bitwize

No. English has used else to mean "otherwise" since before computers came along. Wiktionary offers this quote from Call of the Wild (1903):

"He had never seen dogs fight as these wolfish creatures fought, and his first experience taught him an unforgetable lesson. It is true, it was a vicarious experience, else he would not have lived to profit by it."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/else#Conjunction

There's also "or else", as made famous in crime dramas: "Meet me by the docks at midnight. Bring the money. Come alone. No cops... or else!" But in other usage it can of course be followed by something. "He had to get to work on time, or else he might be fired."

You, however, are not on my list.

The 2026 version is: Why are you writing Lisp instead of your code being autogenerated. Sounds like a recipe for failure.

I once stumbled across a video on the Two Minute Papers YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TwoMinutePapers

I remarked to myself how much the speaker sounded like Ren Hoëk, from The Ren and Stimpy Show. Then I looked up the name of the channel host: Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.

I thought to myself: Huh. Hungarian. That explains the mathematical prowess—and the voice. (Ren's voice is a pastiche of Hungarian actor Peter Lorre.)

Today you'd have to be an LLM.

Winevdm has been out a while.

Regular human processes, it turns out, have been a bottleneck that AI is now removing. AI is now routinely popping problems that have routinely stumped humans for decades or centuries.

But Sneakers didn't quote the Hacker Manifesto.

That's not cool, it's commie bullshit!

Hook the whole mess into Claude, so that it can punish you for attempting to write the code yourself!

From a neuroscience perspective, LLMs are effectively brains. We have built brains. That's quite a leap from first-order logic engines like Prolog.

Says more about the very real limitations of the human mind than anything else.

With an LLM, you can get a good-sized code base to converge on bug-free. The size of the code base your human mind can comprehend on its own is very small, so tiny pieces of code that do something interesting or useful seem beautiful and phenomenal to us. LLMs bust through that limitation and are capable of comprehending far more at one time than we are. Ultimately, human comprehensibility of code will no longer matter, and we will soon be guiding the evolution of vast towers of complexity that Just Work because they've been meticulously checked by machine at all but the highest levels of abstraction.

Where LLMs currently fall down is nuance, things like "business context" and what information resources users actually need.

Per Linus, you're not a serious developer unless you can afford access to these models anyway, so it's not really a big deal in the end.

The CTE scandal that rocked high-contact sports like boxing and American football suggests that sports can cause mental disorders.

That said, physical activity, when carefully engaged in, is a great clearing agent for brain fog. Get to the gym, or go for a hike, jog, swim, or bike ride, if nothing else.

Beginner level: sit in a chair and breathe slowly. Focus on the sensation of your breathing, feeling the air go in and out. If any intrusive thoughts creep in, try to revert back to focusing on your breathing. Meditation looks passive from the outside, but it is a cognitively active process that takes practice to achieve, just like drawing or programming or anything else you want to do. It's the art of placing your attention somewhere and keeping it there, not letting your thoughts carry you away.

Man, if it weren't for college and pushing outside my major, I wouldn't be nearly as competent in Japanese, and I might not have learned what an arrant douchebag Norman Mailer was, which I did from a professor who loved Mailer! But I have Professor Leeds to thank for teaching me enough about him that I could form my own opinion.

> Cheaters denying they cheat is a matter of course.

What happens in an environment of cheaters is that cheating becomes so commonplace, the competition becomes one that assumes cheats are enabled, and then everyone involved either denies cheating or is silent about it because IYKYK and if you DK, you don't need to K. Look at bodybuilding, which is full of men (and women!) absolutely juiced to the gills getting on Instagram and assuring everyone that their physique is totally natty, bro, just hard work and proper nutrition.

Programming is headed in that direction. LLM use, even to the point of "vibeslop", is the new default, and while LLMs do overindex on benchmarks, our benchmarks are going to end up overindexing on validating whatever public opinion thinks is "great" at the time, irrespective of whether it actually is, so "cheating" as we know it will go undetected, and certainly unpunished if it is detected. I don't know what the equivalent of falsely claiming you're natty is. Maybe saying "I wrote this" when you wrote it about as much as the Pope painted the Sistine Chapel fresco?

Years ago I went to a strip club and got a private dance with a girl. I noticed a quite visible scar on her abdomen. Against better judgement I asked her, "Is that an appendectomy scar?" Women that age are very sensitive about their bodies, you see, especially when their bodies are a source of income.

But her response surprised me: "No, that's my C-section scar. THIS is my appendectomy scar." I told her that her scars made her more beautiful because each one is a story; having them makes her a survivor and that's pretty hot. I think she appreciated that.

In time you might, as reminders of a hard-earned lesson. Age does funny things to people. You might say it scars your brain.

Insert diagram of a bullet-riddled plane.

We've passed the front wall of the singularity. Even 10 years out is incredibly difficult to anticipate, now.

This would have been a neat story... in 2024.

Today, it's a matter of:

  $ claude
  
  ⟩ I need to know how the Hitster app maps QR codes to Spotify or Apple Music tracks.

  ⋆ Obliterating...

  Now I have the whole picture. The QR code takes you to a URL with a track ID
  and a region. The track ID/region pair carry the mapping to the song—not the
  QR code. These mappings are in a file called `gameset_database_4.json`, which
  is an AES-encrypted, base64-encoded JSON file. The load-bearing seam is the
  derivation of the key from an XOR'd pair of strings concatenated to the length
  of the base64-decoded data, minus 12 bytes for the nonce and 16 bytes for the
  authentication tag...

OP could have had this answer in 5 minutes and spent the remaining 17h 55m playing with their kids or hugging their dog or something.

Dijkstra's epigrams have not aged well. He once mocked software engineering as "how to program if you cannot"—but this too is a solved problem thanks to AI.

They are.

They're getting into finance and drug discovery now, probably because the profit numbers for selling tokens look pretty dismal over the long term, and investors are looking for a way to service all that debt.

And guess what: they've already distilled the alpha out of businesses who went all-in on AI, so they already have some business models ready to go. Your business models, if you are an executive at such a company.

Try it with Opus 5.5.

The guy with local models in 2026 is like the kid with obviously K-mart clothing in 1988

It was a thing in the early days of LLM coding that actually got better (not great) results. It's far less necessary today but you still see it used as a joke much like the canonical AI response, "You're absolutely right!" (which I also haven't seen in yonks)

$ claude

⟩ Write me a Markdown file viewer for ${OS} that shows Markdown files as formatted documents by default. A button should toggle between the formatted view and the raw Markdown file as plain text. Work the task to completion and make no mistakes.

L. Ron Hubbard (yes, really)

"Venv" type solutions are how Windows manages its backward compatibility, at least in 32-bit land as well. Look up WinSxS: it's basically a store of the old DLLs an old application needs, and the system determines which versions an app needs at app launch, and adds those to the DLL load path. Pretty much transparently.