Even tobacco, the second most widely used drug, has a group of contrarians still today. Amazing.

> In 2026 even the proverbial grandma should know what a backup is

https://xkcd.com/2501/

In the Turing tent, you converse witt the other side instead of just reading static text. This makes a huge difference.

> your inputs lack formal syntax, and that's fine

It’s not fine. I program using formal syntax precisely because I want the computer to do exactly what I tell it to.

Then program, instead of telling someone else (humans, LLMs) to do it.

I am doing so, but I keep seeing people say that LLMs have completely removed the need for writing code.

> No. Floating number arithmetic is deterministic. You don't get different answers for the same operations on the same machine just because of limited precision. There are reasons why it can be difficult to make sure that floating point operations agree across machines, but that is more of a (very annoying and difficult to make consistent) configuration thing than determinism.

Float addition is not associative, so the result of x1 + x2 + x3 + x4 depends on which order you add them in. This matters when the sum is parallelized, as the structure of the individual add operations will depend on how many cores are available at any given time.

You can only specify software into existence if your idea of what you want it to look like is as vague as your specification. Sometimes this is the case, sometimes not.

This argument is based on the notion of proof irrelevance – if a theorem is true, any proof is as good as any other. This is not the case for computer programs – two programs that implement the same specification may be very different in terms of performance, size, UI/UX, code maintainability, etc.

Performance and size can easily be added to any specification, maintainability is not a problem if you never have to maintain it, UI/UX are design issues not code issues. If you specify a UI, it will have the UX you want. We can already do UI creation with visual editors.

C and JavaScript both treat integers and floats as separate types. In Python, ints and floats with the same numeric value are considered identical for almost all purposes.

This has nothing to do with partial orders. Mathematically, a value is always equal to itself, no matter if it’s from a partially ordered set.

FTFY: “There’s this incredible new technology that allows evil megacorporations to get richer and control the world while destroying the beauty of the Web.”