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gmfawcett

2,421 karmajoined 12 лет назад
Director of IT infrastructure, University of Windsor, Canada. Former development manager; unreformed programmer; long-retired Lisp wrangler and Scheme whisperer (with the closing-parenthetical scars to prove it).

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gmfawcett
·позавчера·discuss
Or perhaps just because it's not accurate. Reducing any complex system down to a trivial projection is very unlikely to explain anything well.
gmfawcett
·2 месяца назад·discuss
Look up "perlis epigrams lisp" for the context here. :)
gmfawcett
·7 месяцев назад·discuss
Ostrom's results didn't disprove ToC. She showed that common resources can be communally maintained, not that tragic outcomes could never happen.
gmfawcett
·7 месяцев назад·discuss
"Going Postal" was brilliant. GNU Terry Pratchett.
gmfawcett
·7 месяцев назад·discuss
That's a fair question, but I didn't have another person read it. (If I'm being honest, I think my colleagues would have looked at me funny. We don't exactly have a culture of using TLA+ to describe sysadmin processes here, and it felt a bit like a sledgehammer-swatting-fly even by my own standards! They thought the visualizations were cool, though...)

Many of my rules seemed pretty basic to me -- a lot of things like, "there is no target-node candidate whose ordinal is higher than the current target's and also satisfies the Good_Match predicate." But if I had been writing it for a human reader, rather than just to document constraints, I would have put in more effort to explain why the constraints existed in the first place (what's a Good match? Are there Poor matches? Why do we care? etc.). I didn't skip this step altogether but I didn't invest much time into it.

I did take care to separate "physics" rules from "strategy" rules (i.e, explicitly separating core actions and limits from objectives and approaches). That seemed to help the AI, and I'm sure it would have helped people too.
gmfawcett
·7 месяцев назад·discuss
I think this was more of a press release than an edict. The Purdue announcement says, "Built on recently launched AI majors, minors and certificates across colleges, and following the establishment of a working group last summer, with additional careful deliberation and advice from the University Senate through its Undergraduate Curriculum Council..."
gmfawcett
·7 месяцев назад·discuss
Delegated to the provost and deans. Who else would you expect to hold accountable for developing a graduate attribute?
gmfawcett
·7 месяцев назад·discuss
I've had the same intuition. I've had mixed results in this area, although I'm certainly no expert. Recently I wanted to formalize a model of a runbook for a tricky system migration, to help me reason through some alternatives. I ended up writing a TLA+ spec before generating some visualizations, and also some possible prototypes in MiniZinc. All three (spec, visualizations, CP models) were vibe-coded in different sessions, in about that order, though most of my personal effort went into the spec.

While the later AIs quickly understood many aspects of the spec, they struggled with certain constraints whose intuitive meaning was concealed behind too much math. Matters which I had assumed were completely settled, because a precise constraint existed in the spec, had to be re-explained to the AI after implementation errors were found. Eventually, I added more spec comments to explain the motivation for some of the constraints, which helped somewhat. (While it's an untested idea, my next step was going to be to capture traces of the TLA+ spec being tested against some toy models, and including those traces as inputs when producing the implementations, e.g. to construct unit tests. Reasoning about traces seemed to be a fairly strong suit for the AI helper.)

In hindsight, I feel I set my sights a little too high. A human reader would have had similar comprehension problems with my spec, and they probably would have taken longer to prime themselves than the AI did. Perhaps my takeaway is that TLA+ is a great way to model certain systems mathematically, because precision in meaning is a great quality; but you still have to show sympathy to your reader.
gmfawcett
·9 месяцев назад·discuss
That's pretty impressive -- thanks for sharing the link.
gmfawcett
·9 месяцев назад·discuss
Very well expressed. That's great early-career guidance, but also a good refresher for many senior staff.
gmfawcett
·10 месяцев назад·discuss
I've often taken inspiration from RFC 2418, "IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures" [1], a rare RFC that defines a human protocol ("rough consensus") rather than a technical one.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2418.html
gmfawcett
·4 года назад·discuss
So you're happy to build your commercial product upon the free works of hundreds of FOSS developers, but only if you can't be arsed to give them attribution? Cry me a river! An enterprise has a responsibility to manage its licenses. Complaining that it's not fun is just childish.