Elektrine lite

← Feed

Cees de Groot

cdegroot@mstdn.ca

Posts

  • View post

    RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117066183348062085 It cannot be stated enough that you must assume a) that your LLM got trained on code that was licensed under licenses like the GPL, and b) that your LLM will reproduce chunks of code that are large enough to be copyrightable from its training set. TL&DR: your LLM project is now covered under the GPL (or worse, AGPL, or any other random license, whether FOSS-approved or not). If you open source your code, your whole codebase...

  • View post

    RE: https://caneandable.social/@WeirdWriter/117098977750526646 Hear, hear. I'm still always surprised that I always have to fight FE engineers and product owners to make our stuff just basically damn accessible (hint: if your FE code is halfway decent, an intern can do it in a day. But your FE code isn't, of course, because you had to use the latest framework). I wish some lawmakers would step in, but in most countries they're not firmly in the pocket of Big Tech, it se...

  • View post

    I'm not one of those oldmanyellsatcloud people that always assumes the worst of later generations. "Au contraire", kids never cease to amaze me with their energy and creativity. Here is a great example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdmmBhaHVJA, by a friend's kid, Maxwell van der Werken It's in tribute of his older brother, who the family lost in a horrendous series of blunders at a local emergency room a couple of years ago. Finlay was 16 when he...

  • View post

    Reading through "Delight's Muse", a summary of Christopher Alexander's magnum opus "The Nature of Order". I never heard of it until someone linked it on IRC last week. It's quite nice - you can't all of Alexander in a mere illustration-rich 180 pages without taking some shortcuts, but it aims to be true to the original, is very readable, and I think a great introduction for those who are not willing to make the investment in the...

  • View post

    RE: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/44456-celebrating-45-years-of-kermit-with-the-first-new-c-kermit-release-in-15-years-and-working-with-a-decades-old-c-codebase The number of times that Kermit saved a project back in the '80s/'90s... When working in the pharma industry in Basel, CH, I met some people who got hired by the then big-three companies there to hook up machines. Their weapons of choice: a soldering iron and the Kermit source code in various esoteric programming langu...

  • View post

    Ways to make yourself impopular in this nook of the fediverse #14: write about LLMs in a way that isn't doomsday-ish. Oh well, here goes nothing. A blog post about my experience using Claude Code almost exclusively for the last month-and-a-bit creating lots of #elixir and #lisp. https://cdegroot.com/programming/2026/08/03/ai.html

  • View post

    Compleminte oet ...?

  • View post

    Not often that hotel instructions actual make me lol.

  • View post

    Groeten uit.... ?

  • View post

    Groet'n uut...?

  • View post

    Grüße aus ...?

  • View post

    @dougmerritt @munificent my worst gripe with async/await is that it starts permeating your code base, and by the time it hits my business logic, which (with the languages I tried, at least) inexplicably always happens, steam starts coming out of my ears. I'm strongly in favor of the Erlang/Elixir solution. It'll block on I/O, but that's fine, because it's only blocking a single process and thousands or millions of others are doing useful work. I've always had the feeling t...

  • View post

    https://coalton-lang.github.io/20260424-mine/ - Mine, a new IDE for Lisp and Coalton. Probably this mostly will land in the echo chamber, but this is a great tool for getting people into Common Lisp and Coalton (so spread the word - it's now easy mode to get going! ;-)) #lisp #commonlisp #coalton

  • View post

    @screwlisp Yup.

  • View post

    @screwlisp Make it two weeks later; I'm having visitors this week and my home office doubles as their bedroom :)

  • View post

    @androcat@toot.cat @jasongorman@mastodon.cloud there's a third option, of course: drop Gmail. I find this whole spam thing interesting, as it was effectively solved decades ago by Jason Rennie and his "ifile" program. A simple Bayesian system that you trained by moving your mails around from folder to folder. It picked up on the patterns and presorted your mail with a surprisingly high degree of correctness. My current provider, startmail, is really bad at spam handling so sudden...

