I agree! I get much better results when I give LLMs some light architectural constraints such as to use tailwind and alpine.

A while back I figured out this trick and used it to crank out a bunch of calculators for analog electronics: https://cofree.coffee/~solomon/calculators/

its super convenient to be able to throw tools like this together and load them on a static site.

I agree and I think a really wonderful way to encode agentic control flow would be with Polynomial Functors.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00990

From the podcast episode they talk about the idea of using an LLM for training by disallowing the model to write code. I've been experimenting with exactly that in conjunction with a proof checker (Agda) to help me learn some cubical type theory and category theory.

I find the LLM as interactive tutor reviewing my work in a proof checker to be a really killer combo.

I have a pitch to buy American Spirits and American airlines to bring back smoking on airplanes. I would be happy to pivot to purchasing Spirit Air.

https://cofree.coffee/~solomon/InhaleLabs_PitchDeck.pdf

Man as a teenager I was in a Day of Defeat clan with a couple of the Ask Jeeves engineers. They were really cool.

Best comment I've read this week.

What a great game/mod on the og hl1

I think Hindley Milner (for decidability) + Linear Types (for resource management) + Refinement Types (for lightly asserting invariants) + Delimited Continuation based Effects (for tracking effectful code) + Unison style Content Addressability (for corralling code changes, documentation, and tests) would make a really nice language for an LLM.

That's in large parts Scala.

It doesn't have Hindley-Milner type inference, but it has very strong type inference.

We will get linearity soon thanks to and as part of the Capybara[1] effort.

Refinement types are already long a reality.

The whole new effect tracking thing is based on delimited continuations.

The Unison style content addressability comes up now and then, maybe it will become a reality at some point. It's though mostly not a language thing but more a build system thing.

Scala is already great for for LLMs also for other reasons:

https://arxiv.org/html/2510.11151v1

[1] https://2025.workshop.scala-lang.org/details/scala-2025/6/Sy...

AFAIK Scala's type system is not decidable. The point of Hindley Milner (and I really should have said System F without impredicative or higher rank types) was to get decidable polymorphism not type inference.

Thanks. The early 2000s wants their joke back. And just like it was back then, it's still not funny, just rude.

My criticism still stands. If I know what I am searching for, it's easy to find. But often enough have I seen authors use terms which can have multiple meanings and I would need to look at their definitions in parallel of the context of the article, just to understand what it's even about. No thanks, I'll just pick the next HN post instead.

You literally just have to search RF Engineering and the very first results will explain the term for you.

I prefer agda as proof checker but its not a practical choice for building software. Lean feels like it could legitimately become a successor to Haskell as the go to functional programming language for software development.

I think what holds Agda back from being "practical" is that it just doesn't have good tactics. You can't easily automate proofs and even simplification techniques require some language-level tricks[1]. There's technically support for elaborator reflection (as in Idris) but it's painful and impossible to debug. Certainly nowhere near where Coq and Lean are.

[1]: like this one I've used for several proofs so far: https://danilafe.com/blog/agda_expr_pattern/

Its also really slow and doesn't have a huge library ecosystem. The latter is fixable but not so much for the former.

Also true. The slowness is relatively unpredictable, too: sometimes changing a 'rewrite' to a 'with' can increase memory usage tenfold.

While we're at it, another major concern for me is the inscrutability of Agda's error messages. I've had one error message single-handedly overflow my tmux scrollback buffer. There's no way I'm going to be able to interpret that.

> While we're at it, another major concern for me is the inscrutability of Agda's error messages. I've had one error message single-handedly overflow my tmux scrollback buffer. There's no way I'm going to be able to interpret that.

lmao i've been there. Agda is my first choice for proof checker and for math-y explorations but its not gonna be a replacement for Haskell as a production programming language.

I love diners but they aren't affordable anymore! I want a cheap simple meal and bad coffee. The diners that seem to survive in this market end up up-scaling their menus. : (

I desperately miss the 90's and the middle class we used to have. I also miss basic cheap eats. If someone tried to make an authentic type of diner today, it would immediately become swamped with influencers.

How can I get away from all this? Is there a town somewhere where everyone is over 45 and there is no cell service and a full meal is $5?

Heck I would settle for a small NorCal town that doesn't have gangs or meth.

> Is there a town somewhere where everyone is over 45 and there is no cell service and a full meal is $5?

Yes, but they're suspicious of outsiders and newcomers. They're afraid the newbies will vote away everything that makes that town feel like home.

I miss pre-COVID prices. Our local diner is now $20+ for a simple breakfast (eggs, toast, bacon, coffee/tea) for two people. Pre-COVID is was ~$10 with tip.

Your imagined past was enabled on the back of exploitation poor people and minorities.

That hasn’t gone away, so I don’t think that’s the difference that makes a difference here.

Tastes have changed and I think people have been highly exposed to tastier dishes.

There's also the "Denny's" problem. Classic diners tend to be pretty much the same as a Denny's in terms of quality.

Yeah, chain restaurants have dominated most of the market everywhere out through and including the exurbs.

But if you go to somewhere deeply rural you can still find cheap crappy diner food.

Some of the random non-chain diners in the middle of some forested area are super nice and somehow not expensive, like the kind you stop at on the way to a ski trip. I'd think they'd be pricey cause of tourism or difficulty getting supplies.

Waffle House is your jam.

Only in the southern US unfortunately

WH is all over the place in the US. I live in CO and go regularly. I’m 90% sure I saw one when I was in Utah.

I'd be hard pressed to find one anywhere near a major urban area thats not in the south. They do exist sporadically in rural areas and along highways in many other areas

You guys are two ends of the spectrum; WH exists in more than just the south, but it still doesn’t show up nationwide - e.g no PNW locations.

TIL! I’ve been to PNW, but I was too busy eating clam chowdah to notice.

Bonus, there's a solid chance of being ringside to an epic local MMA fight.

I suspect that people want a theoretical cheap, simple meal, but what makes things cheap now is less the simplicity of ingredients, but really lowering the labour effort. So, something like the free breakfast at a cheap motel: bulk egg mixture, sausages that might as well be 50% cardboard pulp, big tubs of factory waffle batter, churned out onto disposable plates. Unless that's exactly what you have in mind, of course!

I’ve got a place by me that does 2 eggs, 2 pancakes (or French toast), 2 sausages and toast for $4 before 8 AM.

And I don’t go there. The spots that get twice (or more) as much for that meal really are quite a bit better. And their coffee is truly foul. Classic diner coffee is fine, but if I’ve had better coffee on an airplane I’m not prone to going back.

IHOP and Denny's fit that. They're quiet about the value menu.

Especially today. I used to go to a place where every time I ate, my wife would roll her eyes as I talked about how good the prices were. Even they’re expensive now. Still cheaper, but damn. I don’t eat out nearly as much anymore. It’s sad. Diners are my favorite.