Patrick Dobson

God creates man Man rebels God calls Man back Rebels again God sends Man 2.0 blueprint Man ignores blueprint God sends architects Man kills architects God becomes Man God-Man does blueprint Man kills God-Man Ineffective Man 2.0 Demo Day Man starts 2.0 upgrade (ongoing)

@CatholicRunners What does it profit a man to run sub 3:00 and lose his soul?

A healthy body means nothing without a healthy soul 🙏

@darwintojesus I agree except for novel moral controversies. Atheists can get murder or kidnapping right because of history. But wokeness or COVID? Atheists didn't fair better than random selection Christians have the Holy Spirit, and that is essential to navigate new controversies.

Why is this conversation still a thing? I’ll say it again, YES, atheists can have morality and be moral without believing in God. They can do that because* God exists and He’s given all of us a moral compass, aka our conscience. I mean seriously, if atheists couldn’t be moral unless they believed in God wouldn’t they just be walking around like psychopaths beheading people? That’s clearly not the case. Some atheists are actually pretty reliable and have good character, they’re trustworthy. I’ve seen it, like my friend @SpeedWatkins for example. Others too. And some Christians are not reliable, I wouldn’t trust them with anything. They’ll stab you in the back the second you turn it. Belief doesn’t make one moral and disbelief doesn’t make one immoral. We’re ALL moral and immoral to varying degrees. All of us. Now, do I think it’s wise to build a society on the foundation of atheism? Absolutely not. Do I think that would be a good or moral society? No. I think it would be totally degenerate. Just because atheists can* be moral, doesn’t mean they’re as likely TO be moral, or to act morally. I’ve been in both camps and Christians are FAR and away more trustworthy than atheists are. It’s not even close and every former atheist I’ve talked to would agree with me on this. Even some current atheists agree with this. So, can atheists be moral? Yes. Are they as likely to be moral as people that believe in God, purpose, and a final judgment? No, of course not.

@rfleury @yegor256 I like this because I'm betting you're not a huge fan of REST APIs either.

@yegor256 Delete your account

RESTful APIs may be dead soon. Instead, web services may expose a single POST entry point for a prompt. Internally, an AI agent may decide how to interpret it and what to do with the data and the database.

@twithersCLE There were no Guardians in 2016. The Dolans are billionaires. They don't need you running a Ministry of Truth for them.

There was so much I couldn't get into Guardians' 2016 celebration story. One of my favorite anecdotes was Jason Kipnis, who grew up a Cubs fan, saying he got flipped off by one of his high school teachers while he was on deck in Wrigley Field during World Series game.

It's no coincidence that the guy who made distance running look metal was a 5k guy.

“Vibecoding”, i.e. ~hands-off usage of LLMs to rapidly generate code without regard for the actual code’s contents, for novel applications, can literally never be non-slop, because—as I’ve described before—there is not enough bits of information content in prompts to express the user’s exact desires in sufficient detail, and the desired solution is not expressed in training data (due to the problem’s novelty). Only a sentient human developer can relate to another human user to determine what is desirable, and design the software such that it accomplishes this desirable outcome, and carefully verify that it is doing that, rather than something else (potentially undesirable). This is true even for the combinatoric space implied by the training data, for instance if the novel problem is merely novel in that it combines pieces of existing solutions. There needs to be a guiding force to know what to combine and how. The more detailed the prompt becomes, the more human oversight (the more human-guided round trips with the LLM), the closer it becomes to actual code (i.e. detailed execution instructions for a computer).

@Predamame For man and beast

It’s only runnable.

@rfleury @vkrajacic FOSS has allowed rapid protyping, which allows managers to show rapid progress. There's a perverse economic incentive caused by short term thinking. One group needs reckon with the long term cost in short term thinking. OTOH, some software should be disposable.

A fundamental division between schools of thought in programming is (a) the elimination through simplifying of cruft, boilerplate, and extra abstraction layers, and (b) the automation of maintaining cruft, boilerplate, and extra abstraction layers. One of the reasons I drifted away from C++ and newer languages with adjacent philosophies towards a subset of C is that I found myself in the first camp. Some problems were simply not as hard as I was making them. Memory management, threading, UI, and so on could be simplified such that not only the high level C code became simple, but the actual machine code also became simple. This is starkly different from modern C++ and Rust programming culture, where the philosophy is simply that dealing with the complicated lower level details is a matter of *automation*. The compiler needs to generate something extra, it needs to check extra things, and so on. “Agentic programming” falls into the latter camp, and this is also why I don’t employ it in my workflow (other than search engine usage and so on). I don’t need it to generate 10s of 1000s of lines of code. The requirement of 10s of 1000s of lines of code—for implementing something derived from the information content inside a tiny prompt—is an architectural red flag. Perhaps a substantial portion of that code simply shouldn’t exist. I find that my programs become much better when I do that simplification pass first. After that, there’s drastically less boilerplate, less maintenance, and less busywork to begin with.

One Scenario: January 2028 Browns in AFC CG Watson threw for 4100, 32 TDs. Monken fixed him. Berry crushed drafts in '25, '26, '27. Falcons are picking 3rd in the '28 draft. Matt Ryan fired Stefanski. Keeping Berry, firing Stefanski is shrewdest move ever by Browns owner

Denzels on both sides of the ball 🤯

Nice work AB, trading down and still getting first dibs on any tackle.

Sounds like they wanted Tate, but will now take whichever Tackle is available.

Have I got a movie for you

SMART goals violate Matthew 6:34. Christians should have SMARG goals. We can outline everything except the timing, which is God's.

Tweets are cheap. They should be the most recant-able statements we make.

@KlendathuCap Nolan? Not sure Oppenheimer was his best, but not his worst.

My gaming philosophy. In the last years of his life, Roger Ebert famously claimed that games were "not art" (he was referring to computer games, but I'm sure he'd apply it elsewhere). He gave three reasons to back up his opinion. 1) he had never played a game 2) you can win a game 3) Art must consist of a single visionary. (This objection seems odd for a film reviewer, since films are famously collective projects.) Penny Arcade skewered Ebert with a single comment; "if a hundred artists create art for two years, how is the end product NOT ART?" 1/3

Losing your conscious experience in the will of the artist is the peak experience of art. A well-crafted game mechanic is one of the highest forms of art.

Schopenhauer: "the momentary cessation of all volition, which takes place whenever we give ourselves up to aesthetic contemplation, as pure will-less subject of knowledge, the correlative of the Idea, is one of the principal elements in our pleasure in the beautiful."