Random Internet Video for the day: Stop Trying To Understand. Good work, Internet.
Stop Trying To Understand
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Category Archives: Diary
Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica
Today I discovered Newton’s own annotated copy of his Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica.
Altronics catalog
Today my free copy of the Altronics catalog arrived. This is low-tech, but still the best way to keep up to date with the state of the art: just read the catalog from cover to cover!
Learning Clojure
I thought I might start with some of Paul Graham’s famous papers which aren’t about Clojure per se, but are about Lisp:
- Revenge of the Nerds
- The Roots of Lisp
- What Made Lisp Different
- Fortran
- Carl de Marcken: Inside Orbitz
Also his book On Lisp is of interest and is available free online these days.
And then the Arc language tutorial, which is also not Clojure, but looks like an interesting Lisp.
Then I will read the following books, in this order:
- Programming Clojure
- Getting Clojure: Build Your Functional Skills One Idea at a Time
- Functional Programming Patterns in Scala and Clojure: Write Lean Programs for the JVM
- Clojure for the Brave and True: Learn the Ultimate Language and Become a Better Programmer
This is, of course, a silly amount of reading. Let’s see how I go.
Model Thinking
Today I came across Model Thinking Full Course. It’s 11 hours of lectures about formal models. What they are, how to use them, etc. Kind of interesting but I don’t have that much time to give it.
The jank programming language
Today I learned about the jank programming language. It’s Clojure, but on the metal, not the JVM.
HTML DOM Heading Hierarchy
This is just a note for Future John. I was chatting to a friend on IRC who wanted to know how to extract the heading hierarchy from a HTML document. I wrote this code as a proof of concept implementation for him.
CPUlator Computer System Simulator
Today I learned about CPUlator Computer System Simulator while watching Assembly Language Programming with ARM – Full Tutorial for Beginners.
C Pointer Operator Precedence
I have to think carefully about this every single bloody time. As seen here.
And… here we are
This week what we have all been fearing has happened to me: GitHub Copilot generated code for me which seems to meet all the requirements but which I don’t understand very much at all.
To date GitHub Copilot for me has just been mostly a useful auto-complete tool and it hasn’t given me any code which I didn’t understand. But with this code (to control two different hardware timers/counters on my Arduino) I don’t really understand it at all. I have passing familiarity with some of the registers used because I saw them named in the datasheet (which I have only skimmed so far) but basically I don’t understand how this works.
It is tempting to ignore the fact that I don’t fully understand and move on, but there’s a part of me which wants to return to the datasheet so I can understand what every assignment GitHub Copilot offered actually does and what every value it calculated implies. Is that the best use of my time?