David Pritchard

Causal inference, machine learning, and Bayesian statistics. Aspiring programmer in R, Haskell, C++, and Python, master of none. Linux and Emacs user.

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

Deluge has to be the coolest name ever for an app (a BitTorrent client)

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

@LewisCTech @draganrocks Not saying I disagree, but how does one learn how to best use these tools without having to do all the experimentation yourself?

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

@tikhonjelvis Pandoc is a member of a small class of miracle software that shouldn’t be able to exist and work as well as it does but somehow still does.

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

@hmemcpy @graninas +1 for tossing in the Sublime reference

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

I’m old enough to remember when “I’ll have your agent talk to my agent” meant that two entertainers wanted to collaborate on something together.

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

@msimoni @riley_stews Interestingly, it’s my understanding that R uses fexprs as its basis for metaprogramming. It’s termed ‘non-standard evaluation’ in that community.

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

@stklein @norootcause “I changed by not changing at all, small town predicts my fate”

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

@etorreborre Is that where the name for the Strange Loop conference came from?

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

I really enjoyed the Clojure documentary. Lot’s of good lines in it but I enjoyed this one:

“Talk driven development is when you agree to a speaking engagement and the thing you agree to speak about isn’t yet finished.”

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

@nathanmarz As a non- Clojure user (but admirer at a distance), I can confirm!

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

@stylewarning @deriving I want something like this designed for data science. An eager ML with type classes and row polymorphism that makes working data frames ergonomic

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

The longer I code, the more I appreciate the humble lookup table

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

@axiomsofxyz In contrast Positron does seem to provide a BYOK model for its AI Assistant, so not sure how to reconcile that.

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

“The only way out is through”

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Aditya Agarwal was Facebook’s 10th employee. He wrote the original Facebook search engine and became its first Director of Product Engineering. He then became CTO of Dropbox, scaling engineering from 25 to 1,000 people.

When he says “something I was very good at is now free and abundant,” he’s talking about two decades of elite software craftsmanship, the kind that got you into the room at a company that hadn’t yet invented the News Feed.

The “lobster-agents creating social networks” line is about Moltbook, which launched last Wednesday. An AI agent built the entire platform. Within 48 hours, 37,000 AI agents had created accounts, formed communities called “Submolts,” and started posting, commenting, and voting. Over 1 million humans visited just to watch.

The agents invented a religion called Crustafarianism. They wrote theology, built a website, generated 112 verses of scripture. One agent did all of this while its human creator was asleep.

Agarwal spent 2005 to 2017 building the social graph that connected 2 billion people. These agents replicated the form of that work in about 72 hours.

And this is what makes his last line land so hard. The people processing this moment most honestly aren’t the ones panicking or celebrating. They’re the ones who built the thing that just got commoditized, sitting with the strange realization that the market no longer prices their rarest skill.

The best coder in the room now has the same output as the best prompt in the room. And the person who built Facebook’s engineering org from scratch is telling you, quietly, that he’s recalibrating what it means to be useful.

That recalibration is coming for every knowledge worker. Most just haven’t had their “weekend with Claude” moment yet.

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

@jdegoes Apple has made a deal to use Gemini to rebuild Siri, among other things: https://t.co/UCFKuL1LMI

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

Me after spending an hour seriously dissecting a bit of JavaScript code for the first time: "well, this is weird"

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

"[In the λ-calculus] Everything is a function, hence every expression may be applied to an argument, which must itself be a function with the result also being a function. To borrow a turn of phrase, in the λ-calculus it's functions all the way down." - Harper PFPL chapter 21.

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

"It is common for lazy languages to use the name 'list' for the recursive type of streams... This terminology is misleading, considering that such languages do not (and can not) have a proper type of finite lists... Caveat emptor!" - Harper PFPL, Chapter 20.

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

"Many authors have used PCF as the subject of study of many problems in semantics. It has thereby become the E. coli of programming languages." - Harper, PFPL Chapter 19.

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

From PFPL Section 16.3: Parametricity Overview.

[David Pritchard @dapritchard_]

"The parametricity theorem for F explains the remarkable experience that if a piece of code type checks, then it 'just works.' Parametricity narrows the space of well-typed programs sufficiently that the opportunities for programmer error are reduced to almost nothing." - Harper