  • View post

    @androcat@toot.cat @jasongorman@mastodon.cloud The issue is not even that the people are awful. The issue is that the organizational incentives are not aligned with what the users want (and, with Gmail, you can argue you're the product, not the user, although I'm still not sure what data they harvest from Gmail). I saw this happen over and over again when working in B2C/C2C oriented companies. The next quarter must be made, and nobody got better ideas than "optimize ad placements&...

  • View post

    @androcat@toot.cat @jasongorman@mastodon.cloud yeah, maybe I mixed wishful thinking and opinionating here. I mean, one can dream...

  • View post

    RE: https://mastodon.social/@knoppix95/116289644448317818 And that's why I'm a happy GrapheneOS user. Even if it meant, for now, having to buy hardware off Google.

  • View post

    I have two woodworking toolsets in my garage. The yellow-brand stuff is awesome to cut up 2x4s and shoot nails through them until you have a shed or a chicken coop or a deck or whatnot. Then, there's carefully honed chisels, vintage planes restored with love, and - a recent addition - some Japanese saws to craft small things with high precision. Nobody would debate that having different sets of tools here is somehow strange. I also have two "software development" minds...

  • View post

    @screwlisp@gamerplus.org Yup. Where people see threats, I see opportunities: this should be the death knell for the likes of Meta, because /unless you know someone personally/ they'll be more and more likely to be an AI. Which is a great and awesome outcome, I think 🙂 I was on the "cipherpunks" mailing list in the '90s. People discussed identity and "nyms" a lot. How did you know who someone was on the Internet? You didn't. And to a large extent, it didn't m...

  • View post

    Just renewed my @guix Guix Foundation membership. I forgot how easy it is to transfer money in Europe: type in name and IBAN, you get an immediate verification that they match, press send, money is there (and this was between a Belgian and a French bank account). No fees, no delays, no intermediaries taking their cut, just like things should work in the 21st century. I think that if the Canadian government is serious about growing our economy, step one is to pull the damn banking system out of...

  • View post

    I almost forgot. I was really busy but I promised a quick blog post on Elixir testing, so here it is. It's not polished/finished, but I promised a post, not a perfect one ;-) https://cdegroot.com/elixir/2026/03/09/elixir-testing.html - if people have opinions, i'll iterate a bit.

  • View post

    The most recognizable thing about AI generated code seems to be its commenting style: there's a dearth of fully-formed sentences and an abundance of "the next line of code is doing X". Now, my take on LLMs generating code is that they generate the mean of all code they encountered. Just as with testing, this commenting style is indicative of just how bad human-generated code seems to be, on average. I won't stand for this reduction of quality, but I'...

  • View post

    https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ?si=wB78xV9E7UtFQSjU Brilliant. #enshittification

  • View post

    It was fun to chat on @screwtape, thanks @kentpitman @screwlisp @ramin_hal9001 for having me. Recording on https://toobnix.org/w/9otb9JbqRUenLUjK72viwf, next week it seems I'm gonna be grilled on my book, berksoft.ca/gol.

  • View post

    We started using Claude code at work. In a reasonable way, I must say: let's give it a spin, see what it can do for us, treat it as a tool in the toolbox, not a developer-displacing silver bullet, etc. Anyway, I was working on a ticket, took time to install the CLI, and then asked it to generate a test for some new code I wrote (usually I TDD, sometimes I code my way first to a solution, it depends. No silver bullets, just tools in the toolbox). What happened next made me giggle, bec...

  • View post

    Anyway, your homework assignment is to (re)watch @jbrains's "Integrated Tests are a Scam" talk - https://vimeo.com/80533536 (I'm linking to what I think is the original version of the talk on purpose here: this should have been common knowledge for at least this long. But there's newer vids and blog posts if you prefer). Just this - avoiding the integrated test pit - will help you drive your tests (and code) to a point very close to where you can be happ...