Why You Should Read "Data and Reality"
Once more: we are not modeling reality, but the way information about reality is processed, by people. — Bill Kent I've got this working theory that you can...
Regexes are Cool and Good
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Then they solve their problem, hooray! Regexes are great! I use...
Software Artifacts and Programming vs Engineering
Hiya everyone! Workshop is all done and I'm alive again. For those of you just joining us, I teach formal methods workshops to companies. Working on a piece...
Please stop falling for conspiracy theories
I'm a pretty gullible person. When I was a kid, my sister told me that there was a monster inside the toilet. For years after I'd flush and then run out of...
The Outside View
In Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People, Maciej Pinboard nee Cegłowski talks about analyzing AI risk with the perspective of the "outside...
2nd Annual End-of-Year Essay Retrospective
Last year I rolled up the newsletter into an ebook and gave my thoughts on every published blogpost. I haven't gotten around to making the 2021 Computer...
Sup Nerds, We Doin' a Mailbag
First some good personal news: I did a hiatus over the summer due to severe depression issues. Well, I finally got into an intensive outpatient program,...
Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
New Post: ADTs in TLA+ Using Abstract Data Types in TLA+. It's an adaptation of part of my TLAConf talk. It's also a lot more advanced than most of the...
A better explanation of the monty hall problem
I know I said no newsletter this week but this just hit me and it's small enough to write up so I'm fitting it in. The Monty Hall problem is a famous...
New Post: Alloy 6: It's About Time
Read it here! https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/alloy6/ Features my first attempts at using vector graphic diagrams to explain things better, like this:...
Principles of Software Evangelism
My job these days is researching exotic software technologies and selling them to companies, which means I'm a software evangelist. And because I literally...
Alloy 6 First Impressions
So a couple of weeks ago I wrote Finding Alloy's Niche, where I said I wasn't expecting the new Alloy 6 release to change all that much. It came out last...
Documentation could be so much better
A year or so back I wrote the newsletter post Don't use Markdown for documentation, where I complained about its lack of extensibility and cross-project...
Finding Alloy's Niche
(This gets a little rambly, I'm trying to figure out some stuff and thought it'd be nice to share my thinking process.) I've been thinking a lot about Alloy...
A Very Brief SPLASH Writeup
Sup nerds! Last week the SPLASH conference— the main academic conference for programming language research— came to town. I decided on a whim to buy a ticket...
The Myth of Self-Documenting Code
One of the weirdest things about software engineering is how many people hate comments. Like actually hate. There are influential people out there who say...
Defense in Depth is actually a good thing
So my TLAConf talk is out and I was gonna talk about technique research but then I saw this tweet and knew I had to rant about it: If after-release testing...
New Essay and Thoughts on Clickfarm
New Essay: How to Solve the Sudoku Puzzle with programming New essay up! How to Solve the Sudoku Puzzle with programming. This one is a little conceptual, so...
Jewmain Driven Design
Sup nerds, I'm back from Strange Loop! I have a million ideas I want to write about now, but I'll stick to one of the lighter, sillier ones. Based on a claim...
Optimizing State Spaces with Combinatorics
I'm preparing my talk for the TLA+ Conference this week. I asked around about intermediate stuff people wanted me to cover and there was a lot of interest in...