Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 08, 2023

• How did the very first software get programmed?

  I mean. Think about it.

• Bare-bones Diffusion Models

  So... how do diffusion models generate images? Why are these images as good as they are, and not better (or worse)? And... if we're talking about conjuring new images from nothingness, what does "better" even mean?

• Andy Wingo: whippet: towards a new local maximum

  Friends, you might have noted, but over the last year or so I really caught the GC bug. Today's post sums up that year, in the form of a talk I gave yesterday at FOSDEM. It's long! If you prefer video, you can have a look instead to the at the FOSDEM event page.

• Can sanitizers find the two bugs I wrote in C++?

  A few days ago I published a short post about two bugs I wrote while developing the C++ external scanner for my TLA⁺ tree-sitter grammar. Reactions were mixed! Many people were supportive, but there were of course the usual drive-by claims by developers that the bugs were trivial, they would've found & fixed them inside of 20 minutes, and I was laughably incompetent for having written them in the first place.

• The Validity of Custom Element Tag Names

  There I was, minding my own business, when I read an opinion from David Bisset that ended with .

• Creatively Misusing TLA+

  I spent the past few weeks thinking about complexity and poking dead birds and stuff, but now that the March TLA+ workshop is available (use C0MPUT3RTHINGS for 15% off!), I’m back in teacher mode and making workshop improvements.¹ TLA+ is intended for finding flaws in software designs. But what else can we do with it?

  Creative Misuse is the use of a tool in an unintended way. For example, if you use a screwdriver to pry something open, or a book as a monitor stand. Creative misuse in software includes making games in Excel spreadsheets and using yes to test for broken hardware. Creative misuse is 1) very fun, and 2) expands the space of how useful the tool is. I love finding creative misuses for tools. Here’s a few of them for TLA+.

• Subsetting Named Lists in R

  Introduction
  In R, lists are a fundamental data structure that allows us to store multiple objects of different data types under a single name.