Patrick Stevens

WoofWare.PawPrint is now in a shape where it can automatically identify and reproduce concurrency bugs, so I’m calling it releasable.

I took part in Midnight Madness, so here’s a trip report.

Claude Opus 4.7 is solidly superhuman at stylometric identification of authors.

Travelogue of another trip to Norway.

A fun prompt to use with a powerful LLM, to learn about something in great detail.

I keep seeing people going on about the 3.9 - 3.11 = 0.79 thing, but we already know why they do that and how to avoid it!

I wrote a basic LLM-based code review tool that’s distressingly effective.

I’m a bit concerned about a failure mode that is increasingly arising with LLMs: the divorce between how something looks, and its quality.

Why booleans are an advanced technique that should be used with care.

I am forever astonished that people describe Python as a simple language.

While writing an MSIL interpreter, I discovered a bunch of unexpected things about the .NET runtime.

A basic but functional expect-testing framework for F#.

Since my last post about this in 2024-03, LLMs have become a distinctly positive addition to my ability.

I’ve never actually seen anyone write down precisely the way I think about consciousness, so here it is: it’s (gasp!)

How to get a NativeAOT build using nixpkgs

Last weekend I was in a discussion ostensibly about whether the mind is nonphysical.

For a film list, see films.

Modern software practices and their sadness.

I went to a one-day intro to massage taster course, and it was fun and interesting!

My F# source generators have some new features, including an argument parser.

I’ve made a GitHub workflow to assert that all required GitHub checks are complete, and one to publish and attest NuGet packages.

The questions whose answers I don’t know, and the things I intend to learn, on the way to understanding a paper.

Those who would give up essential safety, to purchase a little temporary simplicity, deserve (and will get) neither safety nor simplicity.

To me it’s got a specific meaning, but I’ve seen it used much more generally, and I think its meaning should not be polluted.

This page holds an incomplete list of games I have played.

Another attempt to explain that the Yoneda lemma is actually intuitive.

After a decent while programming with ChatGPT, I’m not sure it’s even a net positive on my ability.

All the reasons I know for why YAML is not a superset of JSON.

Travelogue of my trip to Norway.

A question about the definition of a no-confusion type.

How to start a process into a suspended state on Linux

Some F# source generators to solve common problems I have.

A bunch of ways the iOS user interface is bad, and some undiscoverable features.

How to handle stacked pull requests in a repository which requires squashing all history on merge.

The thought process behind solving a particular Raymond Smullyan chess retrograde analysis puzzle.

A talk I gave at work about the Nix build system.

A talk I gave at work introducing property-based testing and then giving some more advanced techniques.

Exploding the incredibly terse proof into a bunch of exposition.

I used to maintain an archive of the Imre Leader Appreciation Society for posterity through WebCitation, but WebCitation itself is now dead, so here I simply link to [Konrad Dąbrowski’s capture][https://www.konraddabrowski.co.uk/ilas/index.html).

I have deleted almost all of the Anki decks on this page, because I think they would do more harm than good.

A syllabus for a fireside chat to give at work, on Git

This page holds a list of films I have watched, spoiler-free, starting from 9th January 2015.

Some basic questions I had about transformers, and their possible answers.

If I ever become rich and famous, I’m sure I’ll be besieged with requests for “how to do better in life”.

I am Patrick Stevens, a software engineer based in London, England.

This website has been around in one form or another since June 26th, 2013.

My Brita water filter does not in fact purify.

A vignette on the theme of ‘do not allow yourself to get into the habit of supplying the -f flag to rm’.

I tend to argue things in a particular way because I’m in a high-trust environment.

An introduction to the crate pattern for representing existential quantification in F#.