Chip Unicorn

A perpetual student, here to read from more knowledgeable people more than to write. Software engineer, furry. Icon created by @rowyn

Suspected Mexican and Canadian sympathizer!

pronouns: they/them and he/him

Last Notes

2026-01-06 19:52:39 UTC

One coworker -- who I'll call Xavier -- does everything through LLMs. He's the kind of developer that managers who have never been programmers *adore*: 3000 lines of code per day.
I just realized that Xavier cannot read code, even code that he submits for review. He "understands" code by running it against test files and seeing whether results are reasonable. He can only say what the code does, not what causes it to behave in a way.
But that has several problems. An obvious first issue is that if a problem doesn't show up in the test file, then it will never be fixed. A less obvious issue is that his code is brittle and it generalizes very poorly.
Because Xavier doesn't read code, he has a very tough time imagining "What might go wrong?" And because he relies on the LLM, he misses very broad solutions, like using well-established libraries that solve dozens of problems at once.
Programmers who dive deep are still very, very useful.

2025-10-04 18:54:06 UTC

I have a question for mathematicians out there...
Start with a square 100 km on a side.
An inhabitant of this square has two ways to travel: walking, which can be done from any point to any point at a pace $p_w$ seconds per kilometer, or going by a train which needs laid-down tracks but goes at a pace $p_t < p_w$ seconds per kilometer. The inhabitant can combine the two ways of travel -- for example, she could walk to the train, take the train, walk to another train, take that one, and walk to the final destination. If she walks 2 kilometers and takes the train 9 kilometers, her total time in travel would be $2p_w + 9p_t$.
Here's the catch: There's a limited amount of train track available. We can't just cover the square with train track.
If the start and end of the trip were uniformly randomly chosen after the train track layout were set, what layout of the track would minimize the expected time of the trip?
Would it be a grid with squares? Or something more interesting?
#mathstodon #geometry

2025-07-18 17:31:45 UTC

Question of the day:
Congratulations! You are starting a new religion.
You need to decide on your Ten Commandments.
What would one of those commandments be?

2025-05-14 20:49:01 UTC

At https://calc.datova.ai/ , you can do "word calculation", where you add and subtract ideas from words.
For example,
unicorn - horn = mare
or
United States + Canada + Mexico = North America (mostly right)
Here's a few of its observations:
intelligence + wisdom + beauty = appreciation
business - worker = commercial enterprise
president - intelligence = corporate executive
creativty - intelligence - practice = Godard
strength - wisdom - morality = Molossidae (according to Wikipedia, a free-tailed bat)
person - man - woman = avalanche
fox - intelligence = vixen (hey, wait a minute!)
vixen + intelligence = bitchery (okay. This I agree with.)

2024-09-05 05:02:58 UTC

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Happy birthday! Summer is very excited for you!
(Summer is *always* excited for you.)

2024-08-11 02:49:09 UTC

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Donald Trump is sure that North Carolina is in play.
Source: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/events

2024-08-03 22:52:12 UTC

I am fighting depression.
If you are in the #LosAngeles area, I would love to meet up at a *public* spot.
If you're not in Los Angeles, I would love any clues of how to find similar people to me. I'm so depressed that I'm planning to go to a church(*) tomorrow.
(*) It's a Buddhist church. Ought to be similar to Baptists, right?