Hillel
Formal methods, software history, chocolatiering. DMs open and happy to meet up in Chicago. Currently writing *Logic for Programmers* (out Q2 2026)
Newsletter: buttondown.email/hillelwayne/
- Help me settle an IRL argument. Imagine we could construct magic boxes, no bigger than a cubic meter in volume, that altered the flow of time inside them when shut. Would it be more revolutionary to society if the boxes A) slowed down time by 100x or B) sped up time by 100x?
- I was arguing for (B)
- In the past year I went from never eating herring to it being a breakfast staple. Goddamn I love herring
- Day three of quitting all forms of scrolling cold turkey: damn this sucks
- Wrote a bit about the changes to and timeline for finishing Logic for Programmers in the newsletter buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...
- After four months of edits and multiple mental breakdowns, I am delighted to announce the release of *Logic for Programmers* v0.13! All content is in, all that's left is copyediting (and technical editing and layout and proofreading and) logicforprogrammers.com
- v0.13 is a full 9,000 words longer than v0.12, the net result of deleting 11,000 and adding 20,000. That makes the changes to this release bigger than the original v0.1 release two years ago. Additions include answer set programming, inductive proofs, schema migrations, refinement, and more!
- This book has an end date. I can feel it in my bones
- I used to pride myself in how fast I could code up scripts. When I can bash out an automation in half an hour, I write a lot more automations and am a lot more productive in the long run. Nowadays that skill has been rendered almost entirely obsolete by LLMs.
- Coding quickly is a different skill than coding well. Lots of antipatterns become patterns: globals, one letter variables, write-only languages, copy-pasting. You gotta know how to quickly find relevant existing code that you can massage into your own script. But its still slower than vibecoding
- Is this something I should mourn? Probably not. Scripts that took thirty minutes now take five, so I make many more useful automations and tooling. But I do feel just a little bad about it.
