rot, it's data composting
• The series of events that brought us here
• A speedrun of "Well, you have options"

The continued cratering of Twitter, and the joy of discovering open alternatives. Lars and many others find themselves on the open and federated Mastodon instead of Twitter, having a great time, and feeling more excited about open systems than in a long time.

On the level of individuals, owning and controlling your own data feels back in fashion, but there is even more to dig into on the level of large organizations.

Perhaps when GDPR says no and the good spirit of the internet is strong, there is a chance for municipalities and other public sector organizations to get and help build open alternatives to the closed, proprietary, and often hair-raisingly expensive and poorly received software they have today?

Lars sees exciting business opportunities, better software for all, as well as the interesting challenges of navigating tender processes and plain old corruption.

Links

• Mastodon
• genserver.social
• fosstodon.org
• Ruby on rails
• PostgreSQL
• Object storage
• Redis
• Pleroma
• Akkoma
• glitch-soc - "Mastodon Glitch Edition" - where Mastodon UI discovers new features
• Glesys' object storage
• PeerTube
• Pixelfed
• Activitypub
• SpaceX rockets exploding compilation video
• WebTorrent
• Element and Matrix
• eSam
• Mattermost
• SPF - Sender policy framework - email authentication method
• Skolplattformen
• Offentlighetsprincipen

Quotes

• Elon happened
• A very straight path to somewhere else
• As open as email
• Satiate my doomscrolling needs
• A Twitter on IRC
• I don't trust the ecosystem under my feet
• Lectured about a culture I'm not in
• Teams was dubbed illegal
• videos.varberg.se
• The good spirit of the internet
• GDPR says no!
• People software
• You have people living in you
• I want "Svenska IT-myndigheten"
• Pointless, annoying, and wasteful

How to teach functional programming? What are the proper steps, beyond the first ones? Especially when you can't or don't want to point to a framework and say "we do it this way!"

Lars outlines his ideas for teaching Elixir to someone without requiring any prior programming experience.

There is also discussion of mapping, reducing, and representing one in terms of the other. Also things which are better in Haskell than Elixir, perfectly named modules, and - inevitably - why you don't just use Rust instead.

Links

• Chalmers
• CakeML
• Elixir in action - Saša's Elixir book
• Monad
• Map
• Reduce
• Filter
• MapReduce
• Elixir's enum module
• Multiple function heads in an anonymous function
• Immutability
• Guards in Elixir and Haskell
• Witchcraft - the module
• Nerves
• Frank Hunleth
• REPL

Quotes

• It felt like I cheated, I don't know if I did
• In my bone marrow!
• Putting the module before the functions
• Try to explain a monad (there is no second step)
• Pretend that the rest of computing doesn't exist
• Ignore the rest of the world
• Save brain cycles
• Solid, sound, and true
• It's going to have to be a reduce
• I never really updated my map

Archives are cool. How do you keep your digital things in order and, hopefully, backed up?

We need more archivists.

Andreas has re-read Snowcrash, and while it isn't the manual for the world to adopt it doesn't seem to stop the megacorps from thinking it is and trying. Where did Google go wrong, and why? And why aren't we jealous of their recruiting?

Linkable matter

• The library of Alexandria - overrated?
• Backblaze B2
• Syncthing
• Tailscale
• Nextcloud
• Hetzner Storage Share (NextCloud)
• ZFS
• Borg - backup handling software
• Andreas' Instagram account
• Dragonbox algebra (5 yo / 12 yo)
• Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson
• Ender's game by Orson Scott Card
• Meta's new professional Quest headset
• The Corecursive podcast episode about Android
• Supabase
• Swedish archive paper

Better titles

• Overrated library though
• Perfectly gitted and dotfiled
• Way too pragmatic
• A virtual private server and magic
• Nested backups
• Suddenly: math
• More stacks of logos; less clarity
• Preparing for the metaverse
• 1984 isn't the manual
• Snowcrash isn't the manual
• Designing dystopia
• The opportunity for amazing glitches
• Need to try harder at working less
• A strong ack

There are good things in programming, many of which are enumerated in this episode.

