Author | Lightnews

Alan Donovan

@adonovan.bsky.social

620 followers 70 following 49 posts

Software engineer at Google in New York, developing analysis and refactoring tools for Go (#golang). Co-author of "The Go Programming Language" (gopl.io).

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Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 8h

Interesting; most takes I hear in my PL bubble are the opposite: that not having an existing corpus means that LLMs will generate worse output for new languages, making it hard for such projects to get a foothold.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 12h

Also works should you find yourself planning an as-yet-untitled drag event.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 4d

Also more car volume than house volume. And mass too.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 4d

yeah. Sometimes you have grudgingly admit that the recommended fingerings in the even numbered positions (for violin) are actually easier to play if harder to read.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 4d

This happens so often with music! The next day your fingers know what to do, no struggle.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 9d

I’m still digesting the bulldozing of the White House. So many metaphors!

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 15d

He couldn’t have chosen a better architectural metaphor for his whole administration: bulldozing the government in a hastily planned vanity project that it now appears will come in at triple the original cost

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 20d

I was alluding to computers being better than ever at taking money from us, but apparently I was too obscure/unfunny.

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Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 21d

Oh, that's not fair. It's so much easier to pay for things online today.

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Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 21d

Is that so wrong? Minds (i.e. consciousness) remain perhaps the greatest mystery in the universe, but one could at least in principle build a socially useful intelligence without a mind, no?

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 24d

Have you read Blood in the Machine? The Luddites were perfectly rational and reasonable.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 26d

Lamborghini was originally a tractor maker, as Ferrari delighted to point out.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 26d

For his next piece, I think he should write 20,000 words in 24 hours on a typewriter with a continuous paper roll, drinking nothing but tea made from a Benzedrine inhaler.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 28d

LSP could use a decent command-line client. (gopls' CLI is not it. Rob and I often talk about turning it into that, but we don't have any evidence that people other than ourselves actually want to use it.)

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · 29d

“The girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa” legallegacy.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · Oct 6

This was the ad campaign that finally made me carry the Sharpie I always wanted in my commute bag.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · Sep 25

Airline or Filippo?

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Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · Sep 24

I have a tranche of premium collateralized GPU default swaps to sell you.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · Sep 23

"I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter." -- Blaise Pascal

;-)

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · Sep 21

Is that an accidental schlieren image?

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Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · Sep 20

It’s a caption that fits at least every day since January!

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · Sep 10

The reason it is this way is that the user’s installed version of the go command is the only correct implementation of the complex algorithm that returns the metadata of the build.

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Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · Sep 10

Sure, I can think of many examples in our work on Go tools in which we have actively resisted desirable features to prevent us, Google as a whole, or arbitrary users, from accessing information that we or they shouldn’t have.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · Sep 6

Ed needs an Ed.

Alan Donovan @adonovan.bsky.social · Sep 5

I love his shtick, but he's almost daring his longtime readers to ask an LLM to summarize the new information in each massive missive, which is ironic.