julesh

My thoughts about this just clicked. I have seen a bunch of cases of professed non-programmers building pretty big things entirely by vibe-coding, and they work fine. This allows people to participate in creation without years of training, and in the end that is not a bad thing

There are a […]

It's a really good time to be a tech startup: so many incumbents are leaving their lunches just sitting there unguarded to be eaten by anyone with a brain cell
https://mstdn.social/@hkrn/114976234732440052

*slaps roof of .idr file* this bad boy can fit so many language server bugs in it

This paper can't stop me because I can't read!

If you do type theory in an open plan office that's cubicle type theory

Oh gods implementing a lambda calculus with Haskell98 style algebraic datatypes is so much harder than it looks

How in the world did the implementers of languages like SML get this right in the early 80s, before even any of the category theory had been figured out

Wifi on this train no longer allows under 16s, I think that's a new change since last week. But they didn't do any kind of verification, they took my word for it

Can't use vpn to get round an access portal

Today is the 5th anniversary of my start date at Strathclyde, so today I will announce that I'm leaving academia

I am not leaving research - in fact the opposite, my research time is going to increase. For now I am essentially going back to being a postdoc, giving up my permanent position in […]

Cat evangelists be like "have you heard the good mews?"

snacks on a plane

Blue Banana - Wikipedia

London (the Square Mile)
Greater London (the actual metropolitan area)
Greatest London (the urban corridor leading from roughly Liverpool to Milan)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana

Here's a thought I had the other day. In real life project management it's standard good advice to under-promise and over-deliver. But meanwhile in academia grant applications are just almost entirely on what you promise and there is normally little or no checking of what you actually deliver […]

London transport take: there is a section of the Bedford-Brighton mainline that runs underground through the city centre and could be usefully reclassified as a tube line. Going north from St Pancras (where it already has underground platforms) you go to places like Kentish Town and Edgeware […]

The Scottish version of Teletubbies has the baby face in a raincloud

Codeberg Pages appears to be useless to me for the same reason that Codeberg is useless to me: it is strictly for websites of open source projects, they would not allow a research site

Non-US-based alternatives to Github Pages? ie. static site hosting that is much less of a pain than setting up your own web server

Will probably be useful to figure out how to justify them. If you have a functor J → C then the functor category [J, C] can be made into a skew monoidal category that behaves kinda like composition of endofunctors, and J-relative monads in C are just monoids in that. If M is a monoidal category […]

Thinking about graded relative monads, for some reason

Was thinking about type inference and got as far as possibly reinventing pushouts of thinnings when idris language server finished off my laptop battery and this train failed to provide any backup

Take of unknown temperature: Nobody has yet figured out the right mechanism for ad hoc polymorphism

I have only one take for the "what is syntax" discourse, which is that if you have 2 of them they are syntaxen

(this applies whether they have the same semantics or different semantices)

Not as big of a spike as I would have expected, but at least it's a start

Is there a Chomsky hierarchy for steam transducers and/or automata on infinite words? Moore machines and Mealy machines and Büchi machines are finite state, do they have counterparts with stacks or tapes?

If I was planning a city from scratch I would simply grade the surface 1 floor higher than the natural ground. You have the additional cost that every street needs a covered roof strong enough to bear the weight of pedestrian traffic, but in return for that you solve a whole bunch of problems […]

My normal position of "the US isn't real, it can't hurt me" is temporarily suspended while the orange guy is in Scotland

@SvenGeier I'm actually using Nord (which I just learned are actually Lithuanian, neat), that's a big network with endpoints in a lot of countries (here's the map focussed on Europe). I have no idea whether they are actually trustworthy, but at least I trust […]

[Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

According to Ofcom, platforms must not host, share or permit content encouraging use of VPNs to get around age checks. The government told the BBC under the Online Safety Act, it will be illegal for platforms to do this.

Another fun fact, if I was to write a twoot talking about how easy it is to avoid handing over your ID by using a VPN, my mastodon instance would actually be legally mandated to delete that twoot (as far as I can tell, that would also be the case if both me […]

[Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Ofcom said X and Grindr have committed to age checks. X says it is planning to introduce facial age estimation using its own artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Fun fact, twitter will not require you to hand over your ID but they will require you to upload a picture of your face to the nazi LLM and it will guess your age

I also wonder how the legally mandated age verification for users in the UK will be handled by every mastodon server

I wonder what it's like being one of the people that doesn't know how to use the internet, you have to give each site a copy of your ID just to have the right to see a page full of adverts I guess?