Among other nice things: the best features in Elixir. Lars won open source? Bots and realtime-y stuff. Not to mention a type system that screams at you.

Also: Lists in lists, in lists (in lists).

Code made by other people is not one of the things, however. Code made by other people is always upsetting. CSS does not make the list either, but Tailwind does, prompting a discussion of fractally difficult things, leaky abstractions, and progressive enhancement.

Linkable matter

• IO-lists - lists in lists in lists with eventually some binary data in them
• Id3vx - The now published ID3 library
• LiveView
• Phoenix
• Either in Haskell
• Clowns to the Left of me, Jokers to the Right (the paper)
• Stealers Wheel - Stuck in The Middle With You
• Functors
• Elm
• Fmap and bind in Haskell
• Lars' Telegram bots
• Genserver
• Moment.js
• Autobots and Decepticons
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• Tailwind CSS
• Graceful degradation
• Progressive enhancement

Better titles

• Keeps giving nil
• Carefully optimistically happy
• A JSON-thingy
• You won open source
• I have written the code, and it's not my problem
• Murdering your garbage collector
• A type system that screams at me
• The maybes I got over pretty quickly
• They never stopped being results
• An inherited Erlang footgun
• The speaker that was in the monkey
• It's not only that I'm a backend developer

The hardware woes episode. But first: the joy and wonder of ID3v2.3.

Implementing the specification of a binary format as a library.

Lars' next laptop. Then Lars' gear situation. Power bricks and cable capabilities are … a labyrinth.

The trials and tribulations of getting and setting up a Steam deck.

Linkable matter

* The ID3v2.3 spec
* EXIF
* Fold left and fold right
* Lars' blog post about working with ID3
* CRDT
* Apple's WWDC keynote
* The M2 Macbook air
* The Framework laptop
* Linux on M*-chip computers
* Dell's XPS laptops
* RJ45
* Steam deck
* Slackware
* PopOS
* Regolith
* Frank Hunleth (of Nerves fame)
* Sony A7C

If we had titles

* Trying to be clever, and doing it poorly
* It still reverses the whole thing
* Arbitrary comments
* The future of mp3:s
* The world is less and less file-centric
* A USB-C-shape cable

Elon Musk wanting to buy Twitter leads naturally into the topic of cyberdecks and jacking in, which in turn naturally leads one to talk about audio on Linux.

But what is a cyberdeck? How do you build one? And when would you use it?

The sad state of video calls compared to Star Trek - why don't they have to install Teams to hail the Microsoft ship?

Lamenting the sad state of the current crop of dystopic overlords. Who runs Google, really? Amazon might be the most attractive target, just don't take down all our clouds by accident, okay?

Cyberpunk wasn't prepared for crypto, but when other things get bad enough that ceases to be a problem. Let's not papercut ourselves all the way to dystopia.

Linkable material

* Elon Musk has or has not yet bought Twitter
* Cyberdecks
* Jack - the sound library
* Shadowrun
* Keytar
* Pi 400
* Pi TFT
* Touchbar Lemmings
* The Framework laptop
* Google glass still exists
* FPGA
* Obsbot PTZ Camera
* Cory Doctorow on the Corecursive podcast
* Lightning - the on-top-of-Bitcoin payment system
* Podcast index
* Mer - the Swedish cordial-type drink

Alternate titles

* Jack in
* Something vulgar about it
* As far as cyberdecks go
* The keytar of keyboards
* Just hack the Gibson
* Rearview mirrors, but cameras
* Out cyberdecking
* The current crop of dystopic overlords
* Web-scale capitalism
* Our current psychopaths
* Papercut our way to dystopia

Notes will improve when beatings continue.