Paul Chavard
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tchak.net
Paul Chavard
@tchak.net
Reposted by Paul Chavard
Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all under "AI".
December 22, 2025 at 5:21 PM
My understanding is that “left behind” refers to the hypothetical future where AI will end all other software. This premise, is the reason why billions and trillions are being invested. It is absolutely a wild gamble. There is absolutely no guarantee that it will happen.
My standard response is "tell me, in specific detail, how exactly I'll be 'left behind,'" and to date not a single techbro has ever answered the question. "You'll be left behind" is a statement of religious faith, not business fact, and should be treated as such.
So the “figure out how to use it lest you be left behind” replies about ‘AI’ that have been popping up here strike me as inauthentic but also kind of funny because they grant the point that rather than an automation panacea these technologies are quite difficult to figure out how to use effectively
December 21, 2025 at 9:45 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
A lot of people are posting things about how bad it is to rely on AI for lit reviews but also as a society we have made it extremely difficult for non-scholars to access bodies of literature!! Of course people want this!
One of the best things I ever did years ago was try to follow junior scholars saying interesting things and it always paid off in my having exposure to really good contributions over the years. Unfortunately with old science Twitter gone really hard to find that again!
December 21, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
Maybe this will make it clearer:

We went from horse and buggy to interplanetary rockets with less money, time, and human labour than we did as an industry moving from spreadsheets in a TUI to spreadsheets in a GUI

That should be fucking shameful as an industry. wtf is going on??
December 19, 2025 at 4:09 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
I hear this often, but if people were trying to replace programming languages why would they be trying to generate so much programming language output though?

I think it's pretty clear that people want multiple things here
What’s really amazing about vibe-coding is how people are replacing programming languages which are strictly deterministic with human speech which is highly ambiguous and expect programming to be faster and better.
December 19, 2025 at 3:23 PM
France ⛴️ US 🚂 US ⛴️ China 🚂 Russia 🚂 France, so I guess -1
Your planetary winding number is the number of times you have circled the North Pole in total since being born. It's tracked by longitude. It can be fractional. For most people the number is 0 or close to it. If you fly east from the US to Europe to Japan and then back to the US, that adds 1
December 13, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
(fil/1) À la lumière de ce qu’il faudra hélas appeler "l’affaire Théry" une série de constats s’imposent, certainement pas pour se réjouir de sa suspension ou du terrible fiasco plus général pour une partie de la gauche universitaire, mais pour ne pas laisser le monopole des réactions aux réacs
Je suis extrêmement gêné et découragé de voir tant de collègues signer cette tribune et par là même valider le texte indigent de J. Théry sur l'absence d'antisémitisme à gauche (le niveau de déni sur l'URSS est à peine croyable), sans parler du "soutien" apporté à quelqu'un repostant cette abjection
December 4, 2025 at 8:59 AM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
We've got some updates on TypeScript 7! The new native port

- can type-check any project
- supports --build and --incremental
- has rich editor features implemented
- is still 10x faster

and is ready for you to try today!

devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/p...
Progress on TypeScript 7 - December 2025 - TypeScript
Earlier this year, the TypeScript team announced that we’ve been porting the compiler and language service to native code to take advantage of better raw performance, memory usage, and parallelism. Th...
devblogs.microsoft.com
December 2, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
We need your help to get Typst 0.14 over the finish line: The release candidate with accessible PDFs, character-level justification (not even in LaTeX!), and more landed today! Check your documents, packages and against "Typst 0.14.0 Testing" on the web or the new compiler.
October 10, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
announcing a new community-focused gem server from the team previously behind rubygems: gem.coop. join us and start using it today!
October 6, 2025 at 4:03 AM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
Big React Aria release! 🚀

🥳 Multi Select!
🎬 ComboBox onAction prop, e.g. "create" item
➡️ Disclosure animation
✅ New SelectionIndicator component – animations in Tabs, ToggleButtonGroup, etc.
📱 Improved modal behavior in iOS 26
📆 Calendar selectionAlignment

react-spectrum.adobe.com/releases/202...
October 2, 2025 at 8:15 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
React Router Framework Mode now has preview support for React Server Components

Just swap your vite plugin and you can:
- Return Server Components from loaders/actions
- Opt routes into Server Components
- Leverage Server Functions
September 24, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
Ages ago, when I was still a student, I taught myself Ruby on Rails for my senior thesis and fell in love. Fifteen years later, and I’ve used Rails at every job I’ve ever held in the tech industry. Fifteen years, and I still love Rails! But there’s something rotten at its core, and we share a name.
Rails Needs New Governance
Ages ago, when I was still a student, I taught myself Ruby on Rails for my senior thesis and fell in love. Fifteen years later, and I’ve used Rails at every job I’ve ever held in the tech industry. Fifteen years, and I still love Rails! But there’s something rotten at its core, and we share a name.
davidcel.is
September 19, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
Disco Elysium is truly the most leftist game of all time, the studio immediately collapsing into bitter infighting demonstrates the depth of its authenticity
September 19, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
It’s fine to say that violence is never the answer, but I can’t help but observe that for Charlie Kirk violence was always the answer, and it was the only answer he offered, and, because of the privilege that he refused to admit he had, he could enact it from a comfortable and respectable place.
September 10, 2025 at 11:43 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
Ezra didn't have to say anything; no one would care. But he did. So now you can choose whether he thinks the existential threat to basically any minority that Kirk spent his career selling is no big deal—or "No People Involved"—or if he was born on the plastic-plugs-in-the-sockets baby idiot planet.
September 11, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
Ah oui les petits villages de 250 habitants où tu peux pas changer de marque de lessive sans que tout le monde le sache au bout de 6 heures mais incapables de trouver qui insulte une lesbienne, je connais.
September 4, 2025 at 7:54 AM
@marcoroth.dev Hi! Thank you for your work on Herb! Do you know of any good resources on migrating big haml code bases to erb?
September 3, 2025 at 10:57 AM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
The reality is many task skills we learn, we forget and then need to learn again. The reality is that all modern careers are strange historically situated ways of doing things, not inherently The Best Way for our minds. Hell screens aren't even good for our eyes and it's not like we've fixed that.
September 2, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
what’s the name for a version-and-dependency-and-more manager like `uv`? I don’t know, but I’m building one for Ruby anyway

andre.arko.net/2025/08/25/r...
rv, a new kind of Ruby management tool
For the last ten years or so of working on Bundler, I’ve had a wish rattling around: I want a better dependency manager. It doesn’t just manage your gems, it manages your ruby versions, too. It doesn’...
andre.arko.net
August 26, 2025 at 7:06 AM
react-aria-components is the reason I will not consider any other framework outside of react for anything serious now days. So much fighting over state management and DX and perf, but to me the only thing that matters is having a battle tested (accessible) UI toolkit
Is there really no good standalone (no framework used/bundled) combobox web component????
August 23, 2025 at 7:28 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
In the past two years, Typst has become the foundation to base document writing on for so many people. With the lessons from their experience, we are launching our new website today.
August 20, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
I mean, seriously, "write your spec for the robot" is the furthest thing from "vibes" I can imagine
August 13, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
i don't resent llms but this is real
part of my resentment towards LLMs is to do with them crowding out anything else we could be talking about. there are so many things I could be reading to get better at my craft but I'm presented with "you should actually get worse at it on purpose because nothing matters any more"
August 9, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Reposted by Paul Chavard
Can Bluesky say every word in the dictionary?
I dunno but I plan to find out!

I made a website that tracks every single word said on bluesky (as of yesterday).
August 6, 2025 at 3:51 PM