Rant on Briar Patch

Don't Believe Everything You Prove

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In many ways, this is a companion post to my complaint about John Backus’ Turing lecture. If you travel far enough along the smarter-than-thou asshole path, you’ll usually find the end of the line somewhere around formal proof methods.

The idea is that if we can elaborate a proof from a well-verified set of operations and a minimal collection of axioms, the thing we’re trying to demonstrate has to be correct. It’s the ultimate trump card for those seeking a pure, unassailable foundation for their program (or, increasingly, their philosophy of life).

Please Do Not Admire Its Purity

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 23:52:26 -0700

The title, if you didn’t catch it, is a reference to the movie Alien.

Specifically, it’s a reference to the part (spoiler alert for a movie from 1979) where the crew discovers one of their fellow crewmates, Ash, is actually an android. They discover this when he tries to kill Ellen Ripley, our protagonist, and after he’s clubbed to death with a fire extinguisher, the crew reconnects his severed head for a final interrogation.

The Death of Design Patterns

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 23:46:51 -0700

Every now and then, I see Design Patterns floated as a kind of next-step resource for programmers after they’ve gotten comfortable with a language, typically an object-oriented (or at least object-aware) one. I don’t particularly have a problem with OOP as a concept, though I agree with its critics that inheritance is overused in teaching materials by several orders of magnitude.

But as for Design Patterns itself, I personally think these days that it only serves as a window into 90s programming philosophy - a historical relic of a bygone age, and one that I’m not all that interested in revisiting (unlike my passion for Software Tools from the 70s).

LLMs Are Bad at Software

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:27:41 -0700

I am incredibly tired of “reasonable” takes about LLMs being used to develop software. “Well, they’re useful for-” No! They’re unethical plagiarism machines that exploit some of our worst addictive impulses while being trained to flatter us so we’ll spend more time and money on an ecologically destructive and inefficient method of approximating text sequences. They are insidious and I’m going to lay out how they screw up your coding and your critical thinking in all sorts of ways.